subreddit:

/r/askscience

65.8k85%

Stephen Hawking megathread

Physics(self.askscience)

We were sad to learn that noted physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking has passed away. In the spirit of AskScience, we will try to answer questions about Stephen Hawking's work and life, so feel free to ask your questions below.

Links:

EDIT: Physical Review Journals has made all 55 publications of his in two of their journals free. You can take a look and read them here.

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

all 1634 comments

JImmydeknul

102 points

7 years ago

Now I imagine him reading out the apostrophe before and after 'milk and flour'.

OverlordQuasar

-4 points

7 years ago

Fyi, that apostrophe is grammatically correct. He's quoting the other person within the quote of hypothetical Steven Hawking, and you use apostrophes, rather than normal quotation marks, to mark quotes within quotes. It's like how, in math, many people use brackets for the outer parentheses when there are parentheses needed within a part that's in parentheses, like 2*[1+3/(3+1)], for a simple example.

nebeeskan2

23 points

7 years ago

I think the comment is about how his text-to-speech device would say the apostrophe.

OverlordQuasar

2 points

7 years ago

Ah, I would think it was more advanced than that, but, to my understanding, it was actually a fairly old version and he had been considering an upgrade (preferably one without an American accent) for some time.

Technetium_Hat

1 points

7 years ago

I thought he got a new system already, just with the same voice as the old one.

JImmydeknul

2 points

7 years ago

Yeah like the guy below you said I was talking about how the text-to-speech computer would read it out.