Stephen Hawking is trending
Posted on 03 September 2010, 22:03
Ever since Stephen Hawking announced that the universe has no need of God – ‘It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going,’ he says in his new book, The Grand Design – I’ve been puzzling over how to make a joke about it on the Ship of Fools Twitter feed. Today I came up with an amusing line I liked and posted it late morning…
Stephen Hawking in Ikea. Hawking: ‘This table easy to put together?’ Assistant: ‘So easy it assembles itself.’ Boom boom.
Just after hitting the Tweet button, I looked down the page and realised Stephen Hawking was trending worldwide, and at the top of the list. So far as I know, he’s been trending for two days now. Because of that, the joke collected a lot of retweets very quickly, and became one of Twitter’s top tweets of the day (currently approaching 120 retweets, including old-style RTs and new style button retweets).
This is easily our most succesful tweet to date, so there’s a lot to learn from here. We’ve also collected 32 new followers and counting since the tweet was posted, which is another record for us.
Following all this gave me a chance of seeing how lucrative an issue this is becoming for Hawking (who is surely now going to see royalties of a Dawkins magnitude), and how theists and atheists were tweeting each other to death over it in real time. Here are some of the tweets which caught my eye…
RichaelGimbang Someone oughta pray for that Stephen Hawking guy. He just bought front row tickets to catch Hell. Again.
Nnewibruv Stephen Hawking says there is no God… that gravity helped create the Universe… errr… who created gravity??
EricStangel Stephen Hawking says there is no God. I guess that A-Hole has never eaten at the Cheesecake Factory. [If someone knows what this much-retweeted comment means, do let me know.]
jeffward05 I wonder if I should believe Stephen Hawking or a youth group leader with a jesus tatoo, a soul patch, and an acoustic guitar.
sazzadee Perhaps Stephen Hawking is just annoyed because the stairway to heaven has no ramp access.
And finally, some wisdom…
petsnakereggie I feel all the inevitable refutations of Stephen Hawking should begin “Stephen Hawking, who is a way fucking smarter than me, said…”
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