Stephen Hawking unable to attend 70th birthday celebration

BBC : Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was too ill to attend the 8 January symposium at Cambridge University that was held in honor of his 70th birthday. However, he was able to address the audience via a recorded speech. Unable to speak because he suffers from motor neurone disease, Hawking uses twitches of his cheek muscles to choose letters or words on his computer that can be voiced using a speech synthesizer. He is able to select about one word per minute, making the task of writing speeches arduous. Currently the director of research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, Hawking also founded the university’s Center for Theoretical Cosmology and is a visiting professor at the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Saul Perlmutter, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, and Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, also spoke at the symposium.