## JAMES PATTERSON

discuss cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, systems of encryption and decryption, and other topics.

Epstein had been hosting get-togethers like this for years. Toward the end of Chief Reiter's investigation, in March of 2006, Epstein had hosted twenty top physicists-including three Nobel Prize winners as well as the celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking — at a Saint Thomas symposium called "Confronting Gravity," which was advertised as "a workshop to explore fundamental questions in physics and cosmology."

"This is a remarkable group," one of the Nobel Prize winners told a reporter for the St. Thomas Source.

"There is no agenda except fun and physics, and that's fun with a capital F," Epstein said.

Epstein had been especially interested in Stephen Hawking. Someday, Hawking had theorized, the universe would stop expanding and collapse, at which point time would begin to run backwards. Hawking believed that computer viruses were living things. He thought that given the size of the universe, alien life forms existed. He did not believe in God. But he had a vast appre- ciation for the inner workings of the universe, and this is why Epstein gave Hawking a tremendous gift. He paid to have a sub- marine modified so that it could fit Hawking and his wheelchair and give the scientist his first glimpse of an actual alien world- the one that lies under the waves of the ocean.

It was one of the most romantic, generous gestures that Jef- frey Epstein had ever made.

## Al Seckel: January 2012

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{"people":["james patterson","stephen hawking","al seckel","elon musk","mark oppenheimer","jeffrey epstein"]}