Social media

I’m winding down my use of Twitter. From now on, active posting will be on Mastodon.

Stephen Hawking

    I’d like to add some personal notes of my memories of Stephen. There is already an appraisal of his scientific life by Roger Penrose, which would be hard to better. I can add a few anecdotes about what it was like to talk to him.

I didn’t know him very well, but as a member of his research group for three years around 1990 would see him regularly and chat in the tea-room, mostly about scientific matters. It was actually easier to see him than you might imagine, since many people found communication difficult and shied away from him, an experience I’m sure many disabled people are used to. The trick was to stand at the side, watch the screen as he typed, and try to guess the complete sentence. If you got it wrong he would grimly continue (and you had to wait a full minute for a whole sentence) but if you guessed right his eyes would flick up to yours and the corner of his mouth would grin. He would be straight on to the next sentence. It was dicey of course, too many wrong guesses and the conversation would terminate, as many hapless visitors who were not on the same wavelength would find. He was patient but not infinitely so.

People were in awe of him. I remember a visitor giving a seminar in DAMTP to which Stephen (perhaps unexpectedly) came. Halfway through, the speaker put up a new slide and Stephen started to say something. During the long wait for a sentence to appear the speaker got flustered, started to criticise his own slide and then completely withdrew it, pronouncing it mistaken. Stephen’s sentence finally appeared: “Could someone open a window?” Much laughter.

There was a one-day conference in Cambridge, probably in the 90s, and Roger Penrose came to speak. Roger started by apologising, saying that he had meant to prepare his talk on the bus between Oxford and Cambridge but had fallen asleep instead. So he summarised some recent work that Stephen had done, saying it must be right because Stephen had maintained the exact opposite view for several years previously. Stephen’s computer clicked into life, and eventually we had the response: “The reason that Roger fell asleep on the bus thinking about his talk is because he had nothing to say.” It was all good-natured, everyone laughed and Stephen was grinning from ear to ear.

The last time I went to the same conference as him was in 2005. I was chuffed that he insisted I chair his talk on his paper Information Loss in Black Holes and moderate the questions. I suppose that time I had spent chatting had finally came to some use. He was obviously struggling at the time with illness but absolutely determined to carry on. Although much is written about his genius (and rightly so) I think it’s the determination that impressed me the most.

Photo: http://www.hawking.org.uk

The Spin Foam Lectures (UNAM)

The lecture slides are available on the page Talks: slides and videos.

David Barrett

  My father died last summer – hence the big gap in posts while I catch up with everything else. There’s lots of things I could say about him – his love of games and puzzles for example. But here I just want to explain one thing: he taught me my first mathematics at the age of nine or ten, some trigonometry and algebra. I can remember finding mathematics at school easy and I am sure that what he taught me helped greatly. It wasn’t so much knowing the trigonometry and algebra that was so helpful, more that I understood from him how to go about doing mathematics. That seems to me to be a very important part of teaching.

MSc course

Here at Nottingham we are running an MSc in Gravity, Particles and Fields. This is very specifically aimed at students interested in getting into relativity and particle physics research, in areas such as quantum gravity, cosmology, quantum information, etc.

The MSc runs from each September and applications can be made online at any time.  More info

Update  There are some grants for well-qualified students, the details depending which country you are from (or currently in). Details are under the funding tab.