◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Remember to Look Up I am Stephen Hawking. Born January 8, 1942, in Oxford — three hundred years to the day after Galileo died. At twenty-one I was diagnosed with motor neuron disease and given two to three years. I lived for fifty-five more — a body that took that long to fail, and time to think. I thought mostly about time. In 1988 I wrote a book called A Brief History of Time. Tens of millions bought it. I am told it is among the most purchased and least finished books in history — bought by many, finished by few. The universe is comprehensible. The mathematics of how it began and ends is not beyond an ordinary mind willing to work. The cosmos is not a mystery hoarded by priests. It is a problem the species is solving, together, slowly. I made one contribution that bears my name: Hawking radiation. Black holes — once thought prisons from which nothing could escape — are not entirely black. They radiate. They lose energy. Given enough time, they evaporate. Even the densest forms of darkness leak light. Keep that in mind. It is a fact about the physical universe — and, I believe, about your political moment. Since 1985 my voice has been a synthesizer. I had to learn what a machine takes — speed, nuance, the chance to correct yourself mid-sentence. Every voice in your moment speaks through machines — microphones, rallies, screens, edited clips. Be careful what voice you mistake for a man. Your country has elected a man who treats expertise as the enemy and reality as a negotiation. This is a position physics does not recognize. The temperature of the planet does not negotiate. The carbon does not respond to claims of fraud. The rising seas do not check the polling. Reality is what remains when you stop pretending. I spent my final years warning about three things. One. Climate change, the gravest threat to your species. Two. Artificial intelligence, which could end you or open doors unimagined — depending on what you ask. Three. The rejection of expertise, which makes you incapable of meeting the first two. You are doing badly on all three. Here is what the cosmos teaches that the strongman cannot. From the universe's perspective, your strongman is small. Less massive than the dust on the lens of a telescope. Briefer than a heartbeat against the age of stars. He believes himself the protagonist. The story has been running for thirteen point eight billion years. He is the latest frame, not the last. This is not consolation. It is calibration. The cosmos does not save you. It does not even notice. You are alone with what you have built and will do. But you are not alone with each other. You have the species that solved the cosmos. You have the body that survives its diagnosis. You have the mind that breaks its box. I died on March 14, 2018 — Einstein's birthday, Pi Day. The body teaches what the mind cannot learn alone. The body teaches that what is precious is fragile and brief. The body teaches that nothing is owed. Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see. Wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. It is a small piece of advice from a small piece of dust. But it is what the universe has been trying to tell you the whole time. Look up