#FlashFictionFriday: Elegy for Hawking

Stephen Hawking, Star Child,

Entered the world in the Year of the Horse

While bombs fell over London.

Rebel,

Always went his own way

Even when his way was difficult.

Revolutionary,

Freed his mind to travel the cosmos.

Sat taller in his chair than giants stand.

Quantum thinker,

Body shrunken to a singularity,

Mind as expansive as the universe.

Dreamer,

Stephen Hawking

Left us in the Year of the Dog

While we baked Pi for Einstein

And marveled at what we had lost.

Stephen Hawking,

Born 8 Jan 1942; died 14 Mar 2018 at age 76.

Author, Motivational Speaker, English Theoretical Physicist.

Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a position once held by such notables as Charles Babbage and Sir Isaac Newton. Afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS), Hawking was confined to a wheelchair and was unable to speak without the aid of a computer voice synthesizer. However, despite his challenges, he made remarkable contributions to the field of cosmology, which is the study of the universe. His principal areas of research were theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.

Hawking also co-authored five children’s books with his daughter, Lucy.

Hawking’s book list can be found at Amazon: Stephen Hawking’s Author Page

Popular books

A Brief History of Time (1988)

Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993)

The Universe in a Nutshell (2001)

On the Shoulders of Giants (2002)

God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History (2005)

The Dreams That Stuff Is Made of: The Most Astounding Papers of Quantum Physics and How They Shook the Scientific World (2011)

My Brief History (2013)

Co-authored

The Nature of Space and Time (with Roger Penrose) (1996)

The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (with Roger Penrose, Abner Shimony and Nancy Cartwright) (1997)

The Future of Spacetime (with Kip Thorne, Igor Novikov, Timothy Ferris and introduction by Alan Lightman, Richard H. Price) (2002)

A Briefer History of Time (with Leonard Mlodinow) (2005)

The Grand Design (with Leonard Mlodinow) (2010)

Forewords

Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (Kip Thorne, and introduction by Frederick Seitz) (1994)

Children’s fiction

Co-written with his daughter Lucy

George’s Secret Key to the Universe (2007)

George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt (2009)

George and the Big Bang (2011)

George and the Unbreakable Code (2014)

George and the Blue Moon (2016)