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As social media users shared memories and photographs of renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in the wake of his passing in March 2018, a curious image purportedly showing the author of A Brief History of Time at a protest against the Vietnam War in London fifty years before started to go viral: This image has been mislabeled as a photograph of Stephen Hawking for several years. The version of this image available via the National Portrait Gallery, for instance, identified the man with the canes as Hawking. Photographer Lewis Morely, who captured the image, also identified this man as the world renowned physicist. It wasn't until Tariq Ali, a political activist who truly is in this photograph, caught wind of the claim after Hawking's death that the record was set straight: The National Portrait Gallery acknowledged the mistake and promised to correct their caption of the image: Robert Newsom, a Vietnam protester who shared images of the event with the BBC in 1968, noted that Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave were headlining the march, but made no mention of Hawking's alleged attendance: We couldn't find a comparable image of Stephen Hawking from 1968. However, we're skeptical that the theoretical physicist would have been physically able to march along with Ali during this Vietnam protest. Hawking suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and his physical abilities were already deteriorating in the late 1960s. According to the biography Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science, Hawking was having difficulty walking longer distances in 1968, and by the end of the decade he was using a wheelchair full time: We have so far been unable to track down the identity of the misidentified man.
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