Stephen Hawking in Seattle tonight … sort of
It was an exciting night, and even though this has nothing to do with Criminal Defense and only tangentially touches on technology, I had to hurry home and write about it. My son and I went out tonight to see Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, world-renowned physicist, and hugely popular lecturer. Over dinner we discussed his most recent books, explored competing theories of cosmology, and had a great time anticipating and speculating on how the lecture would go.
Alas, Hawking was not able to appear. On Monday, we were told, he collapsed after going off his respirator and completely flat-lined. After being resuscitated back to life, doctors advised that he should not travel, and he was forced to remain at his last stop in San Francisco. As disappointed as his fans were, he was even more so, and at the last hour agreed to an impromptu live webcast beamed from San Francisco in real time to the gathered audience. After a wonderful introduction from his former graduate assistant, Nathan Myrhvold (Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft for 15 years), Hawking made his appearance and dazzled the audience for a little over an hour while stepping through his talk on the Origins of Time.
It was every bit as entertaining as his writing, and at the end he took some questions (asked in previous sessions, he apparently was too weak to answer in real time tonight). Most were on topics of science, but a few odd gems got through:
Q: What’s your IQ?
A: I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.
Q: What do you think of President Bush’s plan to send men to Mars in 10 years?
A: Stupid.
Q: You are rumored to enjoy watching The Simpsons. Do you still watch it?
A: The Simpsons is the best thing on American television.
It was sad to see how much he’s deteriorated lately. He looked very worn and weary (not surprising since he essentially died Monday). For many years he’s been using a single finger movement to click the switch on his communicator. Tonight he was too weak even for that and was forced to rely on a single eye twitch to flick the switch. One hopes that he will bounce back from this current low point, but at his age now (63) it’s hard to know how much more his frail body can take. I find it utterly amazing that he can continue to push himself around the world on a lecture tour.
Ok, some technology discussion. Intel has made a special computer just for Hawking that is activated using a custom input device that can be activated by a single muscular reflex (e.g., finger, eye twitch). For years it’s been running a Pentium II with Windows 98, primarily because the DOS-based text to speech software that Stephen prefers was never updated to run on anything else. Well, those guys at Intel must be big fans because not only did they make him a custom CPU for his computer, they also paid the software company to re-write his favorite app to run it on Windows XP.
What an amazing man. He may have been 1500 miles away tonight, but for that hour I was in the company of greatness.