The late great Professor Stephen Hawking
Mar. 14th, 2018 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenPeople are exchanging reminiscences online. I'm afraid I only have one.
I had collossal respect for the man, his achievements, his astounding determination. Not only did he do a huge amount for physics, but also for perceptions of disabled people. He appeared in the Simpsons, the Big Bang Theory, a number of adverts, and via one of them, a Pink Floyd album. Pretty good showing, really.
For me, he put me in mind of Dr Dan Streetmentioner.
Dr Streetmentioner is of course the author of The Time-Traveller's Handbook of 1001Tense Formations, as documented by the equally late great Douglas Adams.
By a staggering coincidence, that is exactly how far I got through A Brief History of Time... and from what I've read, I got further than most readers.
I think it was regarded as the least-actually-read bestseller in history until Piketty's Capital.
I guess I shouldn't feel so guilty, really.
I had collossal respect for the man, his achievements, his astounding determination. Not only did he do a huge amount for physics, but also for perceptions of disabled people. He appeared in the Simpsons, the Big Bang Theory, a number of adverts, and via one of them, a Pink Floyd album. Pretty good showing, really.
For me, he put me in mind of Dr Dan Streetmentioner.
Dr Streetmentioner is of course the author of The Time-Traveller's Handbook of 1001Tense Formations, as documented by the equally late great Douglas Adams.
«I have a vague feeling that one version of the guide said everything after page 75 was left blank.
One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.
Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
»
By a staggering coincidence, that is exactly how far I got through A Brief History of Time... and from what I've read, I got further than most readers.
I think it was regarded as the least-actually-read bestseller in history until Piketty's Capital.
I guess I shouldn't feel so guilty, really.
