Stephen Hawking speaks

There has been a lot of media attention arising from a seminar in Cambridge to mark, six months late, Stephen Hawking's 75th birthday. You would think that time-obsessed cosmologists would have had better timekeeping. However the political opportunity seems to have been very timely.

Hawking has become the poster boy for the catastrophic doom merchants. He tells us that the human race faces extinction if it doesn't make good on the Paris Climate Change agreement. He is shocked by Brexit. He is outraged by that enemy of mankind, President Donald Trump, and wonders how he can even exist.

We wonder, in turn, how Hawking can even exist. He was diagnosed with ALS, motor neurone disease when he was 21, in 1963, and given two years to live. Still plugging along 22 years later in 1985 – thus already a medical wonder – he contracted pneumonia. It was at this time his voice was lost. His condition was so bad that doctors considered turning off his life support. Now that those two years of life expectancy have turned into 54 years and counting we really have to wonder how Hawking has managed to survive the depradations of ALS for so long. He has survived many decades beyond anyone else – a medical miracle for our times.

There are one or two dark places in the internet inhabited by people who think that Hawking actually died in 1985 and has since been represented by a body double(!) and/or a dummy. His fingers seem to have uncurled themselves over the years, his face and hair have gone through unusual changes and his teeth have developed according to laws as yet unknown to dentistry. Since no one has heard his voice since 1985 and all his language outputs come courtesy of a machine, would anyone really be able to tell whether the crumpled figure in the wheelchair with the strange voice coming out of a loudspeaker was a dummy voiced by the red-green blob or a medical miracle? 'Stephen! If you are in there give us a wave.'

It doesn't matter. Whether the profound thoughts of the great physicist coming out of the loudspeaker are coming from a person, a mummy or a dummy, they are still idiotic. He's a dummy, in fact, whether living or dead.

Update 10.07.2017

The physicist Luboš Motl on his blog The Reference Frame is stunned that reputable scientists do not condemn the nonsense coming out of Hawking's communication devices:

Five days ago, Stephen Hawking – or someone who has hacked his computerized speech generator – has told us that Donald Trump is a supervillain who will transform the Earth to another Venus with temperatures at 250°C and sulfuric acid rains.

Wow. Now, every intelligent 10-year-old kid must know why this possibility is non-existent, why the statement is nonsense. Some scientists including Roy Spencer have pointed out how absurd these Hawking's statements were from a scientific viewpoint.

But lots of the scientists who have paid lip service to the lies about the so-called global warming or climate change in the past have remained silent and confirmed that their scientific dishonesty has no limits. I despise all the climate alarmists who know that statements like that are absurd but who hide this fact because a lie like that could be helpful for their profits or political causes. You know, what these jerks and the people who tolerate these jerks' existence haven't quite appreciated is that it is only lies that may be helpful for them.