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Stephen Hawking
The International Year of Astronomy was a year-long celebration of that field of science. It took place in 2009 to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first recorded astronomical observations with a telescope by Galileo and the publication in of Johannes Kepler's Astronomia Nova in the 17th century. By 2009 I had been collecting resources for the study of astronomy for four years. I had only come to any degree of what you might call a serious and systematic study of astronomy after my retirement in the years 1999 to 2005 from a working life of FT, PT and casual-volunteer work: 1955 to 2005.
So it was that yesterday evening that I gobbled-up Stephen Hawking’s Into the Universe, which premiered in the UK and the USA just over a year ago, and now on SBSONE TV. It was a cold night and I was keeping warm in my lounge-room here in Tasmania. I’d had had a long day; I had not had my daily sleep and after half an hour of this one hour program I was fast asleep. But I read about it the next day and here I am writing about it and about Stephen Hawking.-Ron Price with thanks to SBSONE TV, 24 and 31 May and 7 and 14 June, 8:30-9:30 p.m., “Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking.”
Now in the evening of my life
& on my sleep-inducing meds
I dropped-off to my heart's ease
as Chaucer once wrote, so soft to
my eyes and the murmurer of low
and tender lullabies, as Keats once
wrote, the program not half over.
But, still, Stephen, I was able to
google the subject and this often
makes up for the loss of a visual
stimulation/I missed the computer
generated imagery of the universe
& the symphonic orchestral music.
You’ve been going strong since ’62,
Stephen, the year you got your B.A.
and the year I started my travelling &
pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i
community in that town of Dundas
Ontario in that Golden Horseshoe!!
I’ve got to hand it to you, Stephen,
with your motor neuron disease-&
how you keep going especially since
those books you wrote beginning with
A Brief History of Time in ’881 when
the Arc Project was just getting started
in the port city of Haifa Israel.2 ….You
have not been able to even feed yourself
since I began my career in ’74 in a post-
secondary education sector Downunder
in Australia, & you could not talk since
I moved to Western Australia in remote
Pilbara in ’85…….How do you do it....
Stephen?......Really, how do you do it?
1 Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Bantam Dell Pub. Co, 1988. It has sold 10 million copies.
2 In the letter of 30 April 1987 from the Universal House of Justice, while Hawking was writing his book on the subject of time, it was announced to the international Baha’i community that “the way was now open for the Bahá'í world to erect the remaining buildings of its Administrative Centre” at this climacteric of human history.
Ron Price
8 June 2011
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married for 48 years, a teacher for 32, a student for 18, a writer and editor for 16, and a Baha'i for 56(in 2015)
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