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Comment by eykanal | Hacker News Reader

I don't know a thing about black holes, but every time I see him I'm impressed that someone with such severe disabilities is still able to accomplish so much.

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In 'A Brief History of Time' he briefly discusses the intellectual advantages of his physical disabilities.

Not that I want to take anything away from his impressive achievements, but it would only be fair to point out that he doesn't work solo on these theories. Much of the maths is done by his team.

I can't even imagine how frustrating his condition must be for him though. To have full mental capabilities but have so little (and slow!!) means of communicating his ideas.

Beyond being slow at communicating his idea, he is also largely limited to his working memory. I can't imagine doing any sort of serious intellectual work without the assistance of paper (or similar technology) to augment my working memory.

I imagine that would be an effective way to vastly improve his working memory, like strength-training for his brain. Maybe Aristotle or whoever it was that complained about books ruining youth's brains would find Stephen Hawking's memory up to snuff.

In fairness that is something you can get better at with practice.

In IT we tend to train our brains to commit processes (eg ways to research information) rather than facts. But we also have the luxury of being able to be lazy (internet, functioning limbs so can write notes, etc). Heck, before IDEs and the internet I used to remember every function name and order of parameters for any particular programming languages I was proficient in. These days I just learn the function name and let the IDE remind me of the rest (sometimes I don't even learn the function name and just search for it in the package namespace).

And in our defense, I think this is the only sane way to go about programming given that all the APIs and tools we use are just unfathomably deep layers of human constructs. There's no real point in remembering so much detritus. It naturally benefits from a completely different mindset to the problem of studying the deepest mysteries of the universe.

> disabilities

He's not at all disabled for what he does, which is think, and he does that better than (I'm guessing here) any of us.

You try thinking productively with only a low bandwidth mechanism to bounce ideas off of other thinkers.

Also no ability to use paper and pencil, and still only a low bandwidth mechanism to store and retrieve notes to increase your effective memory.

All excellent points that I agree with. Absolutely a disability from standard human terms, did not mean to argue that. I only meant his brain is still incredibly sharp, and from that aspect he's at no disadvantage.

yup, that was the only thing I could think about while reading this article

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