Earth Day falls on this week, but the Earth may lose this interesting person, reportedly ¡§very ill¡¨ at this moment. A victim of Lou Gehrig¡¦s (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), Stephen Hawking is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in Cambridge, a prestigious post held by Newton. During the years when I was fascinated by astrophysics and cosmology, I have heard many interesting stories about him. He bet on black hole with a year subscription of Playboy, and he would meet Marilyn Monroe rather than Newton. Most woukd agree that he is possibly the greatest living scientist on Earth. One of his great achievements, together with mathematician Roger Penrose, has been to prove that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity means space and time has a beginning in the "Big Bang" and ends in black holes. His book ¡§A Brief History of Time," a layman's guide to the origins of the universe, is a modern classic.

There are a few truly bright stars in our generation. This one is falling.

.