Of course not. Never in my life will I ever have anything but a distant relationship with, or a superficial understanding of, what these two amazing scientists, researchers, and intellectuals studied, taught, understood, or wrote about in their incredible lives.
But I do have a deep emotional and intellectual appreciation for what they were all about.
Carl Sagan wrote an introduction to Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time, and it resonated with me more than I expected. Sagan opens by pointing out how little most of us ever stop to consider — the sunlight that makes life possible, the gravity holding us to the Earth, the stability of the very atoms we're made of. He notes that it's mostly children who still ask the big questions, before they learn not to: where the cosmos came from, whether time could ever run backward, whether there are limits to what a human mind can actually know. Adults, he says, tend to answer with a shrug, in part because those questions expose exactly how much we still don't understand.
That's the line I keep coming back to.
I sure don't have all the answers. But I think it's more important than ever to ask the questions. And with artificial intelligence and the nearly infinite resources of the internet, we've never been better equipped to go looking for them than we are right now.