I definitely didn't have your seats as I was up in the nosebleed section,
though he drove by me in the lobby as I was waiting to go in the auditorium.

It was fun overall, but he vassilated between really simple information,
his guest appearance on The Simpsons, and going into more complex
cosmological stuff. I could hear the audience going Huh? but otherwise
you would have thought the Dalai Lama or a rock star was on stage.

The really disappointing part was at the end. They had students from Harvard
ask Hawking some questions which he would answer in real time (the
rest of the program was prerecorded for obvious reasons).

You might think people going to Harvard would maybe ask something if
not brilliant at least perhaps original or interesting. No, instead the
questions were:

- Is there a God? (Oy)

- Should I go into astronomy for a career? (He said simply "Do it.")

- What is the black stuff between the stars? (Double Oy)

I did not make up any of these questions, especially the last one.

Hawking answered as best he could and the audience responded to
every answer as if God Himself (or maybe Bono) had said it. As Henry
David Thoreau once said in reply to the merits of his degree from that
institution: "Every sheep should keep its skin."

I can now always say I saw Stephen Hawking in person and it was
something to see how the public reacted to him, even if they did not
have a clue about his work. But based on past meetings with so-called
celebrities, I think I prefer to read about their works and watch them
on television.