In the spring of 1996, several of my dormmates decided to trek north to the University of Portland, to attend a speech by Stephen Hawking. We were still in that phase where we barely left campus, so intense was our social world. So this was a major undertaking. I don’t recall how we found out about the speech. This is before the internet was a widespread means of distribution of this sort of information (though I think we found out from my dormmate who was a journalism student).
I remember the anticipation and excitement. It was like we were going to a rock concert.
The talk Hawking gave was a typical one about cosmology. He also gave some shout outs to Linus Pauling, who was a native Oregonian.
Like many people, I had read A Brief History of Time. Also, perhaps like most people, I didn’t recall much from that book (I read the book years before going to the talk, in my defense).
Even by the mid-1990s, I was aware that Stephen Hawking was part of a somewhat out of control hype-machine. Though he was an eminent physicist, he was not necessarily the most brilliant physicist since Einstein (one of the claims on one edition of A Brief History of Time I saw at one point). We didn’t have Wikipedia, so I didn’t know about his somewhat messy personal life.
What we did know about Hawking was that he was a man of incredible brilliance who didn’t let his medical condition stop him. We admired him. We admired his achievements. He was heroic. By the time my dormmates and I saw Hawking in the flesh, he was already very frail. The only movement that we could perceive was that you could see he was breathing because of some barely perceptible movement around his neck.
At the end of the talk, people mulled around during the Q & A, trying to get as close as possible. I still have a vivid recollection of seeing Hawking up on the dais, in bright light.
Afterward, on the trip home, we reflected that it seemed unlikely that the great physicist had much time left, seeing as how he was nearly immobile. We felt privileged to be in his presence when he gave a talk. That was enough. Of course, he lived on for more than 20 years.
Hawkings was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.
The chair was founded in 1664 with a gift from the estate of Henry Lucas, who was a clergyman and an MP during the English Civil War. The gift was his library of 4,000 books and land providing an income of £100/yr.
Other than Hawking, notable holders of the Chair include Issac Newton, P.A.M. Dirac, George Stokes, and Charles Babbage. I doubt that Hawking will be held to be more important to the history of science than those gentlemen.
I agree that there was a lot of hype, though I don’t understand enough theoretical physics to know whether any of the hype was warranted. I also agree that “heroic” is a good term. He pushed on when a lot of people would have just given up.
I attended a small reception for him at the University of Waterloo about 8-10 years ago. He was quickly crowded by well-wishers, including Mike Lazaridis, who wanted to introduce his entire family. The process of “conversation” was quite slow, as you might imagine. I was behind Hawking, about 10 feet away, and could see the screen on his voice synthesizer as he scrolled through to create sentences — a laborious process.