Stephen Hawking — "So my friend tried to call me the other week... but all he was getting was an au…"
So my friend tried to call me the other week... but all he was getting was an automated answer.
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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
This is a self-deprecating joke built on a double meaning. Hawking's friend called and kept hearing what sounded like an automated phone system — but it was actually Hawking himself responding through his computerized speech synthesizer. The humor turns on the irony that his assistive communication device, a robotic text-to-speech voice, was indistinguishable from the impersonal automated answering systems that had become a fixture of everyday life.
Relevance to Stephen Hawking
Hawking developed ALS in his early twenties, progressively losing motor function and eventually his natural voice after a 1985 tracheotomy. He communicated using a speech synthesizer — a flat, robotic American-accented voice that became one of the most recognizable sounds in science. Despite severe physical disability, Hawking was celebrated for sharp wit and self-deprecating humor, regularly joking about his condition in interviews, television appearances, and public lectures.
The era
By the 1980s and 1990s, automated phone answering systems — IVR technology — had become a defining irritant of modern life, greeting callers with robotic voices before routing them through endless menus. Hawking received his first speech synthesizer in 1986, built on that same era's text-to-speech technology. The joke draws a pointed parallel between soulless corporate phone systems and the machine voice that became his sole means of human communication.
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