This morning’s wake carried the news of the loss of a great…Stephen Hawking. Hawking was the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery director of research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and founder of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge. He was also former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and an author of numerous publications. He will be deeply missed by the world.
Former artist of Issue #2, Luca Pozzi reminds us though that Hawking’s departure date is shared with the birth of another former great, Albert Einstein. Studying quantum gravity, teleportation, time travel, cosmology, and particle physics, Luca Pozzi’s work reaches wide. Covering topics from relativity to string theory, he converts theoretical research into installations characterized by magnetized sculptures, levitating objects, light drawings, and performative use of photography. With investigations on the Higgs boson, extra dimensions, and dark matter his work may seem perplexing at first (or always) but emotionally, it evokes a strange feeling of being frozen time and may stir up a new curiosity for an otherwise abstract field.
In lieu of the world’s loss, let us continue to honor Hawking in many ways. Below is a statement from Luca Pozzi about his series which you can view here.
“Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s portrait is reproduced on commercial PVC, and affixed to the wall with a magnetized ping-pong apparatus – his eyes seemingly fixed on the space between the balls. Much of Hawking’s theoretical writing about black holes has been instrumental to Pozzi’s work for the past several years. Stephen Hawking Series draws our attention to a set of asymmetries. Known for his radical, progressive and dynamic thinking, Hawking is nevertheless rendered virtually motionless and wheelchair bound due to neural disease. The mind that theorized some of the most energetic entities in the universe also occupies an immobile body.”