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The Genius on Wheels

Dennis Piszkiewicz

    My daughter Samantha called me to ask if I wanted to go to a lecture by Stephen Hawking. Of course, I wanted to attend Hawking’s lecture. He was a rock star of science, the Mick Jaeger of theoretical physics.
    Samantha gave me this invitation during her freshman year at Caltech, in Pasadena. If you didn’t know about the school as an academic institution but watched a lot of television, you would recognize it as the place where the guys on “The Big Bang Theory” worked.
    Hawking was a mathematician and physicist who made his reputation with his theories about black holes and the origin of the universe, AKA, the Big Bang. He also became a well-known author at the publication of his best seller, A Brief History of Time, in 1988. The book spent the following four and a half years on the London Sunday Times best-seller list and sold more than ten million copies. (The book used simple, sometimes conversational language and skipped the math behind the theories; but still it was not an easy read.) You may also have known Stephen Hawking as the subject of the popular 2014 movie “The Theory of Everything”. The film was nominated for a lot of awards; and it won a few, including the Oscar for best actor, which went to Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking.
    When Hawking was 21, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS, for short. Individuals with ALS progressively lose voluntary muscle control, the ability to move their bodies including the ability to walk and speak; however, they retain all ability for rational thinking. Hawking was told he had from two to five years to live. He chose to make the most of the time he had left, which turned out to be decades.
    Samantha explained to me that Hawking was at Caltech because he would rather spend a couple months every winter hanging out with astrophysicists in warm and sunny California than suffer in the cold gloom of his home in Cambridge, England. Who wouldn’t?
    The day of Hawking’s lecture arrived. Since it was going to be open to the public, we decided to arrive early so we could get good seats. We arrived at the Beckman Auditorium about 45 minutes early and went to the end of the line, which stretched halfway across campus. “Nothing to worry about,” we were told. If they ran out of room in the 1,100-seat auditorium, we could watch a televised remote in any of several big lecture halls.
    The line started moving; and we resigned ourselves to seeing Hawking on TV, but we got lucky. Just as we reached the auditorium, somebody directing traffic told us to go in and fill the seats that had been reserved for VIPs who were no-shows. Samantha and I found ourselves sitting in the seventh row, center, less than thirty feet from the stage.
    After a brief introduction by Hawking’s friend, collaborator, and Caltech Professor Kip Thorne, Hawking drove his motorized wheelchair to center stage. He was greeted with cheers and applause. He was a small man, slumped to the left in his chair, with his head tilted to the right. A computer monitor was positioned at his front. The screen was visible to him but not to us in his audience.
    The title of Hawking’s lecture had been advertised as “How to Escape Out of a Black Hole.” He began by saying, “It is said that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, and nowhere is this more true than in the case of black holes.”
    Not only had Hawking lost control of his muscles, but he had also lost his ability to speak. His onboard computer spoke for him in his metallic monotone. It paused intermittently as he signaled it what to say. Hawking’s voice had an American accent, not British, because he had an old software version developed in the U.S.. He and his listeners were used to it, and it was his trademark. Like any good academic scientist, he illustrated his lecture with images projected behind him for all to see. Somehow, he controlled both his computer-generated voice and his slide presentation on black holes. He did not move noticeably.
    If you’re a little behind in your knowledge of cosmology—and most of us are—a simple definition of a black hole is a celestial object that has a gravitational field so strong that light CANNOT escape it, and that is believed to have been the result of the collapse of a very massive star. Hawking thought otherwise. He made his argument, contrary to the accepted definition, that radiation, X-rays and gamma rays actually CAN escape from a black hole.
    I doubt that many of us in the auditorium and lecture halls cared whether anything could ever escape from a black hole, but Hawkins had a broader, much more ambitious goal. He went through his exercise as one step in a much more ambitious quest, his search for what he called “The Theory of Everything,” one simple and elegant equation that could explain the behavior of physical nature from subatomic particles to the boundaries of the universe—if it has boundaries.
    He gave a lecture that would have been understandable to most high school graduates, and he threw in a few jokes and witticisms to keep everybody’s attention. By the time he had finished, about forty-five minutes later, he made us all true believers that he was on a worthwhile quest, whether we understood any of it or not. He said, only half joking, that if anybody ever proved with scientific data that anything could escape from a black hole, he would be a candidate for a Nobel Prize, the Superbowl of science.
    Before Hawking moved on to the question-and-answer session, Professor Thorne, returned to the stage to answer a question that was on more than a few minds and that someone would probably ask: “How did he do it?” How did a cripple who sat there, apparently without moving a muscle, drive his wheelchair onto the stage? How did he pull off giving such an engaging, informative, and entertaining lecture?”
    It was simpler than I expected. Hawking had a tiny optical device attached to the right side of his glasses that would read the twitching of a muscle in his right cheek that still functioned. This device was plugged into his computer, much like a mouse, and it allowed him to control what he saw on his monitor, such as a keyboard. He could use a word processor, albeit slowly. He could string letters into words, words into paragraphs, paragraph into documents. He could edit and rearrange all parts of the documents. When he was satisfied with the text, he could use a speech synthesizer, to turn the text into his easily recognized, almost robotic voice. Driving his wheelchair must have been, for him, as easy as walking for an able-bodied person.
    Professor Thorne mentioned that the technology existed to implant electrodes in appropriate locations in Hawking’s brain and connect them directly to his computer, but Hawking had decided that he was not yet ready to take that step.
    When Thorne finished, he turned the floor back to Hawking to answer questions that had been submitted before his lecture. From my seat in the seventh row I saw—or told myself I saw—the muscle in his right cheek twitch, and his computer spoke his answers.
    Now, here’s the point I’ve been working toward in this account. I still wanted to know: How did he do it? Had being crippled by ALS for nearly a half-century affected Hawking thought processes in any way? How could he create original, scientific ideas at his age? At the time he was then 68 years old. How did he stay sane inside the prison of his crippled body?
    He had nothing to say that day in answer to these questions, but he once answered them simply by saying, “Although I cannot move, and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free.”
    He was free to explore the universe in time, from the Big Bang to the present. He was free to travel through the universe in its scale, from subatomic particles to the Earth, from our solar system to the Milky Way Galaxy, to infinity and beyond.
    Stephen Hawking was wrong about one thing: His theoretical exploration of the universe was worthy of the Nobel Prize. The prize for physics for 2020 went to three theoretical physicists for their work on black holes. One of these was Hawking’s colleague and collaborator at the University of Cambridge, Roger Penrose. Regrettably, Hawkins was not eligible to receive a share of the prize because he had passed into immortality on March 14, 2018 at the age of 76.

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