On a subsequent visit to the set, he passed by Brent Spiner and asked where his money was from winning the hand of poker. Spiner replied that the check was in the mail.
During the filming of this episode Hawking was given a tour of the TNG sets. When they arrived on the engineering set, he turned to the warp core and said, “I’m currently working on that”. A few fun facts about this scene. To this day, Hawking is the first and only real historical figure to play himself in Star Trek. Also, in the alternate future that played out in the series finale “All Good Things...,” it was revealed that Data holds the Lucasian Chair of mathematics at Cambridge University. Dr. Hawking held this position from 1979 to 2009. While Sir Isaac Newton held the position from 1669 to 1702.
It's a shame Sir Isaac Newton's filming schedule conflicted with his other media projects and he was forced to cancel his appearance. It was very gracious of Panamount to acquiesce to his request to parlay for another time.
Well, it depends on your definition of "historical figure". Does Miss Universe count? There have been at least two of those on Star Trek. lol And there have been at least three astronauts. Not historical? There have been several Oscar winners on Star Trek--including one RECENT winner. There has also been an EGOT winner on trek. Not historical? What about King Abdullah II of Jordan? Not historical? We're approaching 900 episodes of all Trek series. There are plenty of historical people in there.
@@greyeyed123 The issue is 'as themselves'. Whoopi was playing Guinan not herself, the others were also not appearing as themselves; they were playing characters and may have gotten the roll due to who they were in reality, but only Prof. Hawking was credited as playing himself similarly to his credits for The Simpsons and Futurama.
After coming to do the scene Hawking was given a tour of the set. He pointed at the warp core and said "I'm Working on That". Then he asked to be put into Picard's chair on the bridge.
I also recall reading the crew called in an emergency medical team because Hawking was so pumped to be on Star Trek that they thought he was going into shock
IdeasOfIceAndFire Pike=barely alive and need to plug himself to control his chair bawking=quite alive, can still use his cheek to control the keyboard yo talm
A similar thought struck me in TNG when they used Geordi's visor as some sort of webcam on an away-mission and the screen was blurry and in false-color. My, my, 300 years into the future and they don't even have simple portable video gear
@@borstenpinsel It was explained that Geordi's visor doesn't replicate human vision, it far exceeds it. He is able to see infrared, microsopic stress fractures in metal and a whole host of things that are very usefull to his career. Also, there is an episode where he is abducted by Klingons, specifically the Duras Sisters, and they do get a more 90s video feed from his visor, possibly a feature they installed or one that the crew of the Enterprise didn't use.
Michael, they were trying to be too politically correct. All 3 of these guys made significant contributions. This clip portrays Newton as the dumbest and Einstein as the 2nd dumbest. Hawking was the only one still currently alive, so they were trying to suck up to him and probably even be nice to him. I'd say that in the long run, in terms of contributions, Hawking has probably done the least, so far at least.
Dude, for real? This view is misleading as hell. All of them did/do significant work, and just because because the "new kids" take advantage of the work of their ancestors, doesnt mean that they contribute less to scientific progression. The basics are not the peak, and the peak is not the base, and if you wanna say that the roof is less important than the base then think again.
Stephen Hawking was once asked why he did not update his artificial voice, as after awhile far less robotic sounding ones became available. He responded with something along the lines of "Why would I? This is my voice."
There's actually a deeper story to why Stephen Hawking had that same, downright iconic 1980s speech synthesis apparatus: it was an original, custom-designed setup @ the time because nothing like it existed on the consumer market. Apparently, Hawking felt an enormous debt of gratitude to the person who practically invented the system that allowed Hawking to input txt via eye movements & then produce computerized speech, so much so that he refused to "upgrade" the setup once newer & improved tech became commercially available.
I've also heard him say that he understood his voices roll as a remarkable signature and that it allowed other people and children with similar disabilities to feel normalized by his success with abnormality.
And nowadays that flavor of text to speech voice is nearly universally recognized as the "Stephen Hawking voice", he really did gain a sort of ownership over it.
Sad to hear of Stephen's passing. The biggest thing I liked about him was that he didn't take himself too seriously with appearances on The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory , Monty Python and STTNG . The smile he gives when he plays his hand and wins seams to me to be so genuine.
He also parodied himself in a Little Britain ‘Lou and Andy’ sketch for Comic Relief, showing up the woketards who accused the show of being ableist as the virtue signallers that they are
It still amazes me how often we'd see Stephen Hawking in shows and movies. You'd figure he'd always be busy with his work, but he became just as famous for his advertising and cameos as he did for his work in the field of Physics.
A warp drive is pretty much possible, same as many other sci-fi gadgets (like lightsabers). Whats really holding us back from actually making those is a power source strong enough to actually make the magnetic field needed for the device. In a way i say thats a good thing to. A power source of such magniture would be a nasty bomb, and you can be sure that some idiot somewhere would overload the bloody thing to blow up half the planet for shits and giggles.
Grega Meglic With Star Trek's variation of it. Judging by the way the effect is shown. The Warp drive, basically slingshots them forward. Maybe the problem isn't a power source, but a method of propulsion they never thought of. Like say putting two engines behind for the initial push forward. But one engine in front that propels it backwards. Have them all firing at once, then letting go of the front one which would cause the back engines push it faster and harder than it normally could alone. Might not be an exact warp drive, but it may at least propel the ship faster than they've ever been before.
Everything about this is great. I crack up when Newton says "Don't patronize me sir. I INVENTED physics." The way that Isaac, the oldest of the bunch, is annoyed by having to deal with people hundreds of years his senior. Einstein enjoying being in the company of fellow geniuses. Hawking so confident in his intelligence even against someone who his work is based on. It's overall just a genius scene.
@@DennisKovacich Hundreds of years of scientific advancement. Things Newton discovered are the most basic concepts for either Hawking or Einstein. Just like how Newton would be the senior of Pythagoras.
And then there’s Data: The guy who is happy in anyone’s company because he sees every situation as an opportunity to learn, is always condescending without knowing it, and who knows more about physics than any of the other three.
Newton was indeed much smarter than Einstein and Hawking combined. Newton was an immense intellectual giant. He was also an insufferable prick. This representation is not inaccurate.
@@aonbrogan8266 The terms "senior" and "junior" merely denote age, not depth of knowledge. Einstein and Hawking are Newton's _juniors,_ but also his academic successors.
Stephen Hawking actually provided himself for this episode. Totally awesome beyond all measure. As a physics major, I would give up one of my kidneys to play poker with the three greatest physicists known to man.
I don't understand the incredible amount of reverence shown to these men. Give one of your kidneys you say? Please save the grovelling for someone who really deserves it. Anyone who works in a scientific field, and many who work in other fields, and lastly anyone who has worked a job at all, knows that progress is step by step, tying facts together. As if each of these men came up with a ground-breaking idea all on their own (smirk). All were taught at higher institutes of learning in their day, which means there were many minds that came before which supplied them with the basis for their next step. It is now known that Einstein essentially plagiarized the E=MC2 equation. If these men seem taller, it is because they stand on the shoulders of giants - their teachers, professors, peers, and assistants.
I have a theory: The reason that Isaac Newton is so cranky is because Data grabbed the models from educational programs. Newton has been programmed with a much more limited personality than Einstein and Hawking, which is why he is uninterested in playing poker.
Jokes aside, I read in more than one source that Newton was just that cranky, stuck-up dude, now I don't know if that's true, I just repeat what I read :)
Tulle Rönnmyr we are talking the dude who had 23 people executed and occasionally destroyed other scientists to keep control of the Royal society. Newton is cranky because Newton was a jerk
he was and he was a resentful guy too ... but we do own him our science. Einstein was a cool dude tho another thing . how do you think 17/18 century Newton would feel about sitting at the same table with a german jew? I would give anything to be as smart as Newton but as cool and humble as Einstein
legna20v we actually don't owe Newton as much as we think. a strong theory even suggests Leibnitz was creating calculus when Newton stole it. even his work in astronomy was pilfered by others. Newton was a great scientist, that's undeniable. but he was also a crook and conman much in the way of Edison. also, he was an alchemist. probably would not have enjoyed a Jew at the table, whether it was Einstein to outsmart him, or me to ask if he ever fucked John Lock
(I spent the summer studying the history 17th-19th century science in Britain. lots of papers and scientific historians in Oxford and Cambridge have some shit to say about Newton
Glad he had the chance to have his dream....love any and all Data-centric episodes....one of the best! RIP Doc. Hawking, the Universe or at least this planet, will miss you.
There is a story that the crew took Hawking on a tour of the show's various sets. In the engineering deck set, he stopped next to the warp core engine, smiled and said "I'm working on that."
Can we talk about the "Wrong again, Albert" line? Because holy shit. Einstein just mentions the uncertainty principle, omething he deeply distrusted. He didn't believe in quantum physics as it seemed simply illogical to him. "Wrong AGAIN, Albert" wasn't a reference to an earlier hand, but to one of the physicist's biggest blunders. Winderful burn from Hawking.
When Stephen Hawking visited the set of Star Trek TNG to do this episode at some point he went by the set where the Warp Core was and he said: "I'm still working on that" ! Great mind!!!
Hawking was so excited to be on Star Trek that he began to breath so hard the crew feared he was hyperventilating. During the filming they took him on a tour of the various sets-on the engineering deck set he paused by the warp core engine and said "I'm working on that!"
I appreciate how Data understands why it is funny even though he doesn't laugh, because he should be able to understand the rules of comedy even if he doesn't have an emotional reaction to a joke.
This scene always fascinated me. Isaac Newton is memorialized in a statue in Trinity church in Cambridge. At it's base there is an inscription in latin that loosely translates to "There is no greater intellect". He is widely regarded as the greatest mind that has ever walked the earth and here he is with the giants who stood on his shoulders, completely out of his depth and outclassed. It kind of puts things in perspective doesn't it? Science has come so far since then. I find it a privilege to live in such a time. The Hubble, the Higgs boson, robots on Mars. And now, they're talking about how quantum entanglement might be due to tiny wormholes or something like that. Maybe one day we'll be flying through the stars, faster than light, meeting new civilizations. I would not be surprised one bit if our future was very much like Star Trek but we, of course, still have a lot of growing up to do.
I don't know that he's out of his depth. The things he managed to accomplish without the computer power both Einstein and Hawking had access to is amazing.
@@drsch True. And it's all certainly beyond me. But still, he knew nothing about sub nuclear particles or quantum physics in general. He didn't even know about other galaxies or the expansion of the universe. So yeah. A guy like him would've been able to catch up and "outclassed" was probably the wrong word but the sentiment is still valid I think.
@@johnspooner1403 He certainly did a lot of things. If I'm not mistaken, he has more scientific things named after him than anyone else. There's the unit of force, newtonian physics, the newtonian telescope just of the top of my head. There's a lot of other stuff too. Newton, has probably done more for science than any other single individual. As huge as relativity was, even Einstein was working off of earlier work.
At first, when I was watching this, I groaned when Newton mentioned the apple story, that Star Trek was going by that urban legend. Never was I happier when Data immediately followed up with "that story is generally agreed to be apocryphal."
No problem! Found others that put this video on RU-vid, but they always managed to miss the first few seconds, and that really bugged me. So I posted it myself...
that is such a realistic rendition of Isaac newton. He was famously a curmudgeons who was only ever recorded as laughing once in his life. When a friend asked him what the point in studying Euclid was. He laughed in his face.
I love seeing Stephen Hawking here but I also love the appearance of John Neville as Newton who appeared in The X Files as Well Manicured Man, one of my favourite antagonists ever
Hawking was one of the greatest men who ever lived. We lost someone very special today. Idiots abound, but brilliant men with a sense of humour are rare.
I hope Hawking is at least remembered in part for his humor, as well as for his phenomenal contributions to the understanding of physics. Thanks for everything, Stephen. You will be very badly missed.
Looking back on this video uploaded 16 yrs ago, we can basically emulate this very same experience of interacting with historical figures today. People are creating 3D characters in virtual reality worlds, plugging in API keys from Chat-GPT, and using ElevenLabs to create natural sounding voices. AI is still bad at math, but the foundation for the experience laid out in this scene is still possible.
Fun fact. Isaac Newton is played by John Neville. He played Hieronymus Karl Frederick Baron von Munchausen in the film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. :D
Oh my gosh!! Can you imagine!?!?!? If this really happened I wonder who would truly win, either way everyone would be pissed. XD Awesome that Star Trek did this. XD
The scene was about a juxtaposition to Data's passions, which is logics. I think it is perfectly "natural" to assume his Love is of logical persuassions.
But you know, one thing I find hard to imagine is, that Data is incapable of feelings, yet the holodeck is... Like with Moriarty, and that whole debarcle.
