Wired Interview: Stephen Hawking
BY JOAO MEDEIROS
On the afternoon of September 23, 2014, a few minutes before his lecture at the Magma auditorium in Los Pueblos in Tenerife, Stephen William Hawking was rewriting parts of his speech. Hawking, who is unusual in being both a theoretical physicist working on some of the most fundamental problems in physics (his most recent paper, in January 2014, was titled “Information preservation and weather forecasting for black holes”) and being very famous, is a slow writer.
He operates his computer by moving his right cheek muscle. The movements are detected by an infrared sensor attached to his spectacles allowing him to move a cursor on a computer screen attached to his wheelchair. He painstakingly builds sentences at a rate of a few words per minute, a speed that might be slowly decreasing as his muscle control deteriorates. His condition is a consequence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (aka motor neurone disease), an illness from which he has suffered since the age of 21 (he took part in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge in August by volunteering his children: “Because I had pneumonia last year it would not be wise for me to have a bucket of cold water poured over me”). His Tenerife lecture was titled “The Quantum Creation of the Universe.” The 1,500-capacity auditorium was packed.
“He was changing the content at the very last minute so we panicked a bit,” says Jonathan Wood, Hawking’s graduate assistant, a position which involves a variety of responsibilities, from technical assistance to managing social media. “He always does that. I produce the PowerPoint slides because he can’t. I’m not a physicist, so often he will be talking about things that I don’t understand and he’ll have to explain what slides he wants.” The lecture was part of the second edition of Starmus, a six-day science festival that gathered a group of eminent scientists, including physics Nobel laureate John Mather, biologist Richard Dawkins and Queen guitarist Brian May, who is an expert in three-dimensional astronomy. But the star turn was Hawking.
As he made his way to the stage, helped by his entourage of nurses and assistants, a giant screen showed a video montage which included visualisations of black-hole collisions and footage shot from Hawking’s point-of-view in his wheelchair, with “Hole in the Sky,” by the doom-metal band AtomA, blaring throughout the hall.
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http://www.wired.com/2015/01/stephen-hawking-black-holes-hed-good-bond-villain/
