I'm in the privileged position of being invited to an evening with Stephen Hawking this week.
We'll be getting a preview of his latest Discovery channel series, Hawking's Universe, which Intel sponsors, and the rare chance to be in his company.
You may have noticed that comments from the series have received quite a wide bit of press. Prof Hawking is quoted as saying that if we ever met aliens in the universe the encounter might not go to well.
"If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans," the Times quotes him as saying.
His incredibly distinguished career prompted me to think about his achievements and Intel's in parallel. That's not as crazy as it sounds - back in 1997 Intel provided Professor Hawking with his first wireless connection to the internet.
Intel enabled Prof Hawking to connect to the internet from almost anywhere in the world using a wireless GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) connection and a notebook computer specially modified for Hawking by Intel engineers and powered by an Intel Pentium® processor with MMX™ technology.
So here goes:
- After receiving his B.A. degree at Oxford University in 1962, he stayed on at the college to study astronomy.
- Intel was born six years later. Founded on July 18, 1968, as Integrated Electronics Corporation, by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore.
- Hawking was elected as one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society in 1974, after publishing a paper that showed black holes e-mit radiation.
Here is how scientist and writer Carl Sagan described that moment:
"In the spring of 1974, about two years before the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars, I was at a meeting in England sponsored by the Royal Society of London to explore the question of how to search for extraterrestrial life. During a coffee break I noticed a much larger meeting was being held in an adjacent hall, which out of curiosity I entered. I soon realized I was witnessing an ancient rite, the investiture of new fellows into the Royal Society, one of the most ancient scholarly organizations on the planet. In the front row a young man in a wheelchair was, very slowly, signing his name in a book that bore on its earliest pages the signature of Isaac Newton. When at last he finished, there was a stirring ovation. Stephen Hawking was a legend even then."
- Intel created the first commercially available microprocessor, the Intel 4004, in 1971. It operated at 740 kHz and had 2,300 transistors on it. Three years later the 8080 chip had 4,500 transistors
- Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for 30 years, taking up the post in 1979
- In 1982 Intel's 80286 changes computing forever. It boasts 134,000 transistors and the performance increase per clock cycle over its immediate predecessor may be the largest among the generations of x86 processors
- Hawking's global best-seller, A Brief of History of Time, is published on 1 April 1988. It has sold more than 9 million copies and was on the Sunday Times best-seller list for more than four years.
- In 2000 Prof Hawing declares - "I think the next century will be the century of complexity'
- In 2000 the Pentium once again helps Intel revolutionise computing. With 42 million transistors, and for the for the first time each is measured in nanometers - at 180nm.
- In 2010 the 8 core Xeon Nehalem EX is reeled - with 2.3 billion transistors on board, smashing world records.
Quite remarkable, I think, to look at two disparate entities - a person and a company - and get a sense of how much they have achieved.
