I saw Stephen Hawking once about fifteen years ago when I paid to go see him at the local university’s sports stadium (same place I saw the Dalai Llama, NCAA basketball and the Harlem Globetrotters). Given the cost of tickets, I opted for nose bleed seats. Hawking is the only physicist I know of that could fill a university basketball arena. He wheeled out on to the stage and his mechanical voice was broadcast over the basketball PA system as information about all the weirdness of modern physics filled the arena. There wasn’t much to his stage presence. Not to be crass about his disability, but it was a little bit like those old science fiction movies with the talking brains -- a disembodied voice, wildly intelligent with scientific theories that one hundred years ago only a mad man could spout. Even the title of his book suggests the mad scientist connotation: The Universe in a Nutshell.
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