The Forces That Wonder About The Universe Have Grown Shorter By A Head-Physics Made Easy-Kind Of -Wizard Stephen Hawkings Passes At 76

By Frank Jackman

I have always been stricken by that commentary by narrator Nick on the last page of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal The Great Gatsby  where he speculates about an earlier virgin time in the Long Island Sound where the greatest part of the action takes place (kind of virgin although Native Americans were plentiful on the ground in the area). The time when the lusty, thirty, grubbing Dutch sailors saw the land for the first time which sparked their sense of wonder-wonder at what lay before them in the new land. Well in the 21^st century, 20^th too where he came of age of wonder the discovery of land held fewer sources of wonder and so the whole universe became the source of wonder, of speculation about what was ahead for Stephen J. Hawkings who passed away recently at the age of  76 after a very long and tough fight to stay alive with a rare debilitating condition.       

Not silly wonder like some schoolboy, not the wonder of “alternative facts” and damn lies but the wonder created by the scientific method which honored, valued, hell lived for facts AND theories based on hard plausible facts about what made the cosmos turn the way its turns. Here is the big score, here is where he stood head and shoulders above many others in the same profession, the same wonder business. Brother Hawkings made some very tough dollars of facts understandable to those not in the “fraternity.” Well kind of-okay. Who will take up his standard. For now though RIP, Brother Hawkings, RIP.