He tries not to think too much in the morning, but by night the problems of the universe keep Stephen Hawking awake. Fellow physicist Brian Cox asks him about the big issues facing science.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/audio/2010/sep/11/hawking-physics-cox
A new warning from astrophysicist and global science guru Stephen Hawking: Do not talk to aliens.
The brilliant Hawking is wheel-chair bound and speaks through a computer. But he’s thinking about the cosmos.
With billions of galaxies, trillions of stars, the numbers tell him there’s life out there. The smartest forms could make it here. But we should not want that, says Hawking. Too much danger.
Other scientists disagree. We’ll hear that debate, and talk to the man who heads Earth’s greeting committee for aliens.
Sir Roger Penrose is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and is the best-selling author of The Emperor’s New Mind. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, most notably the Wolf Prize in physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their "development of the theory of general relativity, in which they have shown the necessity for cosmological singularities and have elucidated the physics of black holes… enlarging our understanding of the origin and possible fate of the Universe." Penrose was knighted in 1994 and currently lives in Oxford, England.