SOURCE: "Dignifying Humanity," in Humanist, Vol. 49, No. 4, July-August 1989, pp. 29-30, 50.

In the following essay, Organ considers the humor in Hawking's writing.

Stephen Hawking dignifies our humanity. He was born in 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo—as he likes to note. When he was diagnosed as having the illness commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, he dropped his graduate studies to consider what to do. Insights into life and its possibilities came with meeting and marrying Jane and in begetting three children—Robert, Lucy, and Timmy. For the past twenty years, he has been confined to his wheelchair. He has little control over his muscles, and he can no longer speak. Yet, he writes, "Apart from being unlucky enough to get ALS, or motor neuron disease, I have been fortunate in almost every other respect." He is the Lucasian Professor of Medicine at Cambridge University...