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“... can produce perverse results, not least when disability is discussed. Oddly for a book which cites Stephen Hawking as an authority on space, Open Sky discounts the good that motorised aids can do and presses the theory that smart-buildings and computers are making the able-bodied no better than cripples. Soon, Virilio grumbles, the ...”

“... one has no illusions about how dough-like one is. It is exciting to be offered ten pages by Stephen Hawking trying to paint space-time, confident only that however many equations are solved ‘we would still be a long way from omniscience.’ It is nice to hear Abdus Salam speculating that the best way to test a unified theory would be to carry 100 ...”

“... Even now, the cover of A Brief History of Time sets a tiny, and almost literally disembodied, Stephen Hawking against a vast backdrop of the starry heavens. But already by the Sixties and Seventies a new presentation of scientific self began to circulate. James Watson radically confessed that his thoughts strayed to ‘popsies’ even while working ...”

“... Greeks and Romans can’t persuade us to believe in the rational scientific order any more than Stephen Hawking can. But they can help us confront an uncertain future, whether we view it with Stoic distance or Epicurean ...”

“... the size and impersonal complexity of the universe are familiar from other works of fiction post-Stephen Hawking – Martin Amis’s Night Train, for example. ‘Imagine an atom of hydrogen,’ Alfredo says. ‘Then imagine that you have enlarged the nucleus by five million million, bringing it up to about the size of a one peso coin. To scale, the ...”

“... are indistinguishable from the current hypotheses of theoretical physicists like Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Parrinder’s chapters take the form of free-wheeling meditations on Wellsian topoi – ‘Possibilities of Space and Time’, ‘The Fall of Empires’, ‘Utopia and Meta-Utopia’. In Part Two of Shadows of the Future, he branches out ...”

“... chemistry you missed. It’s the people cringing from their scientific illiteracy who buy Stephen Hawking books they can’t read, as if having them on the shelf will make the knowledge rub off; they snap up tracts on atheism, too, to show that if they’re ignorant they’re at least rational. But still, our understanding of the mechanisms of ...”

“... Joy’s anxieties have been echoed since by Bill Gates and the Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, and Stephen Hawking too has warned that ‘the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’ So to the degree that Harari’s vision of the future seems plausible, it’s perhaps because it’s familiar: we’ve been well ...”

“... they apply for jobs and grants. Nothing to see here! No one doubts the assertion, reported by Stephen Hawking in the preface to A Brief History of Time, that every equation in a book of popular science halves its readership. The same is true of notation in a book about music. These mark the point at which readers admit that they don’t understand ...”

“... examining the risks associated with uncontrolled artificial intelligence. Stephen Hawking has suggested that building machines more intelligent than we are could lead to the end of the human race. Elon Musk has said much the same. But such dystopian fantasies aren’t worth worrying about yet. If there is something to be worried ...”

“... The former heads of MI5 and MI6. The head of the Church of England. Nine out of ten economists. Stephen Hawking, Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Branson – truly great Britons who so many people admire and respect. ‘Maybe it’s a conspiracy,’ I would say. ‘Or maybe all these people are right.’This is disingenuous. First, the case being made was ...”

“... for several years, lunching with industry bigwigs (he pitched Spielberg a movie in which Stephen Hawking was a pop star) but getting nothing off the ground. One project he did complete, after returning to the UK, was his student film, Ghosts of Oxford Street, remade as a Channel 4 Christmas special without any of the original footage. Originally ...”

“... given a French accent. This is the comfortingly Newtonian Laplace who figures, for example, in Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, as the celebrated author of a version of determinism which nevertheless left open the choice of physical laws and of initial configuration, and whose optimism about the possibility of deducing all future states of ...”

“... featuring the ‘African-American Atheist Rapper Greydon Square’, the ‘self-styled “Walking Stephen Hawking”’. In Manhattan, the Ensemble Theater produced Darwin’s Challenge (‘On his trip aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin wanders into a cave on Galapagos and finds himself on the set of a 21st-century reality TV show … He gets kicked ...”

“... letters (the 12th-century equivalent of texting), of which 189 survive. He preferred hunting, hawking and fine clothes to the discipline and asceticism of religious life, all of which left him heavily in debt. He didn’t direct his energies to grand episcopal projects like his contemporary Henry of Blois, the wealthy bishop of Winchester, who oversaw the ...”