Tuesday
7/22/04
Responsibility and Relativity.
I’ve been told, all too frequently, that this is a new age of "personal responsibility." I’m not really sure just what that means exactly, although I do rather enjoy the fact that my boys are now old enough to reach the paper towels and take care of their own all too frequent spills. Spills of Biblical proportions, I might add.
And even more heartening was yesterday’s admission by Stephen Hawking that he had it all wrong about black holes and their apparent annihilation of matter and its information. What a nitwit. I mean for heaven's sake, anyone with any sense at all could have told him that it was obvious that rather than trapping and annihilating matter, black holes release "mass energy" in a mangled form. Sheesh.
You know, just between us girls, I’ve always been a little worried about Stephen. Even during our undergraduate days together at University College at Oxford he only seemed interested in frat parties and chasing skirts. And boy could he pound beers! Yup, old Steve-o, as he was known around campus, could do more beer bongs in one night than anyone! And boy could he score with the chicks; when the Steve-meister turned on the charm, the girls were like putty in his wizened little hands.
Of course all that crazy partying eventually took its toll and killed a lot of brain cells; by the time he was doing his graduate work at Cambridge he had taken to wearing a fez and referring to himself as Kaiser Buckminster the Benevolent. From there it wasn’t long before he was publishing work that read as if he was having flashbacks:
The event horizon , the boundary of the region of
space-time from which it is not possible to escape, acts rather like a one-way
membrane around the black hole... One could well say of the event horizon what
the poet Dante said of the entrance to Hell: "All hope abandon, ye who enter
here." Anything or anyone who falls through the event horizon will soon reach
the region of infinite density and the end of time. *1
What a loon. Anyway, in retrospect it seems that our falling out was inevitable; by the mid-seventies he had taken to shooting peas at me through a straw whenever we lunched together at the King’s College Social Club. It was a very sad turn of events indeed, and I can only imagine that his increasingly erratic behavior was due to a growing inferiority complex that was fueled by my superior intellect. What a duced waste of a fine mind.
In any case, if any of the old Oxford gang should happen across Stephen, give him my warmest regards and let him know that I harbor no grudge against him. Deus Servo Regina!
