Prosthetic wings

People are flawed birds. All of us really would like to fly as high as possible, but we have lost our godly wings, according to Plato. The weight of our body condemns us to a life on earth, from where we can only long for all the good and the beautiful found in the heaven of ideas, high up above us. Aristotle would say that earth is the body's ‘natural place’ and therefore a body will fall down without ever being able to rise up on its own. Since Newton's formulation of the law of gravity in the 17th century, we assume that gravity is responsible for keeping us firmly glued to the earth and we can only free ourselves from it at the expense of great effort and energy. In French, the term for getting off the ground, as in the case of an ascending airplane, is décoller, which literally means ‘de-sticking.’ The weight of our body causes us to be stuck on earth, yet owing to our technological acuity we have managed to fly after all.

A rather special form of ‘de-sticking’ took place on 26 April 2007. The British physicist Stephen Hawking is known for his pioneering scientific study of gravity and so-called ‘black holes,’ but he is perhaps even known better for his doing this research while being severely paralyzed by ALS. He was literally released of the weight of his body for a full half minute when he made a zero-gravity flight, organized by the Zero Gravity Corporation. Weightlessness is realized by flying at an extreme altitude followed by a downward dive in a free fall, which for a short period cancels out gravity. In principle, every person (with sufficient money) can go on such a flight. Hawking's flight was special, however, because it is virtually impossible for his nearly fully paralyzed body to move, which is why he, more than a non-paralyzed individual, is normally a victim of gravity.

Paralyzed people do not necessarily experience their body as heavy, though. The neurologist Jonathan Cole (2004) has written about his own zero-gravity flight, whereby he imagined that odd sense of weightlessness to be similar to the feeling of having a nearly fully paralyzed body.