Stephen Hawking Is Still Underrated

I have a confession to make. For a long time—years, really—I thought Stephen Hawking was overrated.

He was just so famous, an icon, and I found it hard to imagine that his contributions to physics were really proportional to his fame. There’s just something about a guy who speaks in a computer voice that automatically makes him sound like a genius. Like someone who knows things no mortal human could ever know.

Not that I was immune to his celebrity. I was fortunate to have met Hawking on a few occasions, at physics conferences I was attending as a journalist. Once, during a lecture, I found myself sitting directly behind him. I tried my best to pay attention to the speaker, but I was mesmerized by the words flashing across the computer screen mounted to the arm of Hawking’s wheelchair. Paralyzed by a motor neuron disease, Hawking had one last functioning muscle in his cheek, and by twitching it he could control the cursor on his monitor. The cursor constantly scrolled though a catalog of his most commonly