Stephen Hawking delighted in reminding audiences that he was born three hundred years to the day after the death of Galileo, on January 8, 1942. Imagine how Hawking would have reacted could he have known that he would die on March 14, 2018—the hundred and thirty-ninth anniversary of Albert Einstein’s birth.
I never got to know Professor Hawking, and yet I found myself mourning the news of his passing as if I had lost a close colleague. Like so many people of my generation, I grew up in a world in which Hawking’s name was nearly as familiar as Einstein’s. In one way or another, I’ve been grappling with his ideas for my entire career.
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