But, Silicon Valley is full of talking heads - entrepreneurs who would be engineers, engineers who would be physicists, and physicists who would be philosophers - all making a living from their mental, not physical, morphs. These guys are, in essence, all talking heads and on many levels are one-in-the-same with Dr. Hawking. But in a singular fundamental, they are not one-in-the-same, because for most of them, the talking-head thing ceases at the end of the day. They can brush their teeth and put on their own jammies without help.

So, in comes a man who plays all of these roles and plays them well. An entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, an engineer’s engineer, a physicists’ physicist - writing best-selling books on the cosmology of the universe, testing in real-world/real-time the latest in voice synthesis and word recognition software, succeeding in putting aside most of the annoying and banal aspects of human life, the stuff that wastes so much of one’s creative time and energy, to contemplate black holes and other quantum secrets.

Here's a man, a vibrant and fascinating man, who's seemingly at peace with himself. Has he stopped wishing to own what most of the other talking heads appear to own - a functional, physical morph? This is the question that hovers over those lucky enough to be in his presence.

Dr. Hawking has a barely perceptible ability to move the fingers of one hand. He holds a modified mouse in the palm of that hand and uses it to maneuver a cursor across a computer screen cantilevered to the front of his wheelchair. First he clicks on a letter of the alphabet. When that portion of his dictionary appears on the screen, he clicks through to an exact word.

He watches the list intensely as it scrolls through a lengthy string of vocabulary options, slowly choosing words and building a sentence to completion. This may be fascinating to the casual observer, but don’t kid yourself. It's a tortuous and time-consuming process, the results of which is a single sentence that takes upwards of several minutes to compose and vocalize through the voice synthesizer. When Hawking is responding to a question, often by the time he has constructed an answer, the conversation has long since moved onto some other topic, his answer oddly out of synch with the flow and exchange of ideas.

When he gives a speech like the one at the Flint Center, Hawking's talk is written and readied prior to his appearance. It's played back for the audience as his sits immobile in front of them up on the stage. After his speech, he takes questions, but the process of answering those questions can take a long, long time.

The audience waits, chatting quietly among themselves as Hawking painstakingly composes each answer. Hawking's crew up on stage indicates to the audience when he's ready to respond, and the chatting stops as everyone leans forward to hear the synthesized voice yield up the answer. When it's all over, everyone stands up and gives him a rousing ovation.

I'm sure it's the same in every appearance. Pure adoration from his many, many fans. Nonetheless, I did overhear one inanity as we were leaving the theater after Hawking's presentation ... "And he has such a tremendous sense of humor!"

Oh, please! Why wouldn’t a man who has become increasingly inert over the course of the past 20 years have a sense of humor? The rest of us do - mortals who can switch between the banalities of grocery shopping and changing diapers, and the lofty constructs of applied physics and the implications of artificial intelligence. Why shouldn't Dr. Hawking?

Meanwhile, help is on the way. As a matter of fact, it’s already here. Hawking has been liberated by the Internet, set free by the handiwork of the very technologists who sit in adoration at his feet. Suddenly, the world is at Hawking’s fingertips as he joins in with the overwhelming legions of Internet surfers and Web wonks who spend most of their waking hours out in a global community of interconnectivity. In a time when reality has gone quite suddenly virtual, Hawking does not have to come to the world - the world has come to him.

As the entire human race is moving to a virtual state of affairs with the help of wireless communications, enormous on-chip device integrations, computational speeds, and memories, Hawking’s circumstances and the state of technology in the second half of his lifetime have reached a fortuitous confluence. This is one lucky guy!

Hawking is not the only vibrant and vital human being who, in the process of losing one essential element of their humanness, has taken on an even larger, more luminous presence in our midst. The indefatigable Christopher Reeve joins Stephen Hawking in the annals of extraordinary public figures who pose a most profound and fundamental query.

What constitutes human existence and how alone are we really in that existence? If we lose our morphs, do we lose ourselves? If we lose our souls, does our morph really matter anyway? Do Reeve and Hawking really need to have active, vigorous bodies to live full lives? For those of us who have the former, have we realized the promise of the later?

It’s Valentine’s Day and with unabashed sentimentality, this is one talking head that would like to speak from the heart and pay my profoundest respects to the extraordinary Stephen Hawking, Christopher Reeve, and all others constrained by cruel predicament. If the talking heads among us pursue liberating technologies that enhance and enrich these lives, we will all move, irrespective of morph, closer to living up to our fullest and most fulfilling potential.

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October 13, 2004

Copy Editor: Scott Sandler

Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com

Copyright (c) 2004, Peggy Aycinena. All rights reserved.