Stephen Hawking visited the Star Trek: The Next Generation set in the 1990s and made one memorable request during the tour.
Executive producer Rick Berman recounted that Hawking, who had randomly requested the visit to the Paramount soundstage, asked to be lifted from his wheelchair and placed in Captain Jean-Luc Picard's chair.
Berman described the moment in the book The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross. "It was a pretty amazing sight to have perhaps the greatest mind of the latter half of the twentieth century in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, wanting more than anything else at that moment to sit in Picard's chair," he said.
The experience prompted Leonard Nimoy to contact Berman the next day about a potential cameo. This led to Hawking appearing in the Season 6 finale Descent, where he played poker on the holodeck with Data, Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton.