Deep thoughts

Good news, Earthlings: Neither your precious planet nor the galaxy wherein it loiters will be annihilated next month. At least not by any miniature, synthetic black holes spawned when scientists turn on $3 billion worth of scientific hardware in Switzerland.

So sayeth Stephen Hawking, professor and high prophet of theoretical physics (HPOTP), who delivered this portent of non-doom along with his distinct brand of existential brain-busters last week at that well-known intersection of galactic ley-lines, Caltech. Through the twitch of a cheek muscle, Hawking bared his revelations on the natures of time, space and other dimensions in synthesized speech to more than 2,000 scientists, seekers and quantum hobbyists during his 17th annual hajj to Pasadena.

“If there is too much information in a region of space, it will collapse into a black hole,” he said, or, more accurately, his sci-fi wheelchair voiced in robot-speak. With Hawking and so many empirical luminaries gathered under one roof, it logically followed to fear the imminent collapse of Beckman Auditorium into space-time.

The disease which has slowly severed the links between the 66-year-old Englishman's brain and motor functions silenced his voice decades ago, but perhaps only someone who hasn’t spoken in 23 years could say so much in one hour.

Least esoteric was his impatience with those Chicken Littles claiming the nearly completed Large Hadron Collider will devour the world or convert the Earth into “strange matter” when the 17-mile long, European supercollider is brought online in May.

There was a lot of science. Black holes — a Hawking favorite — sometimes hiccup (belch? vomit?) some of the enormous stuff they consume, he explained. But they change it too. Something about a volume of Shakespeare being alchemically transformed into Homer Simpson.

And he had advice. Want to explore a black hole? “Choose a big one,” he recommended.

Want to avoid an earthly demise for our species?

Better get cracking on those extraterrestrial colonies and warp drives, he urged.

Then there was deep-end-of-the-pool science, like how human perception captures only a sliver of anything because we’re blind to the six dimensions beyond the familiar four defining space and time.

Hawking even pulled the rug out from under our simian brains with this potentially disquieting suggestion: “Our history books and memories could just be illusions,” he dared. “The past is as probable as the future.”

I think it took a table-tennis analogy to explain that one. Only Hawking’s command of metaphor can describe Cosmic Truths using a bucket, funnel and bowling ball, dumbing things down just enough for mass consumption.

In fact, we might all be the “exotic emissions” of a black hole, he seemed to suggest.

Yet “explain” may be inaccurate for ideas and theories fringed with undeniably mystic qualities.

“It's not that God doesn't exist; he just doesn't intervene to change the laws,” Hawking offered between slides of bad clip-art and wisecracks about not receiving a Nobel Prize.

Thus his metaphysical appeal to some of the thousands queued for The Stephen Hawking Experience outside Beckman Auditorium on April 9, many with no impressive letters trailing their names.

If science stumbled somewhere along the way to supplanting religion's answers to the Big Questions, Hawking's theories offer something beyond the intersection of deep-water theology and po-mo science.

Covina bar owner Doug Salvinski sees in Hawking's work the stuff “they left out of the Bible” and studies his ideas in part to improve his understanding of God.

“String theory? Relativity? Do I understand all of it? No,” he said, gesturing with an ice cream sandwich.

“I think he wants us to think differently,” said Sandy Boylan of Alisa Viejo.

Not long ago, Carol Williams of Monrovia was sitting on a commercial flight, convinced she was about to die.

“I told myself that would be it; that I'd just cease to exist,” she remembers thinking. The thought wasn’t as comforting as she had hoped.

Both a member of the Altadena-based Skeptics Society and closet agnostic, Williams, 62, said she still sought answers and wondered if Hawking might help resolve her own cognitive dissonance.

“I don't believe a supreme being comes down and runs my life,” she said. “But I don't have an answer for why things work so well.”

The attraction of the universe's great riddles may be universal, but that's not to suggest everyone draws spiritual implications.

Redondo Beacher Bob Hosken was there to hear the latest incremental updates to Hawking’s reasoning and was firmly rooted in the practical.

“I don't understand the philosophical questions. I don't relate to that,” he said.

Also, as the last celebrity of science’s Golden Age, Hawking’s notoriety alone fills seats. Handy comparisons to Albert Einstein abound.

“He's a hero for all of the people here,” said Chris Baldock of Downey. “I wouldn't wait like this for Bono.”

Forty-five years of Lou Gehrig’s disease has slowly robbed Hawking of function. His lecture was painstakingly prepared in advance through an optical scanner that detects movement in his cheek, according to colleague Kip Thorne.

“He’s the most patient and stubborn man I know,” Thorne told
the audience.

Like the trickle of thought Hawking leaks out to the world, information can sometimes “leap out” of black holes, he has concluded, conceding a famous bet he’d made with Caltech’s John Preskill and Thorne.

Further degeneration in Hakwing's condition — such as losing that cheek muscle — still threatens to silence him completely, leaving him trapped inside his own mind.

When he opines on his favorite subject — those enigmatic black holes — it’s difficult to tell whether Hawking sees any personal parallel or irony to his metaphors.

“They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought,” he said.

“If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There is a way out.”