Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

I woke up this morning to the news that legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had passed away.

Hawking held an undoubtably important place in modern culture. Through his improbable battle with ALS (he was diagnosed at 21 and given two years to live) he became uniquely recognizable. "That guy in the wheelchair" brought the arcane and abstract world of cosmology to a wider audience.

I was first exposed to him in the season six finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I would have been about eight years old.

L to R, Albert Einstein, Data, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton... go figure.

My family happened to have a copy of his New York Times bestseller, A Brief History of Time, on the shelf. It was one of those books that lots of people bought but few actually read. I tried to read it and it wasn't that difficult. That book contained a lot of important lessons for a young person!

The idea that runs through the book is that the universe is explicable. Not necessarily explainED but explicABLE. (At that point our current best estimate for the age of the universe, 13.8 billion years, was still about a decade away.) While the world might be complicated, the explanations aren't forever hidden over the horizon of human knowledge. Sometimes, we actually have too many possible explanations and are waiting for a way to tell between them. He also spent most of his time talking about Black Holes and the beginning of the universe; pretty cool stuff. Once you start thinking in those terms, it's hard to turn back. 

More recently, he has made guest appearances on The Big Bang Theory and had an Oscar nominated feature film about his early life on his way to his PhD, The Theory of Everything. So I hope I'm not the last generation to be inspired by his life and work.

The World's Greatest Stevens

What could be better than waking up on Monday morning and finding out that there is a clip of two of your favourite thinkers chatting for an hour? The fact that both are named Steven. 

Stephen Fry and Steven Pinker are two of the most eloquent speakers and writers I've ever come across. They're talking about Pinker's new book Enlightenment Now. You can see it sitting on the table between them as they chat. It's quite large and I'm about a third of the way into it. So far it's amazing. The thrust of the book is simply that the world is not actually going to hell in a handbasket. Things are getting better... much better... shockingly fast... and for some reason, nobody wants to notice. More importantly, we can understand why it's happening, and try to do more of it.

So if anyone needs me for the next little bit, I'll be watching this:

The History of the Universe in Ten Minutes

One thing almost everyone is genuinely terrible at is thinking about large numbers. Any time you can take huge numbers and make some more comfortable comparison, it's a huge help. Here someone put together a history of the known universe (13.8 billion years is the current best estimate) and condensed it down into ten minutes so you can get a sense of the relative timescales.

Don't hold your breath looking for humans. We don't show up until the very last frame.

On the Ethics of Conjuring

It's a strange feeling to stop and consider that you lie for a living.

Magic is make believe, but there's something that separates it from other forms of pretend, like watching a movie or a play. In a movie, you can get swept away in emotion and feel that you're watching the real-time reactions of real people (who just happen to be reading from a script all the way through.) But in magic, emotion isn't enough; I need to bring my audience on intellectually. They need to know what they're seeing and know that it can't happen. The lie is more real.

Seeing a behind the scenes look watching your favourite Stark Trek alien getting into makeup doesn't detract from your enjoyment of Star Trek. But watching a magic show set up and seeing where all of the bits and pieces secretly went would seriously undermine your experience.

If I were trying to be absolutely intellectually honest, and admit that lying is wrong, it's not easy to defend my particular brand of lying.

One person who thought about this a lot is the famed magician and skeptic (and Canadian) James Randi. He was recently interviewed on the podcast of Penn Jillette (who has also thought deeply about this). They chat about this and other things for the better part of an hour. Gave me an intellectually satisfying warm fuzzy feeling: 

David Copperfield writes in The Onion

Or so The Onion claims. I've been reading the article almost but not quite entirely sure it's satire. Such is the problem with politics these days. 

“Right away there was the issue of accountability. In the aftermath of Trump’s surprise victory, we realized the American people deserved better from their magicians. It didn’t matter if you were working birthday parties or headlining the MGM Grand. You had to take a real honest look at what you did and accept that whether you were making a playing card disappear, pushing a cigarette through a quarter, or levitating over the Grand Canyon, your actions would be judged in the context of an entirely new political climate.

With Trump peddling fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, we could no longer remain silent: We had an obligation, both as illusionists and Americans, not to allow such hateful behavior to become normalized.”

One pieces that I found rather interesting:

“Though much of what we as Americans hold sacred has come under threat this past year, there has been at least one positive development: Many magicians no longer saw their female assistants in half, having come to realize that there are now consequences for such behavior in the workplace.”

Magicians have a history of being not so nice to women (and often our audiences in general), something I've tried very hard to not emulate for my entire career. 

Tax Cuts Explained with Magic Tricks

I post this only because it contains magic tricks... as someone who was forced to learn the math behind the Laffer Curve in university.