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STEPHEN HAWKING NAMED LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION 2008 GUARDIAN AWARD WINNER
The 2008 Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award has been given to Stephen
Hawking. The award is annually bestowed upon a respected scientist or
public figure who has warned of a future fraught with dangers and
encouraged measures to prevent them. The 2008 award is in recognition of
his continuous warnings that global catastrophic risks will eventually
come and therefore it is unsafe and unwise for all of humanity to be on
a single planet.
Hawking's quotes include:
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the
survival of the species. Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of
being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear
war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet
thought of."
"In the long term, I am more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need
large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab.
You can't regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by
accident or design, we create a virus that destroys
us."
"I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years,
unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can
befall life on a single planet."
At considerable risk to his frail health, Hawking inspired mankind to
live on more than one planet by entering Zero G. You can watch him
experience Zero G at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmurxp8m9Dk.
Our Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka will soon be
following Hawking's
example.
Hawking does his best to keep the public informed about the dangers to
come.
Due to warnings by Hawking and others, the
Doomsday Clock was
moved to five minutes before midnight in 2007.
"It is now five minutes to midnight," Hawking said after the clock was
moved forward two minutes from 11:53 pm, where it had stood since 2002.
"We foresee great peril if governments and scientists don't take action
now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate
change," he added. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has kept a
Doomsday clock since 1947 as a reminder of the dangers of nuclear
proliferation.
Stephen Hawking was born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death. He
has come to be thought of as the greatest mind in physics since Albert
Einstein. With similar interests — discovering the deepest workings
of
the universe — he has been able to communicate arcane matters not
just
to other physicists but to the general public.
Hawking grew up outside London in an intellectual family. His father was
a physician and specialist in tropical diseases; his mother was active
in the Liberal Party. He was an awkward schoolboy, but knew from early
on that he wanted to study science. He became increasingly skilled in
mathematics and in 1958 he and some friends built a primitive computer
that actually worked. In 1959 he won a scholarship to Oxford University,
where his intellectual capabilities became more
noticeable.
In 1962 he
got his degree with honors and went to Cambridge University to pursue a
Ph.D. in cosmology. There he became intrigued with black holes (first
proposed by Robert Oppenheimer) and "space-time singularities," or
events in which the laws of physics seem to break down. After receiving
his Ph.D., he stayed at Cambridge, becoming known even in his 20s for
his
pioneering ideas and use of Einstein's formulas, as well as his
questioning of older, established physicists.
In 1968 he joined the staff of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge
and began to apply the laws of thermodynamics to black holes by means of
very complicated mathematics. He published the very technical book,
Large Scale Structure of Space-Time but soon afterwards made a startling
discovery. It had always been thought that nothing could escape a black
hole; Hawking suggested that under certain conditions, a black hole
could emit subatomic particles. That is now known as Hawking Radiation.
He continued working on the theory of the origin of the universe, and in
doing so found ways to link relativity (gravity) with quantum mechanics
(the inner workings of atoms). This contributed enormously to what
physicists call Grand Unified Theory, a way of explaining, in one
equation, all physical matter in the universe.
At the remarkably young age of 32, he was named a fellow of the Royal
Society. He received the Albert Einstein Award, the most prestigious in
theoretical physics. And in 1979, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of
Mathematics at Cambridge, the same post held by Sir Isaac Newton 300
years earlier. There he began to question the big bang theory, which by
then most had accepted. Perhaps, he suggested, there was never a start
and would be no end, but just change — a constant transition of one
"universe" giving way to another through glitches in space-time. All the
while, he was digging into exploding black holes, string theory, and the
birth of black holes in our own galaxy.
In 1988 Hawking wrote
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to
Black Holes, explaining the evolution of his thinking about the
cosmos
for a general audience. It became a best-seller of long standing and
established his reputation as an accessible genius. He wrote other
popular articles and appeared in movies and television. He remains
extremely busy, his work hardly slowed by Lou Gehrig's disease
(amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that affects muscle control)
for which he uses a wheelchair and speaks through a computer and voice
synthesizer.
"My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it
is as it is and why it exists at all."
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