Science Studies has shown that scientific knowledge is above all about practice. But what happens when a scientist, such as Stephen Hawking, does not have the use of his hands, does not–or cannot–draw pictures and perform many-page-long calculations on paper? Does everything happen ‘in his head’? Are theories produced ‘theoretically’? Yet, though this famous example of a mind dematerialized seems to confirm the cliché better than anyone could hope for, it actually shatters it. Drawing on an extensive and in-depth series of interviews with Hawking, his students, and his colleagues, this paper aims to reconstruct the human, material and machine-based network that enables Hawking to do physics. I call this network his extended body.
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