A Pune scientist on how Stephen Hawking had audiences spellbound in the days before he lost his voice
Somak Raychaudhury
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Astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury, director, IUCAA, Pune, is among the lucky few to have heard Stephen Hawking's true voice as an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge.
"In my first term as PhD student at Cambridge, Professor Hawking gave a set of public lectures called 'A short history of time'. More than 500 people used to attend these weekly lectures. You had to get there an hour before the start to find a seat. I still have my notes from those lectures — a printed copy was also circulated. Very few people knew Hawking at the time outside a tight circle of physicists and cosmologists and Cambridge academics," Raychaudhury said.
He added, "After being operated upon, Hawking, who used a computer aided speech synthesizer, restarted his public lectures. He soon realised that students were bringing their young children to hear him. That's when the idea of the book 'A Brief History of Time' was born."
Raychaudhury said, "In 1997, we had planned to bring Hawking to Pune but he was." He added, "Stephen Hawking was fearless and spoke knowledgeably about science and ethics and science and religion. He will be sorely missed."
Also read: After a dispute, Stephen Hawking agreed with our new theory, recollects astrophysicist Pankaj Joshi
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