Stephen Hawking’s rate of speech is down to about one word per minute, and the nerve decay has now reached the point where he needs to move to some new technology, says Sam Blackburn, who has been responsible for the technology which allows Stephen Hawking to communicate for the past five years (he has recently resigned).

“Steven has a stubborn attitude towards this sort of thing. He feels that he has to prove he can still use his existing system,” Blackburn says. But a radical new system would be a problem because the learning curve associated with that is very steep, and Hawking wouldn’t be able to ask for help because the very thing he wouldn’t be able to use would be the speech system, Blackburn explains.