Platon

Professor Stephen Hawking.

Now, he was very ill when I took this picture.

In fact, his whole body had essentially shut down.

There was only one muscle he could still work, and that was underneath his eye.

His team of scientists placed a sensor at the base of his glasses, and that sensor picks up movement of that muscle, and with that muscle, he moves a cursor over each letter of the alphabet on his laptop screen.

He chooses a letter.

builds a word, constructs a paragraph, and that's how he communicated those epic statements about space, time and humanity to us.

At the end of the session, I said to him, Professor, what an honor it is for me to photograph you.

And I've seen how hard it is for you to even communicate, but I'm going to ask for a big favor.

I said, I want one word of wisdom from you, one word from you that's going to be worth a million words from anyone else.

We all waited.

His nurse was a little concerned.

I had heard that that muscle was failing, and most of the things he typed around this time didn't mean anything.

Suddenly, we heard, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

He was typing.

We all leaned in to the laptop screen to see where the cursor's going to go.

And it went all the way to the letter W. Then he starts the next letter.

Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

All the way to the letter O. And then the final letter.

Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.