By Alan Boyle
As famed physicist Stephen Hawking turns 70, the subject that most occupies his thoughts is not how the universe arose from nothing, or how he's been able to live with neurodegenerative disease for so long. Here's what he thinks about most: "Women. They are a complete mystery."
That's the bottom line from New Scientist's interview with Hawking, timed to coincide with this weekend's birthday celebration at Cambridge. The theorist is almost completely paralyzed due to his decades-long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, and had to provide his answers by laboriously twitching his cheek to operate a computerized speech-translation system.
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Hawking also listed what he saw as his "biggest blunder in science" (his now-repudiated insistence that information was destroyed in black holes), the most exciting development in physics during his career (the discovery of the big bang's imprint in cosmic microwave radiation) and the potential discovery that would do the most to revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos (discovery of supersymmetric particles at the Large Hadron Collider).
But it's his brief comment on women that attracted the most attention: How could it be that a scientist who has plumbed the deepest mysteries of the cosmos finds himself mystified by women?
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/05/9981931-what-mystifies-dr-hawking-women
Quote from: GG on January 05, 2012, 06:48:44 PM
But it's his brief comment on women that attracted the most attention: How could it be that a scientist who has plumbed the deepest mysteries of the cosmos finds himself mystified by women?
Because he is a man, and they are women. I thought that was kinda self explanatory. Come on, the physics of the universe are nothing compared to them.
I read "A Brief History of Time." In that book he relates a story about betting cosmologist Kip Thorne a subscription to Penthouse magazine that Cygnus X-1 was not a black hole.
The man likes the ladies.