246 Trillion people
September 3, 2010
According to CNN’s homepage, that’s how many people shared this article about Stephen Hawking’s new book.
Just a brief snippet of The Grand Design was released to generate buzz and considering that the number of people apparently sharing this article is 6 orders of magnitude larger than the number of people on earth, I’d say it worked.
The comment thread is also pretty entertaining – people (probably with no more astrophysics knowledge than your average 5th grader) claiming that his data is misleading, his reasoning flawed, his conclusions erroneous, and he’s probably a bad person to boot. And they conclude all of this based on a report about 2 pages of a book that isn’t even released yet. This post sums it up pretty nicely.
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We Beasties 
Wow. Mindblowing. And weird so many people find it that new and revolutionary. Science and imagination are different things. You need imagination to have faith, but you don’t need faith to have imagination.. Faith isn’t about putting God, life and the universe in a box, it’s a lens that gives the whole thing meaning. I wrote about it here –
http://daveyspens.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/gods-and-monsters/
Unfortunately, there are far too many people that don’t leave god in the realm of the imagination, and try with all their might to drag him into the real world. Disregarding an eminent scientist’s conclusions, and indeed his entire career, because he says that bit of imagination is irrelevant in order to understand the universe is just the latest manifestation of absurdity.