A Tiny but Non-Zero Intersection
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Iremember reading his remarkable first popular book in my late teens, the first bestseller which also smashed the rule of “each equation will halve your readership population.” I love my sci-fi, especially the “hard” kind which has lots of science in it, but also the non-fiction science writing which describes our real world. Both can be mind-expanding drugs for me, especially when well written.
My wife and I overlapped in our great appreciation of the film made of his much longer-than-expected life, which won its star the Oscar for Best Actor a few years ago. We don’t always like the same movies or TV, indeed our natural tastes can diverge quite widely, but I do seek out items which might appeal to both of us. This was definitely one of those films.
Further reading necessarily de-mythologized the man for me as I came to realize that, like all of us, he had his failings and flaws.
Though his illness was huge, it didn’t cut him down in his prime. Indeed, it allowed the part of him not affected (his mind) to soar for decades and break all records for surviving the condition.
It must be obvious of whom I am writing by now, no? Especially given that he has just died at age 76. A respectable span for anyone, a miracle for one so cruelly smitten: he refused to let it put him down. The world profited thereby.
Checking out his website more than a decade ago, I noticed that a number of his speeches, transcribed from a rather hard-to-understand artificial voice which had replaced his own lost one many years ago, were full of mistakes. Not, I hasten to point out, mathematical or scientific ones, for I am not to any tiny degree capable of seeing or correcting these. No, it was the simple language, the English, which was suffering in these online text versions.
Being that I have been a proof-reader for a long time, I offered to undertake this job with the online speeches. To my delight, I was given permission to proceed; did so, and sent in my corrections. This was using a Hotmail email account which I do not have anymore. Even my edited versions might well be lost as I have been through a number of computers since then, including a lost hard drive or two. So, I may not be able to prove what I’m claiming now.
The website itself allows for errors in the language of the transcribed speeches found on it, reflecting the nature of the computer speech in which they were given. Fair enough- to be honest, I can’t even remember which speeches I worked on.
If I were to draw a Venn diagram, though, showing any relationship between myself and the late, celebrated Stephen Hawking, I would have two circles overlapping by a small amount. Not just touching, but overlapping. The common area would be the speeches I edited, which were received. I don’t even know if someone else near him wrote to answer my original query on his behalf. It doesn’t matter. It’s not about me; it’s about this great man and thinker, who did have a huge impact on my mind as I sought answers for some of my astronomical and cosmological questions in the 1980s. That’s a fact, one for which I will always be grateful.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1800 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
By Tony Hanmer