Tribute to Stephen Hawking: There’s a Hole in My Heart Today

“A star just went out in the cosmos,” said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist commenting on the death today of world-renowned physicist, mathematician, cosmologist, author and human being…Stephen Hawking. (CNN)

Lately I’ve been trying to downsize my Slices; make them more about small moments or small things.  But today I have a hole in my heart; I must deviate to honor the death of this most amazing man.

I don’t know all that much about him, but I have kept him in my peripheral vision for decades.  I am not a science geek, so I didn’t pay him as much attention as he deserved. I always admired him as someone who pushed the boundaries of science and simultaneously served as  mentor extraordinaire to those who are physically handicapped.

At a time when our news is driven by chaotic governing, corrupt leadership, fake news and the like, it is important to take a moment to honor someone who transcended his own limitations and focused on the bigger picture: How the universe was created, our part in it and how we will most likely end our existence. Personally, it always was reassuring to me that Stephen Hawking was “minding the store.”  I felt we were in good, caring hands, that he would make sense of the chaos for us, and that his contributions to scientific knowledge ranked right up there with the great ones: Newton, Galileo, Einstein.

Now he is gone…and has become part of the invisible energy of the Universe once again.  At least, that’s what I like to think. And who will take over the reins? In an era that has moved away from scientific discovery and refutes scientific knowledge, more than ever we need someone to pick up where he has left off and continue to remind us there are forces greater than all of us at work.