How best to pay tribute to one of the most intelligent men in history, one mentioned in the same breath as Einstein? With a silly cosmic song of course, taken from the Meaning of Life. Professor Stephen Hawking himself has been a walking (well, wheeling) miracle since his early 20s, surviving to the age of 76 through debilitating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neurone disease. But he will be also remembered, not only for work on gravitational singularity theorems in the framework of general relativity and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, unifying the Einstein's theory and quantum mechanics, supporting the many-worlds interpretation, but also having a great sense of humour. So here he is, joining in with the Monty Python reunion tour of 2015, running down a "pedantic' Brian Cox, and doing that famous song from The Meaning of Life. The original is also here for you to enjoy. Farewell then Stephen. Enjoy your journey to farthest reaches.
Whenever life gets you down Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough...
Just, remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself, contains a hundred billion stars
It's a hundred thousand light years side-to-side
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick
But out by us its just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point
We go round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
As fast as it can go, the speed of light you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
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