My Collission With Stephen Hawkings, Seeing Stars...
..You might say I was, as he is, motor-challenged myself; or a co-incidence of space and time or a confluence of coincidences, or a conspiration of global forces that culminated in this headlong collision with
Stephen Hawking.
As brief in history as it was in current as well as in the vast time scale of universal occurrences, it remains indelibly impressed on memory as it must be on the memory of the world because of its momentous nature.
A beautiful day in spring in the fork in the part between the river Cam...
****
I become aware that
someone is looking at our antics. I turn. My attention is drawn to the twinkle
in his eyes. His face twitches and he nods, I think. It is the twinkle that
holds my attention before I notice that the face belongs to a frail man in a
wheelchair. I smile embarrassingly, nod back, and turn and whisper to John that
we are being watched. He looks in the direction of my nod.
‘Stephen Hawking,’
John whispers, surprising me. The usually sardonic drawl contains a
hint of awe. The frail man seems to nod again, at us eyes still twinkling, clearly
enjoying our clowning.
I had been teasing
John, trying to deflect his growing exasperation at my hopeless inability to
balance on the bicycle from which I had already taken several tumbles. The
bikes - one of the amenities of the Nuffield Foundation Press Fellowship that
brought us with three other journalists to Wolfson College, Cambridge - had
been presented to us with much fanfare as a means to get around the sprawling
campus and its surroundings which was the size of my city, Port-of-Spain, times
ten.
I continue ribbing
John, which exasperates him even more. Trying to lighten his mood, I drew his
attention to the swans regally commanding the River Cam. He is easily
distracted.
“They are
protected, you know,” he says.
“John knows
everything,” I taunt him, mounting the bike again as he reaches to poke me. I
try to cycle out of his reach. He follows on his bike.
That’s when I almost collide head long onto the lap of Stephen
Hawking, staring directly into those twinkling eyes with its power to interpret
twinkling starts in the universe. I am face
to face with the man who was making science fiction real. He is on one of what I would come to
recognize as his regular afternoon strolls on The Backs, in the foreground of
the River Cam.
*****
View from the Cosmos
This Hole inside me,
has become larger than life, so large that it is no longer inside me, but I am
inside It. It is expanding to cuddle the world on which It let me lose. Into an
infinitude of space, encompassing the planet, the stars, the universe, and
beyond, still expanding.
I fall into the dark
depths of sleep. ‘Hawking radiation’ is emanating light rays around me and I am
inviting him to explore inside me.
“What you are trying
to detect thousands of light years away, is right here inside me,” I taunt him ... The twinkle in his eyes warm me with confidence.
....Stephen Hawking and I are staring at this hole inside me.
“It has helped me.
Maybe It can help you prove how black holes lose their primal energy and
‘disappear’. Maybe it can show you how they reveal their secrets, as It has
released Its secrets to me,” I tell him, and then you can get your Nobel after
all.”
A range of
experiences and incidents that I thought random and unconnected floated out and
connect themselves, like a fast paced slideshow, linking one episode to the
other. I feel as if I am piecing together the moments of my life and
simultaneously presenting it to Hawking for his expert opinion on this my
theory of the human as a microcosmos, an exact replica of the vast universes
that were his domain of curiosity.
“Your
Nobel might be just this Hole away,” I tease. The most famous scientist in the
world has not been awarded a Nobel Prize,. It was not a matter of if, but when.
It was a matter of some restlessness in the scholarly world that the man dubbed
the World’s Greatest Scientist had not received a Nobel because of
insubstantial proof of his theory, though the Nobel Committee has defended some
of its more controversial awards. A dreamer myself, and touched by how he has
defied the odds for more than fifty years with ALS (amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis) for which at 21 he was given only five years to live. I feel some
complicity. We have both been challenge to defy death and live with life-challenging conditions ...
This is an Extract from my Upcoming Biography, LIFE! HoleHeartedly
and .A Brief History of a Time I encountered Stephen Hawkings or a glocal culturally simplistic challenge to the scientific theory of everything...
