How Hawking became the "sage" of science

— -- So who says nobody cares about science? One 67-year-old theoretical physicist visits the hospital last week and the world goes nuts.

"Been quite busy here," says Gregory Hayman, a spokesman for the University of Cambridge, where Stephen Hawking has since 1979 held the mathematics post once occupied by Isaac Newton.

Hawking's illness — he remains in Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, England — made news worldwide. "Our impression is that he is still recovering, and there certainly has been a lot of attention," Hayman said Friday.

Why so much attention to a theoretical physicist, one whose best-known book, A Brief History of Time, was published in 1988? Hawking has never won a Nobel Prize, did much of his work on the Big Bang three decades ago with another physicist, Roger Penrose, and planned to step down from his post this year.

Of course, he also has appeared in cartoon form on The Simpsons, in person on Star Trek, and on the pages of British tabloids. All this fame, for a man afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), bound to a wheelchair and reliant on a computer synthesizer to speak since a 1985 tracheotomy to treat severe pneumonia. His 2007 zero-gravity ride on a NASA airplane made headlines, as did his call for colonizing space afterwards.

"I think there needs to be such people in science, for the public," says science communications expert Felicity Mellor of the United Kingdom's Imperial College London. "His (1988) book came at a time when he was still very active in science, despite being disabled, enjoying a very vigorous intellectual life. And his public profile appealed very much to people interested in the human side of his situation."

"He really is the closest thing we have in physics to a sage," says physicist Phillip Schewe, chief science writer at the American Institute of Physics, who once accompanied Hawking to hear two hours of sessions at a physics meeting a decade ago. "He is a scientist, he wanted to attend the sessions to hear what people were working on. But at the same time, when he gave his talk, you could see people paying rapt attention to him."