Stephen Hawking — "I felt ill the other day, but all they had to do was to turn me off, and then ba…"
I felt ill the other day, but all they had to do was to turn me off, and then back on again.
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More from Stephen Hawking
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About Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)
British theoretical physicist whose Hawking radiation work and A Brief History of Time (1988) brought black-hole physics to a mass audience while he lived with ALS for 55 years. Closely associated with Roger Penrose (his collaborator on singularity theorems) and Carl Sagan (fellow popularizer who wrote Brief History's foreword). For an intellectual contrast, see William Lane Craig, American philosopher of religion — Craig's Kalam cosmological argument depends on the Big Bang requiring a divine first cause; Hawking's no-boundary proposal was specifically designed to remove the moment that would require one — the cleanest cosmology-vs-natural-theology contrast in modern thought.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
When feeling unwell, the speaker jokes that their body, like a computer or electronic device, just needed a simple reboot to fix the problem. It's a dry, self-deprecating quip that reduces human illness to a technical glitch — as if the body runs on software that occasionally needs resetting rather than any complex medical intervention.
Relevance to Stephen Hawking
Hawking communicated entirely through a computer system after ALS robbed him of speech. His voice synthesizer, wheelchair motors, and life-support interfaces were literal technology keeping him alive and functional. This joke collapses the boundary between his biological self and the machines sustaining him — a boundary Hawking lived with more intimately than almost any human in history.
The era
Hawking made this remark during the rise of consumer computing and the 'have you tried turning it off and on again' culture of the 1990s-2000s IT era. As personal computers became ubiquitous and tech support became a cultural punchline, Hawking cleverly appropriated that universal modern frustration and applied it with remarkable dark wit to his own medically dependent existence.
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