Some Personal Reflections: After Watching the Film-Drama "Hawking"(2004)

[RonPrice]

Part 1:

 

This piece of writing is a revised edition of an earlier work, and it was inspired by watching Hawking, a BBC television film¹ about Stephen Hawking's early years as a PhD student at Cambridge University. The film got me thinking about both physics and my own life and this piece of writing was the result.

 

Hawking is now an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge. This film-drama follows Hawking's academic search at the age of 21 in the field of physics for an understanding of the Universe; the film is aslo about his struggle against motor neuron disease. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Hawking and it premiered a decade ago in the UK, April 2004.

 

By the middle of the 20th century I was just six years old and in grade 1 in a primary school in Ontario's golden horseshoe. I had just begun my somewhat tangential connection with astronomy and physics through the influences of my maternal grandfather and my mother's brother. The world of the cosmologists, by 1950, had developed two different theories to explain the creation of the Universe. Some supported the steady-state theory which stated that the Universe had always existed and would continue to survive without noticeable change. Others believed in the Big Bang theory which stated that the Universe was created in a massive explosion-like event billions of years ago. That event was later to be determined as 13.72 billion, or 13,720 million years ago. In October 1965 the Big-Bang theory had become the generally accepted explanation of the origin of the Universe. Some of the story of how this explanation came to be is found below.

 

Part 2:

 

"Observational evidence to confirm the idea that the Universe had a very dense beginning, came in October 1965, a few months after my first singularity result, with the discovery of a faint background of microwaves throughout space,"² said Hawking in 2007. "These microwaves" he continued, "are the same as those in your microwave oven, but very much less powerful. They would heat your pizza only to minus 271 point 3 degrees centigrade, not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it. You can actually observe these microwaves yourself. Set your television to an empty channel. A few percent of the snow you see on the screen, will be caused by this background of microwaves. The only reasonable interpretation of the background, is that it is radiation left over from an early very hot and dense state. As the Universe expanded, the radiation would have cooled until it is just the faint remnant we observe today."

 

Stephen Hawking(1942-) is British astrophysicist noted for his 1965 PhD thesis which argued that if a star can collapse inwards to form a singularity, coined a “black hole” in 1967 by American physicist John Wheeler, then so to can a singularity explode back outward; thus giving an explanation for the Big Bang.

 

Part 3:

 

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson set to work early in 1963 putting their radio astronomy receiving system together. I had no idea at the time since I was 18 and studying nine matriculation subjects in the most demanding part of my formal education. Matriculation in Ontario was known as "grade 13" and it was then, and it became even more, a controversial part of the secondary school curriculum in Ontario. My interest in sport and girls back then far exceeded my enthusiasm for either physics or astronomy. In late 1962 I had had to drop my study of physics because I realized that, I would fail physics if I continued. I would then have to repeat the year if I wanted to continue into university and study science or medicine. I just could not understand the content of the physics curriculum. So it was that I dropped physics, picked-up history, went on to an arts degree, and spent my working life, for the most part, in the academic domain of the arts and the humanities.

 

In the early months of 1963, as I was finishing my matriculation studies, and as the Baha’is of the world were preparing to hold their first international election, these two American scientists, Penzias and Wilson, were most concerned about the quality of the components they were adding to the system they were developing. It was a system they had been given to do their work and the existing components of that system had superb properties for the work they were engaged in. These two men began a series of radio astronomical observations so as to make the best use of the careful calibration and extreme sensitivity of their system. Of the various projects they were working on, the most technically challenging was a measurement of the radiation intensity from the Milky Way galaxy at high latitudes.³

 

 

 

Section deleted by moderator owing to plagiarism

 

Wilson gave a detailed description of the development of their system in his 1978 Nobel lecture.⁴ Their discovery established the Big Bang theory as the unquestionable and leading contender by far for the explanation of the origins of the universe. For this discovery they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. -Ron Price with thanks to:¹ Hawking, SBSONE TV, 9:30-11:10 p.m., 18/1/'15 ²The J. Robert Oppenheimer Lecture in Physics, delivered 13 March 2007, by Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University. Hawking spoke at Zellerbach Hall on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley; ³Arno Penzias, “Autobiography,” Nobelprize.org; and ⁴Robert Wilson, Nobel Lecture, 8 December, 1978.

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I find the history of the sciences and the linkage with my own experience has an interesting synchronicity. I trust at least some readers will find this to be the case, and it may raise questions in their own mind about their personal histories and the events of our time in the world of the sciences.-Ron Price, Australia

[swansont]

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Moderator Note

 

Several paragraphs were deleted, as they are identical to paragraphs found here:

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp65co.html

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/astro/penwil.html

 

Also, you need to make clear what you wish to discuss. If all you are doing is posting your memoirs, then you are in the wrong place. This is not your blog.

 

[RonPrice]

Point made, point taken....thanking you

 

Ron Price

Australia