Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject

"Hawking Incorporated is essential reading for anyone interested in “distributed cognition,” the idea that thinking mostly takes place outside of our minds—but it is also a great story of how a severely mobility-challenged being was able to escape from his constraints to do something which contemporary science currently prohibits: to remain active in the universe even after death. A typical trope in scientific biographies, starting with those of Newton, stresses how geniuses often work in isolation, lost in thoughts that are not concerned with the mundane. This characteristic tells us a lot about how the scientific persona has been constructed throughout history, but it gives us a distorted view of what scientific work actually entails."