IS he dancing in heaven, explaining the universe to God, bobbing about in black holes or just not existing in any way, shape or form? Unless he has access to an ouija board, wherever he is or isn’t, we will never know the ultimate destination of Professor Stephen Hawking, who died on Wednesday.
But he will live on in memories, theories and inspiration. His theories, expounded in popular works such as A Brief History of Time, are well known to you all and I only have time to go into them here briefly.
Essentially, he found himself in a black hole and kept digging. Building on previous work by Albert Einstein – aye, him – and Robert Oppenheimer, Prof Hawking reversed the role of black hole from something that sucked everything in until it became an infinitesimally small “singularity” to something that also took something infinitesimally small and blew it out with – wait for it – a Big Bang that created life, the universe and whatnot.
If you disagree with this assessment, I will pass on your complaints to the authors of the text which I have just bowdlerised for the purposes of this homily or lecture. The point is he revolutionised scientific thinking, and did so with a mind that roamed the outer reaches of the universe from the ultimate confinement of a wheelchair in a body that wasn’t going anywhere.
And it is this, his inspiring example, that made as much of an impression on the public as his wonderful scientific work. Struck down with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, he at first became depressed, which is good to know, as it means he was not superhuman but one of us, with normal reactions to life, its cruelties and its beauties.
Perhaps his greatest achievement was then to put everything into perspective (and unsurprisingly to later develop a Theory of Everything), to accept what had happened, deal with it, focus on what he could still do, instead of lamenting over what he couldn’t, and refuse to allow his spirit to be crushed. Indeed, he advised anyone struck by physical misfortune not to let disability of the body become disability of the mind.
So, superhero? No. Hero? Yes. To the disabled? Yes, but to all of us. Here was someone who, inspired by his Glaswegian mother, stared in wonder at the stars as a child, yet did not learn to read until he was eight. His handwriting was always terrible. He liked a glass of wine and a curry. He had a Homer Simpson clock on his wall.
He was one of us. He didn’t fear death, though he didn’t believe in God or an afterlife, which is where perhaps he parts ways with some. My own research, for example, suggests that there is a God, but that he is flippant and dangerously unpredictable (picture him as a giant, cosmic Vladimir Putin if you will).
I can also reveal, after giving it limited thought, that there is an afterlife, but the beer is rubbish and, while you’ll find ambrosia by the bucketload, you’ll struggle to find anywhere that serves decent chips.
These are just my hunches. The Hawkster thought things through more logically. Although he talked about knowing “the mind of God”, he explained that he didn’t mean a creator in the traditional sense but figuratively as an impersonal process of physics.
The afterlife, he added, was “a fairy story for people afraid of the dark”. In the meantime, he made light of life and the most of his wheelchair, even taking to the dancefloor in it, though he did complain that it always gave away his attempts at disguise.
He appeared on The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory, didn’t mind jokes at his own expense nor playing pranks on others, such as the hapless BBC producer who pulled out a plug on some nearby equipment, prompting the prof to slump forward pretending it was he who had been unplugged.
He declared the biggest mystery in the universe to be women, and was described by actor Eddie Redmayne (who played him in biopic The Theory of Everything) as “the funniest man I have ever had the pleasure to meet”.
He got involved in politics, most recently protesting against NHS privatisation in England. So he cared about the way things were going. And where did he think we should go? Ooter space, that’s where – if the robots spare us. We had, he said, to reach out to the stars, otherwise humanity wouldn’t survive.
And who are we, this stupid, brilliant, infuriating species? “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special.” Very special: Stephen Hawking. Very special: all of us.
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