The man behind Stephen Hawking’s voice

Stephen Hawking would be silent without Sam Blackburn, said Catherine de Lange in New Scientist. Since 2006, Blackburn has worked as the physicist’s personal technician and maintained the technology that allows Hawking to communicate with the world. However, that technology—an infrared sensor that’s attached to his glasses and translates movement in his right cheek into words spoken by a voice synthesizer—can no longer keep pace with Hawking’s worsening motor neuron disease. “[The] disease causes a progressive decay of the nerves, and now his facial muscles are the only ones he can control reasonably well,” says Blackburn. “Those are now fading too, unfortunately.” The result is that the system has slowed to about one word per minute.

Blackburn has tried encouraging Hawking to upgrade his gear, and to switch to a system that monitors brainwaves or eye movement. But the 70-year-old cosmologist has proved remarkably resistant to change. “I find it exciting, [but] Stephen has a stubborn attitude toward this sort of thing. He feels he has to prove he can still use his existing system,” says Blackburn. “The result is that when there is a communications expert in the room—someone trying to show him new technology—his speed using the existing system suddenly increases.”

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