The New Yorker:
If ever a human being seemed capable of living forever, that human was Stephen Hawking. In 1963, when Hawking was twenty-one, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the degenerative neurological disorder, and given three years to live; he died this past Wednesday, at the age of seventy-six. For five decades, he used an electric wheelchair and, as the years progressed, had an ever-shrinking range of motion. Toward the end, only the twitch of a cheek muscle, processed through a computer interface with a digital voice, provided an outlet for the churning, often playful mind inside. To the eye alone, he was a rumpled suit on wheels, fathoming the unfathomable.
“Hawking has become a kind of a ‘brain in a vat,’ ” the anthropologist Hélène Mialet wrote, in 2013, on Hawking’s seventy-first birthday. “In some ways Hawking is, to borrow from Obi-Wan referring to Darth Vader, ‘more machine now than man.’ ” Hawking embraced this perception. In an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” one of his dozens of pop-culture cameos, he was a hologram playing cards with Einstein and Newton. On “The Simpsons”—which Hawking appeared in several times and called “the best show on American television”—Homer refers to Hawking’s character as Lisa’s “robot buddy.” On “Futurama,” Hawking was an everlasting head in a jar, a role he reprised, last year, with heads-in-jars Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and George Takei in the video trailer for the “Futurama” smartphone game. He was not a fully disembodied voice, but he was moving steadily in that direction.
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