All in the mind | 21 January 2016

You don’t expect to be brought close to tears by the Reith Lectures, which are after all at the most extreme end of Radio 4’s commitment to ‘educating’ its audience. Yet when Stephen Hawking delivered this year’s talks at the Royal Institution in London (in front of a lucky audience of listeners and scientists) there was both much laughter and a heightened sense of emotion.

This was not because of his plight — the eminent professor of theoretical physics has suffered from a rare form of motor neurone disease since the age of 21 and the only discernible movement in his body is in his eyes, and the twitching of his facial muscles. Nor his cheeky sense of humour, or his grace and dignity, although these are remarkable enough. It’s not even the way he has continued to work, undaunted by the obstacles presented by his illness, dependent now on those facial twitches as the only way he can make himself understood. No, what really impresses beyond words is the way he has used his most unusual intellectual capacity not just to pursue his ideas about the cosmos but to find new ways of living day-by-day, and thereby to show others suffering also from neuro-degenerative disorders what is still possible when so much else is lost. He challenges us all to recognise what we could and might be.

Even though what we heard was not Hawking but the sound of a totally synthetic voice, manufactured by technology from the slightest of movements, his character shone through everything he said. His thoughts could only be made plain to us through painstaking work by him, word for word, at a rate of about one word per minute, combined with state-of-the-art artifice. And yet we did feel as if a real connection had been made, that he was speaking directly to us.