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Hawking holds Delhi's who's who in a thrall

Basharat Peer in New Delhi

Legendary physicist Stephen Hawking, who holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University OF Cambridge, delivered the Albert Einstein Lecture 2001 in the jam-packed Siri Fort Auditorium on Wednesday.

Professor Hawking has shown that Einstein's general theory of relativity implies that space and time would have had a beginning in the Big Bang and end in black holes.

The audience waited eagerly to listen to him talk on 'Predicting the future -- from astrology to black holes'.

"Can you hear me?" were Hawking's first words from his hi-tech wheelchair.

Hawking attributed the popularity of astrology to the desire of the human race to control the future, or at least to be able to predict what will happen.

He pointed out that if astrologers made definite predictions, they could be proved wrong. But, wisely enough, they make their forecasts so vague that they can be applied to almost any outcome. Hawking added that astrology had become extremely implausible after the discoveries made by Copernicus and Newton.

He talked about the scientific determinism expressed by Laplace -- that if one knows the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe at any one time, the laws of physics should allow one to predict the state of the universe at any other time in the past or future.

"If scientific determinism holds, we should in principle be able to predict the future," he added.

Hawking went on to explain the concept of "absolute time" and how it was overthrown by the Special Theory of Relativity and the changes Einstein's General Theory of Relativity had made in it.

The professor displayed flashes of his wit too: "I remember going to Paris, to give a seminar on my discovery that quantum theory means that black holes are not completely black. My seminar fell rather flat, however, because almost no one in Paris believed in black holes at that time. Maybe it was the name, which the French considered obscene, and refused to use."

Explaining the impossibility of detecting radiation from large black holes due to the radiation left over from the hot Big Bang, he wished for the discovery of smaller and hotter black holes. Adding dryly that if one were discovered "I would get a Noble Prize".

Amongst Hawking's patient listeners was Dr A P J Abdul Kalam, scientific adviser to the prime minister, Bharatiya Janata Party MP Uma Bharti and a virtual who's who of the capital.

The presence of a significant number of physically challenged persons was not to be missed. For them it was not just a lecture, it was a meeting with optimism, courage and hope.

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