The theory of everything pragmatic: Stephen Hawking and the unconstrained mind

In “Professor Dowell’s Head,” a 1925 science fiction novel by Alexander Belyayev that was a must read when I was a kid, a dying scientist bequeaths his body to a colleague who then revives just the heart and the head. “A Brief History of Time,” his popular work on cosmology, sold 10 million copies but has been described as “the most popular book never read.” Most of those who helped crash the website on which Hawking’s 1966 PhD thesis, “Properties of Expanding Universes,” was published last year probably couldn’t get through the manuscript. Hawking arguably did more for the ascendance of nerd culture than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs put together: They were visionary and at times eccentric, but Hawking has been more than that: Disembodied, a living challenge to the laws of nature he wanted to bring into a single “theory of everything.” That’s why Silicon Valley CEOs grieve his death. “Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.” Had Hawking not lived this advice with what looked like supernatural ease, many of his quotes would read like the inspirational garbage one often finds on the social networks. Hawking wasn’t exactly a cyborg: Though he lived extraordinarily long for someone with his condition, he didn’t live long enough to get artificial “spare parts” or have his brain transfered to a computer so it could live on in a robot body.