Had Stephen Hawking been born here, the fate of astrophysics would likely have been different: no Theory of Everything, just a Hypothesis of Nothing. Had he been born here, the starburst of his extraordinary life would have been sucked into a black hole, a metaphorical black hole, and the proof that the universe can be so unkind to some people would have been concluded.
I don't wish to be fashionably pessimistic, because that's a betrayal of Hawking's spirit -- "look at the stars, not down at your feet". But in the week that wheelchairs and disability have been in the news a lot -- and for different reasons -- it's hard not to imagine a scenario from a parallel universe: What would've happened had an exceptional person like Hawking been born in a place where disabilities are liabilities, where healthcare is a privilege and knowledge is secondary to connection, where imagination is not as mandatory as, say, military conscription?
Life, as we know, shouldn't be defined by the random accident of birth, and destiny shouldn't be decided by rogue genes that cause a terminal disease when you're 21 and a bright Cambridge student. Dr Stephen Hawking, who died on Wednesday at 76, proved that with guts and grace, and from his wheelchair. And yet in all honesty, the struggle to defy inadequacies and to cheat death vary in difficulty according to other external factors as well. The individual thrives, or thrives better, when their surrounding structure gives him or her the crutches to carry on.
First of all, the Hawking in this parallel universe could not ride the Skytrain to work.
Regardless of his intellectual triumph in unlocking the secrets of the Milky Way, the other-Hawking could never have solved the mad riddle of having a lift for the disabled and to have that lift locked at all times -- a cosmic paradox that defies all quantum formulae. Hawking would have had to sign a form to confirm that, despite empirical evidence, he was genuinely disabled and wheelchair-dependent, and still he might have not have been allowed to ride the damned lift unless he resorted to violence, as wheelchair activist Manit Intharapim did when he broke a glass door out of frustration last Monday and became headline news.
In fact, the other-Hawking could not have used any public transport -- not the "low floor buses" that have been discussed since 2014, nor the daredevil motorcycle taxis, nor even regular taxis, with their high mathematical probability of refusing disabled passengers. The study of black holes would have become the theory of potholes, the asteroid belts of our footpaths.
The government has promised support for universal design, a philosophy that advocates maximum accessibility to public facilities, and yet tangible results are slow in coming. More fundamentally than that, however, is the fact that it would have been unlikely that this other-Hawking would have survived to the age of 76 as our public healthcare programme would have crushed him long before: The interminable wait in the chaotic lobby of a state hospital (one of my family members clocked five hours last week), the instability of the universal healthcare scheme, and the political brawl that takes poor patients as hostages. The real Hawking said the socialised medicine of England's National Health Service gave him quality treatment that had kept him alive, and that allowed his mind to wander the cosmos. The other-Hawking would have had to fight much, much harder, and the brief history of his time would likely have been very brief.
Had he braved all of the above, the other-Hawking would still have had to overcome one final obstacle: The fact that his passion for the study of stars and galaxies, of black holes and the origin of time, would have been deemed useless in this parallel universe. Why look at the stars when our feet are stuck in the mud? Why think of the heavens when we have problems on Earth, especially in this country? Why solve abstract equations when your math should help increase our GDP?
These questions expose a disability of society: The disability to embrace the joy of curiosity and the vastness of the human mind. The disability to value imagination and intellectual abstraction, to regard art students as being as worthy as students of medicine, or cosmologists as important as capitalists, or filmmakers as indispensable as soldiers, or the disabled as equal as the able-bodied. Hawking's Theory of Everything, as far as my simple mind can grasp, is a reconciliation of the monumental and the sub-atomic, the infinite and the miniscule, the seen and the unseen. In its complexity lies a gorgeous, generous, inclusive heart that beats before and after time. That's what we need, before we turn into a black hole.
Kong Rithdee is Life editor, Bangkok Post.