Like Stephen Hawking, I have been living with motor neurone disease (MND). Like him, I'm one of the lucky few not to have died within months of diagnosis. I'm nine years younger than him and have had the symptoms of the disease for only 10 years, compared with his 49. However for those 10 years I've "lived with the prospect of an early death" also. Unlike Professor Hawking I am not a superstar scientist. I'm simply a small-time writer, who used to be a teacher and a vicar.
It seems to me that, while some things Stephen Hawking says in the interview as it's reported are unarguably true, some are also admitted hypothesis, and some are merely tendentious. One of the features of MND both for him as for me is that it affects your ability to speak and hence pares down what you say to the bare bones. (That's not of course the case when you have time to type a script.) Hence sometimes you are frustrated by your inability to nuance your ideas. And so it may be that his very categorical answers are the nub of his opinion, but not the full expression.
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