C. C. Hagan

It had been a tumultuous day. BBC News announced the sad death of Professor Stephen Hawking in the early hours of yesterday morning – Wednesday 14 March 2018.   ABC News in Sydney, Australia described him as the most brilliant scientist of our time – famous for his work on gravity, black holes and quantum mechanics.... Physicist Michio Kaku commented: “Einstein and Hawking were seen as ‘messengers from the stars’ who popularized science.” He [also] commented that Stephen Hawking had applied quantum mechanics to black holes which were thought not to emit light. He had found they did emit faint light.   Importantly he saw Hawking as setting the agenda in physics to develop a unified theory between Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics and gave us a ‘huge piece of the gigantic jig saw puzzle of unification’.   Einstein set this quest in motion and Hawking developed it... Newton stands in stark contrast to Hawking on the meaning of life. Not only did Newton dedicate himself to science but also to theology.  Newton saw theology as a necessary fabric of reality because he believed those laws were the harmonious work of a creator.  ...Newton’s approach to ‘natural philosophy’ reads like a playbook of the scientific method,  discovery, and a symphony of mathematical analysis. His work underpinned the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century and led to a vast body of science and mathematics using Newtonian Physics and Mathematics as its foundation. He had discovered and produced valid theories for gravity,  laws of motion,  fluid mechanics, optics and new techniques in mathematics such as infinite series and the binomial theorem. He had created the first major building blocks of reality. Yet at the time he had conceptualized all this he was shy to publish ... He was also an alchemist,  historian, theologian, member of parliament and finally became Master of the Mint of England- a life journey worth anyone’s time in exploring.