There`ve been a flood of pieces in the media this week about Stephen Hawking. Professor Hawking was seventy on Sunday, and most of the papers and mainstream TV channels have acknowledged the landmark by running profiles about him and commissioning tributes from colleagues, students and fellow celebrities.
The pieces, broadly speaking, seem to have two inter-related themes. The first is that he`s made it to seventy at all, given that he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease when he was twenty one. (This is a story of guts, determination and medical advances). The second is that Professor Hawking is mind-bogglingly smart, and has put that smartness to good use in the intervening forty nine years by helping us to understand a lot more about the (equally mind-boggling) complexities of the (very big, very old and apparently very unstable) universe. (So this is equally a story of mind-boggling cleverness).
Until he was diagnosed, Hawking was, by all accounts, a `bright but lazy` student. After it, he put his head down and went on to make groundbreaking discoveries about the origins of the universe, quantum theory and black holes. He even postulated at one point that the laws of Space-Time might allow for the possibility of time travel.
All the while, of course, it`s true that, day by day, he was being kept alive. Without medical advances and excellent care, none of that remarkable work would have been possible.
As a result of the alignment of these two things, (the medical bit and the mind-boggling bit), Professor Hawking is now famous for other things too – the Dalek voice; the image of him floating weightless in the Vomit Comet, the plane which dives from high altitude to simulate space`s absence of gravity; the ten million copies sold of his A Brief History of Time; his making physics sexy long before the advent of Manchester`s D-Reamy Brian Cox. Most crucially of all, of course, Stephen Hawking is famous for his appearances in episodes of The Simpsons.
Homer memorably refers to the professor as `The Wheelchair Guy`, and Hawking saves himself from certain death in one episode, having being shoved off a ledge, by having his wheelchair grow helicopter wings. Which is what can happen when you`re The World`s Most Famous Living Scientist.
But there`s one other remarkable element the Stephen Hawking story. His science is, of course, (mind bogglingly) remarkable, as is his physical determination and the role he`s played in popularising scientific thought. The point is this – that these things have been accomplished by a man in a wheelchair who, with each passing year, has had less and less control of his physical body.
This is, quite rightly, a story of science and celebrity, and of triumph over adversity, but it is also about one other thing – something familiar to anybody who`s been involved in the world of welfare to work, or who is active in issues of disability and employment. It`s about how all those potential obstacles which may have stopped him from doing what he does well were manoeuvred around, managed or minimised, leaving him free to achieve his potential, and to become …. Stephen Hawking.
This is, in fact, a story of reasonable adjustment.
Written by Paul Wilson, Pluss Business Writer
