It’s not like Hawking and Epstein traded a few emails talking about science, or had a one off meeting. It appears they had a fair amount of exchanges over a long period of time.
Epstein was a vile human in the worst kind of way and I see no evidence that Hawking was blind to this fact. Half the people on this app wouldn’t willingly associate with someone of a different political party than them, but to defend a man who willingly spent time with a convicted sex trafficker? The fact that Hawking was paralyzed doesn’t absolve him from willingly enabling (and potentially partaking in) child abuse and sex trafficking.











Personally speaking I also lived through the 80’s and the 90’s but if you were to ask me to pick out the differences between the aesthetics from two photographs one from 2007 and one from 2017 I’d be hard pressed. If the images were taken on a consumer grade camera I’d probably focus on the differences in image resolution, but other than that I’d probably be hard pressed.
Now if you were to repeat the experiment with two images from 87 vs 97 oh yeah I’m confident I’d be able to figure out which decade things were from.
What I’m getting at is I’m not sure how much living through the eras really blunts our ability to perceive the differences between decades. If anything when watching period pieces with actors pretending to be in the 80’s or 90’s I feel like I’m acutely aware of the subtle tells that give away this wasn’t actually filmed in the past.