Last night there was a two-hour programme on the Discovery channel scripted by Stephen Hawking about the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch (when everything will collapse back into a pinpoint again), or possibly some other outcome altogether.
It was thrilling. I sat down to watch it with my usual objective in such projects, which is to understand 5% of what was said, but I think I may have understood as much as 20%, so lucid and entertaining was the exposition.
There was also some of Hawking's wonderful dry humour, as in the story of his being invited to give a lecture in Japan. He was asked not to mention the end of the universe, he recalled, because of the potential for negative effects on the notoriously jumpy Japanese stock market. Hawking said that he told his Japanese audience that the best estimate cosmologists could make about the end of the universe was what it was between 27 and 28 billion years off, so there was no immediate pressure on shareholders to sell.
This programme will be repeated. Watch out for it.
No need for panic on the Nikkei, says Hawking.
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