A visit to cambridge

KENDRIYA VIDYALAYA UJJAIN

A VISIT TO CAMBRIDGE

01/12/2012

1Prepared by

Divyansh Khare

STEPHEN HAWKING-A “DIFFERENT” MAN

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Prepared by Divyansh Khare

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Hawking's unimpressive study habits resulted in a final examination score on the borderline between first and second class honors, making an oral examination necessary. Berman commented: "the examiners then were intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far more clever than most of themselves". After receiving his B.A. degree at Oxford in 1962, he left for graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Hawking started developing symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis upon his arrival at Cambridge. He did not distinguish himself in his first two years at the institution. With the help of his doctoral tutor, Dennis William Sciama, he returned to working on his PhD after the disease had stabilized and graduated with his doctorate in 1966, before starting a four-year research fellowship at Cambridge.When Hawking began his graduate studies in the 1960s, there was much debate in the physics community about the opposing theories of the creation of the universe: big bang, and steady state. Hawking and his Cambridge friend and colleague, Roger Penrose, showed in 1970 that if the universe obeys general relativity and fits any of the Friedman models, then it must have begun as a singularity. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in exceptional circumstances, singularities are a fairly common feature of general relativity. For their essay on this subject, Hawking and Penrose were jointly awarded the Adams prize in 1966. This essay served as the basis for a textbook, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, that Hawking published with George Ellis in 1973.

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In 1969, Hawking accepted a specially created 'Fellowship for Distinction in Science' to remain at Cambridge. In the early 1970s, Hawking's work with Brandon Carter, Werner Israel and D. Robinson strongly supported John Wheeler's no-hair theorem – that any black hole can be fully described by the three properties of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. With Bardeen and Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes should emit radiation, known today as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.Hawking was elected one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society in 1974, and in the same year he accepted the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to work with his friend on the faculty, Kip Thorne. He continues to maintain ties to Caltech, having spent a month each year there since 1992. Hawking's first popular science book, A Brief History of Time, was published on 1 April 1988. It stayed on the British Sunday Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. A Brief History of Time was followed by The Universe in a Nutshell (2001). A collection of essays titled Black Holes and Baby Universes (1993) was also popular. His book, A Briefer History of Time(2005), co-written by Leonard Mlodinow, updated his earlier works to make them accessible to a wider audience. In 2007 Hawking and his daughter, Lucy Hawking, published George's Secret Key to the Universe, a children's book focusing on science that Lucy Hawking described as "a bit like Harry Potter but without the magic."



MIRACULOUS

Firdaus Kanga (b. 1960, Bombay) is a writer and actor who lives in London. He has written a novel, Trying to Grow a semi-autobiographical novel set in India and a travel book Heaven on Wheels about his experiences in the United Kingdom. Trying to Grow was later turned into an award-winning BBC-BFI film, Sixth Happiness, for which Kanga wrote the screenplay, and in which he starred. Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard said of Sixth Happiness: "Firdaus Kanga's performance has battery pack power...a remarkable true story."Sixth Happiness is about Brit - a boy born with brittle bones who never grows taller than four feet. It is also about the Parsi or Parsees - descendants of the Persian empire who were driven out of Persia by an Islamic invasion more than a thousand years ago and settled in western India. Parsees had a close relationship with the British during the years of the Raj. Brit is named by his mother, both after his brittle bones, and in tribute to his mother's love of Britain. The depiction of Brit's parents as ardent Anglophiles with fond memories of the Raj and WW2, presents a glimpse of a non-stereotypical Indian family.

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Firdaus Kanga (b. 1960, Bombay) is a writer and actor who lives in London. He has

written a novel, Trying to Grow a semi-autobiographical novel set in India and a

travel book Heaven on Wheels about his experiences in the United

Kingdom. Trying to Grow was later turned into an award-winning BBC-BFI

film, Sixth Happiness, for which Kanga wrote the screenplay, and in which he

starred. Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard said of Sixth Happiness:

"Firdaus Kanga's performance has battery pack power...a remarkable true story."

Sixth Happiness is about Brit - a boy born with brittle bones who never grows

taller than four feet. It is also about the Parsi or Parsees - descendants of the

Persian Empire who were driven out of Persia by an Islamic invasion more than a

thousand years ago and settled in western India. Parsees had a close relationship

with the British during the years of the Raj. Brit is named by his mother, both after

his brittle bones, and in tribute to his mother's love of Britain. The depiction of

Brit's parents as ardent Anglophiles with fond memories of the Raj and WW2,

presents a glimpse of a non-stereotypical Indian family. This, along with the story

of a young disabled man's sexual awakening as family life crumbles around him

makes Sixth Happiness an interesting exploration of modern, urban India. Kanga's

creation - both as writer and performer - resists drawing the main star Brit as

either martyr or victim. Brit is bright, spiky, opinionated and selfish with a razor-

sharp wit. He prefers the Kama Sutra to Shakespeare and does not allow gender

or disability to come in the way of his desire for sex and love.


Firdaus Kanga has presented documentaries, such as Double the Trouble, Twice

the Fun (d. Pratibha Parmar, 1992), a provocative documentary drama that

explored sexuality and disability. The film was broadcast as part of Channel

Four's lesbian and gay series out. Taboo, another documentary presented by

Kanga, explored religion and disability - for instance, the Hindu notions of

karma - exploring how religion can exclude and patronize people of disability.

Firdaus Kanga was born with ontogenesis imperfecta, a condition also known as

brittle bones disease. This left him with several painful fractures throughout his

childhood and adolescence in India. He grew up in a family of five, in a one

bedroom Bombay apartment. He spoke out against the Indian socialist

consensus, and was a supporter of Reagan and Thatcher politics. Kanga's first

major achievement was Trying to Grow (also translated into French [Grandir] and

Italian) a novel exploring disability, sexuality and culture. In India where religion

still dictates most cultural acts, Kanga's novel broke several taboos - portraying

disabled people with healthy, rich sexual appetites. Kanga publicly

rejected Hindu notions of karma (laying responsibility for suffering at what

humans may have done in their last birth) often foisted on disabled people.

Kanga was one of the first few public figures in India who stood up for the views

of gay people, celebrating sexuality, in a society that still criminalizes, though

hardly, if ever, prosecutes homosexuality.


Kanga was selected to be part of The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947-97 -

a major anthology of the work of the most important and influential Indian

writers of the last 50 years. This volume was published by Salman Rushdie and

Elizabeth West to coincide with the anniversary of India's independence.

Kanga was born in Bombay in the westernized Parsi community, and his writing

centres on dealing with disability and sexuality.


A story of a meeting between two extraordinary people. They are both brilliant and full of intellect.They are, what people call 'disabled'. However, the story here calls them two people who are 'differently abled'.Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest scientists of our time. He suffers from a form of paralysis that confines him to a wheelchair, and allows him to ‘speak’ only by punching buttons on a computer, which speaks for him in a machine-like voice.Firdaus Kanga is a writer and journalist who lives and works in Mumbai. He was born with ‘brittle bones’ that tended to break easily when he was a child. He suffered a lot of fractures in his early childhood.

Chapter 7

A visit to CambridgeSummary


The interaction between them proved fruitful to the extent that it projected the real state of mind of such people.The psychological aspect has been written very well, describing the simple level of frustration which people feel when they feel claustrophobic, least bothered about people considering them brilliant and sympathising their condition.Strong sense of expression such as eyes which can speak, still, and they are saying something huge and urgent .A small thing understood through this chapter is the fact that one can never feel the pain and the agony which a person who is not as capable as other people does.

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When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

-Prof. Stephen William Hawking.

THANK YOU

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Education

A visit to cambridge