Antarctica — A museum exhibit hopes to uncover the secrets behind the doodles, jokes and coded messages on the blackboard of legendary physicist Stephen Hawking. The board had not been touched by its owner for more than 35 years until Hawking died in 2018 at the age of 76.
according to The Guardian, the whiteboard dates from 1980, when Hawking joined fellow physicists at a conference on superspace and supergravity at the University of Cambridge in England. While trying to come up with a ‘Theory of Everything’ for the universe, a set of equations that would combine the rules of general relativity and quantum mechanics, Hawking’s colleagues used the whiteboard as a distraction. He filled it with a mix of half-finished equations, confusing puns, and incomprehensible scribbles.
Preserved for more than 40 years, the mind-boggling chalkboard has just been on display to the public for the first time in Hawking’s offices, the Science Museum of London. The exhibition, which opens on February 10, 2022, will welcome Hawking’s physicists and friends from around the world. Hopefully, they can decipher some of the handwritten doodles.
Scroll to read
Scroll to read
What, for example, is meant by “faint symmetry”?
Who is the bushy bearded Martian drawn large in the center of the blackboard?
Why is there a snub-nosed squid climbing a brick wall?
What’s hidden in the can labeled “Exxon supergravity?”
The world’s greatest mathematicians and physicists are expected to rise from their seats with an answer.
The chalkboard is on display alongside a dozen other Hawking artifacts, including a copy of his Ph.D. thesis on the expansion of the universe. There was also Hawking’s wheelchair and his personal jacket. according to The Guardianthe exhibition will run through June 12 at the Science Museum of London, before stopping at several other museums in the UK.
Hawking was born in England on January 8, 1942. While studying cosmology at Cambridge University in 1963, he was diagnosed with motor neuron disease, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Hawking was sentenced to only be able to survive for two more years. However, he continued to live and work for more than five decades, publishing pioneering work on black holes and the Big Bang theory.
Source: Space.com
-“).attr({
type: ‘text/javascript’,
src: ‘https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js’
}).prependTo(“head”);
if ($(“.instagram-media”).length > 0)
$(”
