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CT queues to see Hawking
12/05/2008 13:04 - (SA)
Verashni Pillay
Cape Town - In the quest for an African Einstein, celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking delivered his first public lecture on African soil to a packed audience in Cape Town on Sunday.
Fans of the wheelchair-bound physicist queued to get in and tickets were scarce, as he returned to the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (Aims) for the announcement of a series of similar centres across the continent.
Hawking, who speaks with the help of a voice synthesiser, said he predicted five years ago when the first centre opened in Muizenberg, Cape Town, that the institute would bring Africa to the cutting edge of science.
"The progress made since then has been startling," said Hawking. "The 'Next Einstein' plan for Aims centres all over Africa is even more exciting.
'Major impact' for Africa
"Its implementation will have a major impact on the continent's development."
Hawking, 66 has achieved wide acclaim for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes.
He is also known for his popular books which make complex subject matter accessible to the general public, like the runaway science bestseller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller list for more than four years and was turned into a television series.
Despite suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) which has left him almost completely paralysed, Hawking continues to work and travel and has supported Aims since its inception by his Cambridge colleague, South African born mathematical physicist, Neil Turok.
Turok thanked Hawking for coming to South Africa to do the lecture despite the physical effort it required. "He has an incredibly brilliant mind, able to tackle questions at the very frontiers of knowledge," said Turok, who began the centre after being dismayed at the lack of opportunities for maths graduates in Africa during a visit.
160 students
Since then Aims has graduated 160 African students from 30 African countries, and now plans to establish 15 centres across Africa over the next five years.
'The next Einstein' project, as it is known, hopes to create a vanguard of African thinkers and scientists across the continent who would spread their knowledge via teaching and research.
"Not only will this be vital for Africa I believe it will be important for the future of
science, because science needs Africa's talents," said Hawking.
Nobel-winning physicists, David J Gross and George Smoot as well as Nasa head, Michael Griffin, also addressed the 800-strong audience on the general topic of the universe.
The speakers said the "next Einsten" would have a lot of questions to answer including, as Gross said, how to "save the planet from ourselves".
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