My thoughts took me back immediately to the summer of 2000 when the younger, fundamentalist version of myself was being blown away by light cones and black holes. I’d learned about Einstein in highschool, studied relativity, but it wasn’t until I’d come into contact with Hawking’s work that my world really started to open up.

First it was A Brief History of Time, then Deutsch’s Fabric of Reality, and Greene’s Elegant Universe–the scales were starting to fall from my eyes, so to speak. Each of these authors (not to mention Nietzsche, Heidegger, Zizek, and Jung) helped me recover my curiousity and courage. But it wasn’t until this morning when the words (Hawking, Ill) stuck in my head that I realized how much of that process started with his work.

I think I speak for many when I say:

“Thanks, Stephen. You’ve done more than change our view of the universe; you’ve helped us see how we can fit into it.”

Data plays poker with Hawking, Einstein, Newton

I grew up watching Picard, Data and LaForge battle the borg. For this history and science geek, second only to Picard’s “Engage!”, the iconic Star Trek TNG moment is Data on the Holodeck, simulating a poker game with his three scientific heroes: Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking.

Because I’m currently living on one of the most remote places on the planet, surrounded by parsecs of water, forests and fog, I feel no less isolated than Data, on the Enterprise, out near the Romulan border, and today I found myself imagining my own holodeck poker game. Which three would I invite?

Interestingly, my mind went first to living persons (Rachel Maddow, Johnny Depp, Richard Dawkins), but they’re alive—I could just beam them up to the transporter room. No, to be true to the established traditions of holodeck poker, they would have to be simulated real dead people. Data spent time on the Holodeck solving mysteries in the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes, but for poker and conversation, he preferred real but extinct personalities.

So who would it be? Sadly, I am primarily monolingual. So like Data, computer translations notwithstanding I’ll stick with speakers of English. How about…

Benjamin Franklin

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Katherine Hepburn

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

Robert Ingersoll.

My creed is that: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.

Who are your Holodeck Poker partners, alive or dead?