A star is an incredible thing. Tiny pinpricks of light which speckle the night sky, humanity has perpetually been fascinated by them. Holes in the firmament, permanent affixations to the celestial sphere, guiding beacons for lost travellers, nuclear power-stations of colossal scale, the twinkle in a lovers eye after a particularly bad pun; history is alive with descriptions of them given by scholars and simpletons alike from all walks of life.
Universally it is accepted that a clear night sky is one of the most beautiful sights available. It isn't prohibitive; anyone can look up on a clear night, kings and beggars, office drones and CEOs, Scientists and painters and they can all marvel. Further, the nightsky is the most complicated thing that we can readily observe, by looking up you are looking at the only genuine infinity that can be put into context, you are simultaneously looking at nothing and everything, looking backwards in time as distance stretches away to the beginning of the Universe.
To the everyday person this is beyond comprehension and so we do not try to comprehend it. To the highest majority of the global population this is merely a fascination, something to be marvelled at, to enjoy and to occasionally use as a meagre inspiration for crap blog posts or 'inspirational' Instagram pictures. For a select few however it is not enough to look up and go "wow", for a select few there is a need to look up and go "why?" The latter find the former hard to comprehend and vice versa.
One of the people asking "why" was Stephen Hawking, a person who sadly died last week. A person who by all accounts was at the forefront of that tiny percentage of us asking "why". It was not his asking "why" that truly set him apart however, Stephen Hawking asked "why" and then he helped the rest of us to ask the same questions. He discovered and understood these phenomenally complicated situations and without dumbing them down was able to unravel them and present them to a world of laymen clearly and thoughtfully without them losing any of their initial lustre.
People like him are the reason we know the earth moves around the sun, how we understand the movements of planets, of the moon, the effects of solar storms in our atmosphere, the reasons why in 1006 AD a new star appeared in the skies as a supernova, why we understand bursts of microwave radiation, background radiation, how we put men on the moon, flew robots as big as cars to mars, have sent a satellite beyond the limits of our solar system, can see the beauty of nebulae millions of miles away, have visual evidence of billions of other galaxies and are right now moving closer to becoming an interplanetary species within my lifetime.
Without the world behind it, Science would not progress, without the interest of everyone on the ground the funding would dry up, if it were only a select few at the top of the IQ charts who understood what was happening beyond the limits of our atmosphere then the atmosphere would be our limit. We could not have pushed through the barriers we have and continue to without people like Stephen Hawking leading the charge with a rallying cry that genuinely inspires armies of billions.
And so the stars are a little closer today than they were 76 years ago, not because our rockets are bigger, our telescopes more refined or our astronauts of better quality. It is because people like Stephen Hawking can see the benefit in exciting the world to science, to the study of the unexplained and the pursuit of exceeding the limits that have been set upon you. It is one thing to ask "why", it is quite another to provoke the world to ask "why" with you.
