Hawking's passing wasn't exactly unexpected, considering his nearly lifelong illness; what was unexpected was the fact that he survived ALS for over 50 years while becoming one of the most important scientists of that same half-century. His death is a gigantic loss to the science world, of course, but a couple of essays published by Gregory Benford in 2005 and 2012 (and reproduced on File 770 here and here) show a more personal side of Hawking. From the former:
A week after my evening at Cambridge, I got from Stephen’s secretary a transcript of all his remarks. I have used it here to reproduce his style of conversation. Printed out on his wheelchair computer, his sole link with us, the lines seem to come from a great distance. Across an abyss.
Portraying the flinty faces of science—daunting complexity twinned with numbing wonder—demands both craft and art. Some of us paint with fiction. Stephen paints with his impressionistic views of vast, cool mathematical landscapes. To knit together our fraying times, to span the cultural abyss, demands all these approaches—and more, if we can but invent them.
Stephen has faced daunting physical constrictions with a renewed attack on the large issues, on great sweeps of space and time. Daily he struggles without much fuss against the narrowing that is perhaps the worst element of infirmity. I recalled him rapt with Marilyn [Monroe], still deeply engaged with life, holding firmly against tides of entropy.
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