Stephen Hawking lectures at Cal Tech from an email published at BoingBoing
...One of the most brilliant minds alive on the planet today, he is cruelly trapped within a useless body, which slumps like an understuffed and oversized rag doll in his large and gadget-filled wheelchair.
In a smart grey suit and white shirt with fine blue stripes unbuttoned at the collar, he was smartly dressed, with a mop top-type short haircut that made him look like an escapee from Quadraphenia.
Yet his movement is minimal. He blinks his eyes, his right knee vibrates up and down with an involuntary tremor, and only the slow rise and fall of his stomach indicates that he is still alive.
[...]Once, early on in the lecture, his head slumped forward like a broken doll, and an aide had to walk on stage to readjust his body: an undignified moment as Hawking's head was manhandled and repositioned, and then his whole body picked up and put down, as if the aide was plumping up a particularly large and unwieldy pillow.
It was simultaneously eerie and inspiring: to know that within this frail, almost lifeless carcass, there hummed the thrilling genius of the mind that produced A Short History of Time, and The Universe in a Nutshell, and some of the most seminal work on black holes.
(... and I'm whining because of a little back pain. What are you whining about today?)
Posted by fred1st at October 22, 2003 10:03 AM | TrackBack