Tonight, in
Brussels,
Belgium,the great
physicist Stephen Hawking was invited for a lecture titled "
Brane new world". I went to see him with my dear
Vanessa. The
lecture was at 8 pm, but I went at 7 pm to get a place. When I entered the room, the 1,000+ seats
auditorium was already almost full. But by the time Vanessa and her
nerdy brother-in-law , who had come especially for the purpose, had come in, 7.30 pm, the room was full. We had to sit on the floor.
After the traditional speech by the people who had organized the happening, professor
Hawking started the lecture. The lecture was in the Hawking's
speech computer's mothertongue, being
English. But the exact text was also shown simultaneously in French and in
Dutch, which was very interesting, as as Hawking's interaction with the speech computer appeared to be very slow. The waiting time between two sentences Hawking "spoke" appeared to be useful to think about the things he just said.
The Hawkman managed to make the subject (string and
brane theory) pretty understandable. He spoke about
M-theory,
branes,
string theory,
ekpyrotic universe and more.But what marked me most was how funny the guy actually is. He was continuously referring to his hypotheses with : "which would be great as I would get the
Nobel prize". He made suppositions about us being only a simulation in an
alien videogame (pictures projected on the screen of one-eyed green creatures with
Game Boys). He also showed us a funny
Monty Python-esque animation with god blowing in a balloon with the universe and the devil picking in it to make it explode ("pop !"). And in the end, we were shown his appearance, alongside
Isaac Newton and
Albert Einstein, in an episode of
Star Trek: The Next Generation. All in all a very interesting lecture.
Nothing happened with Vanessa, as usual. Spacetime will tell.