Baez Decrypts

John Baez’s description of Hawking’s talk at GR17 is the best scientific commentary on the talk I’ve come across. It’s a notch above all of these descriptions I’ve read which are of the form: I don’t like Euclidean quantum gravity, but I do know [insert other theory of quantum gravity here], and we already knew [insert claim here]. Which is fine for learning about [insert claim here] but doesn’t really tell me anything about what Hawking was trying to say!