in Utah

News today is that British scientist Stephen Hawking is very ill and is in the hospital. No word yet on how serious his condition is but we are hoping for the best for this man, who has accomplished so much despite so many obstacles posed by his motor neurone disease.

Some years ago Mark and I and our brother-in-law Tony had the chance to meet Dr. Hawking in Salt Lake City. He was there as part of a promotion for a film being made about his life and work, and some of the production team members invited us to come over for a special reception with Dr. Hawking and then hear him give a talk at the University of Utah arena.  It was probably one of the coolest and yet strangest experiences of our lives.

There are three things I’ve never forgotten about the visit.  The first was when we met him at the reception. He wheeled in and we all stared at each other in silent appreciation. Then, he activated his voice synthesizer and we all greeted each other.  I think most of us didn’t really know what to ask or say, but we all muddled through.  There was one moment when I felt we were all in some sort of surreal, subdued “exhibit” atmosphere, and I’ve often wondered who was more of an exhibit — us or Dr. Hawking.

The second moment was when Dr. Hawking gave his talk to a standing ovation crowd at the arena.  First they played his scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Descent.”  That brought the house down. Then, as that faded out, Dr. Hawking wheeled up onto the stage like a rock star.  The crowd went wild and from that moment on, he had them in the palm of his voice synthesizer. One of the people we were sitting with leaned over and said in wonderment, “It’s amazing to see this many people get together to hear a lecture on cosmology and astrophysics from a guy who can’t talk.”  It was amazing. And extremely gratifying.

The third moment came the next day when a small group of us accompanied Dr. Hawking out to Evans & Sutherland so that he could tour their flight simulators and planetarium installations.  The high point of that day was when they loaded him into a flight simulator, showed him how to fly it, and let him loose.  In one simulation he practiced shooting moving targets and when he hit one, he grinned like a kid in a candy shop and tapped out on his voice synthesizer, “I deaded it.”  (I’m guessing he didn’t have the word “killed” in the memory banks.)

I’ve had a lot of time to think about those three days in Salt Lake City and it has taken me a while to write about it. I had a request for a story about it at the time, and I couldn’t do it — it would have felt exploitative of a man who had no defenses against such stories.  Or maybe I didn’t feel I could do it justice. Maybe I still haven’t, but it feels like the right time to talk about it. In a strange sense, putting Stephen Hawking in a flight simulator is a completely natural thing to do, and I often have wondered if he would be the philosophical prototype of a research project where a perfectly functioning human brain is transplanted into the cyborg world of a simulator.  Clearly he will not be doing that completely — but watching him play and learn in that simulator, and watching him in subsequent experiences on a zero-gravity simulation flight, showed me that such human-machine mergings are in our future. And, more importantly, the human who does it won’t lose his or her humanity. Far from it. Stephen Hawking is a man tethered to a machine, and yet, he was having fun and that was what counted!  I hope he will be with us a while longer and continue having fun as he lives on.