How Stephen Hawking Helped Redefine Humanity ’s Existence

During the fall of my sophomore year at Harvard, a group of my fellow physics majors were excitedly discussing a rumor they’d just heard: Stephen Hawking was coming to give the prestigious Loeb Lectures. I played along with their excitement, but truth be told, I didn’t know who Stephen Hawking was. This was the early 1980s, well before A Brief History of Time, so to all but the most physics-savvy of people, Hawking had yet to become Hawking. The rumor was true, and a few weeks later the physics-savvy crowd turned out in force, packing the largest hall to hear Hawking discuss relativity and the origin of the universe. Although his movements had been reduced to flicking a finger or squinting an eye, Hawking could still speak — a soft, monotone murmur that was barely audible. One of Hawking’s graduate students, trained to decipher his speech, sat inches from the wheelchair, attentively listening and relaying Hawking’s remarks to an audience that hung on every word. The reduced pace allowed me to follow a lecture that otherwise would have left me baffled, making the experience all the more remarkable. I was riding to the edge of space and time on a mind soaring free of a body that had been mandated to sit as still as stone. As the world would come to know, Hawking suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that ravages the neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, but leaves cognitive functioning intact. By shifting from the tactile...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime remembrance Source Type: news