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Uncategorized Thursday, January 5th 2012 at 2:00 pm

Stephen Hawking Understands Everything but Women

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In an interview with New Scientist, Stephen Hawking was asked what he thought about most during the day. In a classic, age-old form, he replied, “Women. They are a complete mystery to me.” Possibly even more amusing, he wasn’t making the fairly standard joke — he was serious. A man who literally wrote the book on something as complex as Time doesn’t understand women.

The interview was in preparation for Hawking’s upcoming 70th birthday, for which the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, University of Cambridge, is holding a symposium dubbed “The State of the Universe,” on January 8. Among being mystified by women, but not mystified by things we actually don’t understand, like black holes and time, Hawking answered a few more questions, almost equally as entertaining as the aforementioned one.

When asked, “If you were a young physicist just starting out today, what would you study?” he replied, “I would have a new idea that would open up a new field.” Get it? Because he’s baller and that’s what happened. Of course, he also answered seriously to a few questions as well, saying that he feels the discovery of supersymmetric partners would be the biggest would do the most to revolutionize how we understand the universe, which happens to be something the CERN laboratory is searching for with the Large Hadron Collider. When asked what he felt his biggest blunder was, he replied that thinking that information was destroyed in black holes was his biggest blunder — at least his biggest scientific blunder — and was proved wrong back in 1997.

So, yes, one of the most brilliant minds alive today understands time and space and black holes leaking information back into the universe, but not women. Although this picture says otherwise:

(via New Scientist)

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  • Laurence glavin

    Albert Einstein has been quoted as saying that the US Income Tax was hard to understand

  • kyle

    ”
    he feels the discovery of supersymmetric partners would be the biggest would do the most to revolutionize how we understand the universe” 

    Y’all need to work on your editing.

  • Jeremy Swink

    Thank god I thought I had gone stupid for a second,

  • M.N. Hanson

    My experience has been that men who claim not to understand women are just baffled that we demand to be treated like human beings. They find it audacious that we believe ourselves to be intellectually equal.

  • M.N. Hanson

    Granted, I can see why that would confuse Stephen Hawking. He probably feels that way about everybody.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_AOFTU2AM7WRZZFDC6SPN4XF6KQ Null

    A lot of these superbrilliant science guys have Asperger’s and don’t understand other people. Since women tend to be less Aspergery on average…you do the math.

    People are good at different things…

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  • Dontemailme

    @M.N. Justifiably, I would say

  • Jack Rockstar

    This is a ridiculous statement, M.N., and one loaded with some serious internet trolling. Mr. Hawking, from his books to his public statements, is an incredibly intelligent and highly modest individual, deeply interested in humanity’s increasing knowledge of the universe.

    And frankly, if you ever met a man who claimed to understand a woman, he’s lying. No man does. At least Mr. Hawking acknowledges that with all his knowledge, the complexities of a woman elude him.

    You preemptively assume all men are either baffled by a ‘woman’s want to be treated like a human’ or that you consider yourselves to be intellectually equal to men. Nowhere in this article does Mr. Hawking state that women are lesser than men – merely that a woman is a mystery even he cannot unravel. 

    Take your feminist agenda out of the equation and you can see that this is a statement about how he appreciates women. Thank you.

  • Email

    No, that rarely has anything to do with it.

    Sure, there are men who might not look at women as equals, but that’s not the case with someone as intellectually robust as Stephen Hawking (though it is true that most women are not his intellectual equal, simply because very few people of either gender are his intellectual equal).

    Most men don’t understand women because they operate by different motivations. There are, in fact, biological differences in men and woman, what they need from relationships, and what makes them tick.

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisgrayson Chris Grayson

    As a young man, he had a reputation for being a bit of a playboy, chasing women around and neglecting his studies. Then the symptoms of his motor neurone disease began to show. That’s when he really began to focus his mind on his work.

  • http://twitter.com/vaporware John Caldwell

    Stephen Hawking doesn’t need to understand,when he always has his Chick Magnet turned on.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_Z4CJFSWSF6NJQ2QO56FEBHKHJM K

    Actually, when you study women biologically this is not true.  Women placed in anonymous situations/surveys (i.e. free from social stigma) show similar drives to men.  It’s usually when they feel they will be judged (for example, they are told their name will be attached to a survey, or they are asked questions in front of peers, etc) that they conform to social standards (for example prioritizing relationships over one-night-stands).

    Not to put all the focus on women – men cave to social pressure as well.  Men benefit from marriage more than women, but most still act as though it’s a chore and that women are the ones that benefit from marriage – for all we know some may believe it and abstain from marriage altogether…good for women, I suppose, but bad for them.  Furthermore British men prefer cuddling more than women, but again, cuddling is supposed to be a “girl” thing.  If presented food and given only a few seconds to choose, men tend to choose more “girly” food items (salad, sweets) than if given time to choose (and thus contemplate how their food choices may reflect on their masculinity) – when given time they will often choose more “manly” foods (meat, potatoes) regardless of what they actually may be craving.

    Bottom line biologically – genetically – men and women are over 99% the same.  It always baffles me how people prefer to focus on that 1%.  In all honesty, we actually exhibit surprisingly little sexual dimorphism compared to some other mammalian species – further illustrating that men and women aren’t as different as some would have you believe.  And even if they were – even in those species where there is huge sexual dimorphism – there isn’t nearly the dichotomy of male/female roles that humans have repeatedly argued are “natural”.

    If you want to cling to your bias, by all means feel free, but please be aware it is personal bias, not biology.  Anyone who’s actually studied the biology of the sexes could tell you that.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_Z4CJFSWSF6NJQ2QO56FEBHKHJM K

    Hurr hurr a scientist doesn’t understand women, hurr this is hilarious.

  • A Man

    Women are the devil!

  • peace

    Good points Email, but it should be men and women or man and woman, not “men and woman”…a Freudian slip?? ;-)

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Vivlian-Wozz/100003324676254 Vivlian Wozz

    I am a 27 years old doctor,mature and beautiful. and now i am seeking a good man who can give me real love, so i got a sername Andromeda2002 on  Agedate.СòM, a nice and free place for younger women and older men,or older women and younger men, to interact with each other.Maybe you wanna check out or tell your friends.
     

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Vivlian-Wozz/100003324676254 Vivlian Wozz

    I am a 27 years old doctor,mature and beautiful. and now i am seeking a good man who can give me real love, so i got a sername Andromeda2002 on  Agedate.СòM, a nice and free place for younger women and older men,or older women and younger men, to interact with each other.Maybe you wanna check out or tell your friends.

  • http://uebergeek.wordpress.com/ uebergeek

    My impression is that men who claim not to understand “women” often just don’t seem to have figured out that women are individuals, and thus we don’t really have much of an aggregate behavior. Except for that whole “going to the ladies room together” thing, of course.  

  • Gayatri

    The idea that ‘women’ as a whole are to be understood is reductive. And simply the fact that Stephen Hawking has one of the most able scientific (and therefore extremely rational) minds on the planet also goes to imply that what he doesn’t understand is probably irrational, i.e. women. Which is usually what men mean about it being hard to understand women. It’s a boring cliched statement to make and I’m surprised one of the foremost minds of our time would resort to such a trite statement.

  • http://twitter.com/theworldofmarla theworldofmarla

    He partied with Aileen Wuronos (on his left)? In that case, he’s lucky to be alive. 

  • http://profiles.google.com/anonymity.wm Anonymity Wm

    You can sum up how to understand and attract women in just a few words. Listen to what they say, actually comprehend it and pay attention, and then respect that. Everything else you might need to know will come naturally if you can do that.

  • JohnDough

    dont be mad because youre a geek

  • grace

    this sounds like they misinterpreted Hawking. He speaks with a machine that talks in a computer voice. when it come to human speaking we need tone and body language to speak correctly, two things of which he has little of. give him a break and try reading something he read. Stephen Hawking has had an amazing role in cosmology and has theories that are like nothing we have ever recorded in human history. bottom line, give him a break.