Man, Stephen Hawking is a giant mind to lose. Of the people kicking at the edges of the darkness, his mind felt like something special. Not because of his disability, but because he outlived expectations years ago. He felt like the purpose of knowledge kept him alive against the odds. (I’m sure that it was precisely because his mind was so important every advancement was used to help him communicate and survive for the sake of science.)

It’s easy to fetishize Hawking as overcoming great adversity, but that’s to rob him of the work and his ideas. Black Holes still feel like frontier of science. As someone who is a fan of science but not a professional of any sort, he was still a towering figure. Einstein was well before my time, and I was a little young for Sagan. Before Neil Degrasse Tyson became America’s science teacher, Hawking was there. In cameos on Star Trek and Futurama, he was a figure of pop culture as well as science.

I mean how many scientists get their own Nerdcore tribute act?