Stephen Hawking is gone, but others like him will be born

From natural science and a certain philosophical school, we know that nature is one vast benevolent self-contradiction.

Thus, in our world, bodies exist without minds. In science fiction, I have come across even minds without bodies. Even in reality, the vast majority of bodies have no minds.

Stephen Hawking, the historic English scientist, was the only human being I am aware of who came close to personifying the opposite of it – namely, a mind without a body.

In him, the sharpest mind I have ever known was housed in a body that never functioned properly in certain essential ways of life as we know it.

There, the general statement that one can make is that, at least on our planet, Nature dabbles in such apparent self-contradictions everywhere we turn.

ABILITY

But why worry? That is exactly what makes Nature the master balancer.

If it habitually denies you certain abilities, it, at the same time, often equips you with certain others. Both reality and science fiction affirm it again and again.

Perhaps, however, no human individual has ever personified that self-contradiction as phenomenally and as painfully as has Stephen Hawking, the great English physicist who died last week after a history-making mental life housed in a physical body so diseased that the body often threatened to collapse at any minute of his extraordinarily tortured physical existence.

The greatness of Stephen Hawking consisted not merely in that he was able, mentally, to penetrate every nook and cranny of our universe in its overwhelming vastness and complexity but also in that he could narrate his mental adventures in a language that you can easily swallow and digest with only a smattering of English even if you have never entered any university science classroom.

GIFT
Before I read A Brief History of Time, Hawking’s chef d’oeuvre, I had only the smattering of elementary physics that I had picked up from my classroom at Alliance High School.

I was unaware that nature could be so easily cut into such small pieces as even a scientific layman like myself can chew and swallow with little effort but with unusual enjoyment.

No, I do not purport to know for what purpose nature chooses to invest such extraordinary mental power in a body so hopelessly impaired by disease.

But Stephen Hawking’s historic intervention in human life consists in his reminder to us all that a special mind – and a special hand as its cutting tool – are what humanity possesses over and above whatever may be special in any other species.

KNOWLEDGE
Above all, Stephen Hawking was a communicator, an ability lacking in many of the most brilliant scientists.

Hawking’s was a communication ability which people do not usually associate with scientific minds and physically impaired bodies.

That, I find, is why you can fully enjoy A Brief History of Time – Hawking’s history-making book – even if you have never stepped onto a university campus.

Enough knowledge of the English language and of high school physics should usually put you in good stead to appreciate the level at which science and technological expertise now stand the whole world over.

To be quite sure, Hawking’s extraordinary physical impairment badly affected his oral ability.

COMMUNICATION
But, like some of his precursors in physics – especially Isaac Newton, the equally great scientific compatriot – Hawking explains reality in all its overwhelmingly splendid vastness in a language that every Tom, Dick and Harriet can swallow with relish if he or she possesses a certain level of knowledge both of physics and of English.

Moreover – as Hawking’s compatriot William Shakespeare has put it – “some must go off” in order to leave room for others to be born.

That, exactly, is how I know that other even sharper-minded Darwins, Newtons and Hawkings will be born, not just in England but even in Kenya and anywhere else in the human world.