Feet of clay …

… The mind of God? The problem with deifying Stephen Hawking - Prospect Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Veteran science writer Charles Seife’s warts-and-all biography doesn’t hold back from exploring Hawking’s less appealing sides. This is long overdue—not so much because Hawking needs cutting down to size, but because he needs to be rehumanised. There was inevitable public fascination with the great man trapped in the wheelchair—increasingly paralysed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or motor neurone disease) since early adulthood—even as his mind soared across time and space. The physicist’s remarkable tenacity, as well as his unquestioned scientific eminence, were part of the draw. But Hawking was revered as an almost superhuman intelligence. Amid that mythmaking are some disturbing messages for our attitudes both to science and to disability, as Hawking was stripped of his personhood and turned into an icon.