Original subtitles

It's really steep.

Huge fan, huge fan. - Would you like to have your photo taken?

Can I have your picture?

Come on, you guys. Want to have your picture?

- Here you go. - Pleased to have you here.

Cheesy grin.

Smile.

Another cheesy grin.

All the great scientists and this is one of 'em - Kepler and...

Galileo, Newton - we've got one right here. It's fantastic. Amazing!

My name is Stephen Hawking.

For the past 50 years, I have travelled the world

studying and lecturing about time and space

and the laws that govern the universe.

- Hey, Stephen, break a leg. - Don't say that!

I'll have to look after him.

This film is a personal journey through my life

told in my own words.

Come with me and I will show you how I live and work today...

...and tell you the story of how I became who I am.

Welcome to my world.

So are you going to take your lunch in the cafeteria?

- It's up to you. - Yes.

I just have to give Judith a call...

WOMAN'. I think it would kill him

if he was in a home, being cared for by nurses.

I think that would be the end for him.

He likes to be able to choose what he wants to do with his life,

he loves the danger of flying, he wants to go into space

and he's been in submarines!

He's just the most craziest man.

He's got a lot of guts in him.

Just through here is the nurses' room.

So if anything medical happens, we'll just grab a phone, phone 999,

but there is not much we can actually do

because Stephen is on a Nippy, which he'll breathe on.

If that fails, the only other thing we could do and we do have -

we have oxygen cylinders and we can give him oxygen,

but if he's in a total state then we will have to let him go.

I have lived over two thirds of my life

with the threat of death hanging over me.

Because every new day could be my last,

I have developed a desire to make the most of each and every minute.

Although I'm 71 now,

I still go to work every day at Cambridge University.

I'll see you in a bit. Enjoy your shopping.

Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival,

as has been maintaining a sense of humour.

- Morning, Judith. - Hello.

When I went to my job interview,

I thought he was going to ask me

about my past medical history and what I've done before in care,

but he didn't, he asked whether I could cook poached eggs!

And... I was 19 at the time and I lied,

cos I didn't know how to cook poached eggs, but I got the job straightaway.

Er... it ain't like going to work any more,

it's like just gonna go and see a friend...

well, family.

Stephen's been there through the years of me growing up

and, like, turning into an adult.

So he's been there through most of the important stages of my life.

I've had a very privileged life, thanks to Stephen.

Do you enjoy my company?

Maybe.

You're horrible to me, ain't ya?

Yes.

As you can see, the gradual advance of my illness

has meant that I am totally reliant on those around me.

71 years ago, life started that way too.

I was born in 1942, exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo.

My parents were both at Oxford University,

where my father studied medicine.

He later specialised in tropical diseases.

It is often said that a person's early years

are a good indication of how they will turn out.

Perhaps my eldest sister, Mary, remembers me best.

I remember Stephen was very bright, always into things.

I remember my father made me a dolls' house,

so Stephen put in both plumbing and lighting!

He liked to win.

He liked to win in everything.

We all learnt to play draughts.

I beat Stephen once, once at draughts,

and he immediately took up chess and I never beat him at that again!

[also spent a lot of time playing on my own as a boy.

I had a passion to understand how things worked,

from toy trains to the whole universe.

He would spend a lot of time looking at the sky,

looking at the, um...

stars and wondering where... eternity came to an end.

He couldn't conceive that there could be something

without a finish.

Home life was always stimulating for me and my siblings.

My mother and father were intellectuals

and naturally they expected their children to follow.

Both my parents were moving in the Highgate-Hampstead intelligentsia,

that sort of circle.

We always talked -

everyone talked, and everybody argued.

We used to argue theology a lot. It's a great thing for kids

because you don't need any facts whatsoever.

To outsiders, the Hawking household was considered eccentric,

but, for me, it was a place where my mind was constantly challenged.

There were books everywhere.

Bookshelves that were double-banked. Bookshelves that had,

on top of upright books,

rows of other books shoehorned in wherever there was space.

It was a less conventional house -

one in which the children had a great deal of freedom

and I remember being

quite gob-smacked by the conversation over lunch.

It was about subjects which were never talked about in my house -

sex, homosexuality, arguments for and against abortion

and various other subjects that were quite unusual.

As I developed into a teenager, my parents taught me

to always question things and think big.

Stephen devised - and remember, this was in the early 1950s -

not just one, but two, computers,

which we built from scratch.

It was about the size of a half-depth fridge,

but about as tall and about as wide.

It solved logical problems posed in binary - if this condition is true

and that condition is true or that condition instead is true, then...

and it would give you what the "then" meant.

At school, my classmates gave me the nickname Einstein,

even though I was only ever halfway up the class.

It was, I like to think, a very bright class.

It was always assumed that Stephen would go to Oxford.

Both my parents had been to Oxford, you know, he was extremely bright,

there was never any doubt about this.

He and my father had a difference of opinion about what he should study.

Father thought it would be a good thing if Stephen did medicine,

but Stephen was not into medicine -

he'd have made the most awful doctor...

...so they compromised.

STEPHEN'. We agreed on a degree in natural sciences, specialising in physics.

The prevailing attitude at Oxford at the time was very anti-work.

You were supposed to be brilliant without effort...

or to accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree.

To work hard to get a better class of degree

was regarded as the mark of a ”grey man " -

the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.

I think Steve and I fell,

both of us, right into that category,

that there was no need to work or to appear to work,

and Steve was a very funny guy.

He was able to appreciate jokes

and tell jokes the whole time

and spontaneous humour was really his forte.

Row! Row!

Row!

STEPHEN'. At Oxford, I joined the Rowing Club and became a cox.

I relished in the freedom, the speed

and, of course, calling the shots.

The Rowing Club also introduced me

to one of my favourite pastimes at Oxford...

...partying.

I once calculated that I did about a thousand hours' work

in the three years I was there, an average of an hour a day.

I'm not proud of this lack of work,

I'm just describing my attitude at the time,

which I shared with most of my fellow students.

Within the whole year, people gradually thought of Steve

as being the brilliant guy in the year,

but he was brilliant in the sense that he could

make off-the-cuff remarks which were deep...

...so he was definitely a stand-out person of intellect.

The question always was

whether he would use that intellect to go anywhere.

Good evening, Professor Hawking.

STEPHEN'. Well, if the number of champagne receptions one goes to

is a measure of success, then it would seem that I have made it.

Tonight, I am guest of honour

at the launch of a supercomputer called Cosmos, in Cambridge.

Cosmos is one of the most powerful computers in the world

and will enable us to better understand our place in the universe.

Stephen's perhaps the world's

most famous scientist, you know, and one can't deny that it's fantastic

to have his support.

It really is a big day for theoretical cosmology in the UK.

STEPHEN'. The notion of fame is a curious thing to me.

In my mind, I am a scientist who has been lucky to work

on some of the fundamental mysteries of our universe.

Sometimes I wonder if I am as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities

as I am for my discoveries.

As my student days were in full swing,

I was gradually becoming aware that all was not well.

During my final year at Oxford, I had noticed

that I was getting rather clumsy

in my movements

and I fell over once or twice for no apparent reason.

But then one evening, late at night, something more serious happened.

I recall the time that Steve fell down the stairs.

He fell downstairs all the way to the bottom.

He'd lost consciousness and then he couldn't remember who he was.

He couldn't remember where he was, so it was a very serious thing.

STEPHEN'. When I look back at that fall,

I didn't realise at the time it was a warning sign of things to come...

...but I recovered and soon had more pressing things on my mind.

Despite my relaxed attitude to study,

I graduated with first-class honours

and left Oxford for Cambridge University to begin my PhD.

Yet little did I know

I would soon be diagnosed with a crippling illness

that would change my life forever.

Well, Stephen's speed of communication has very gradually slowed down.

A few years ago, he was still able to use his hand switch

and able to communicate by

clicking this switch on his wheelchair.

When he wasn't able to do that any more,

we switched over to a switch that he mounted to his cheek,

but with him slowing down with that

we've approached his sponsors

and so they've been looking into facial recognition.

This is a high-speed camera

which will allow us to see very fine details

on the facial expressions and this will help us to improve

- the rate of your speech and input. - Yeah.

STEPHEN'. I have had to learn to live with my slow rate of communication.

I can only write by flinching my cheek muscle

to move the cursor on my computer.

One day I fear this muscle will fail,

but I would like to be able to speak more quickly.

Do you want me to change it to English Alphabetic?

Yeah. I'm buzzing.

Yeah?

Is that all...? Is that all OK, Stephen?

Yeah?

I'm not getting this at all, Stephen.

Sometimes he can make a mistake

and then he deletes it and then

he makes another mistake and deletes it

and, you know, it can be frustrating there watching

and he can see the frustration on his face as well.

STEPHEN'. I am hoping this current generation of software experts

can harness what little movement I have left in my face

and turn it into faster communication.

Your current piece of software is a little dated, well, it's a lot dated,

but you're very used to using it,

so we've changed the method by which

your next word prediction works

and it can pretty much pick up

the correct word every single time,

even if you're... even if you're letters away from it.

This is a big improvement over the previous version.

I really like it.

- That's pretty amazing, the... - I think it's actually gone brilliantly.

The stuff that we've showed him he was excited about.

Anything better than what he's doing,

I think, is going to be a success and anything

that doesn't complicate Stephen's life any more than it is,

I think that will be a success as well.

ATV120, thank you very much.

STEPHEN'. In 1962, aged 20,

when I arrived at Cambridge to begin my PhD,

I was also desperate for my voice to be heard as I embarked

on my first real scientific challenge.

At the time, two theories battled to correctly describe the universe.

The steady-state theory

held that the universe had always existed

and would exist forever.

But there was another, more exciting idea.

The big-bang theory suggested

that the universe had begun with a huge explosion.

I decided to try to see

if I could shed any light on how the big bang came to be.

But, by now, the immediate challenge I was facing

was to keep control of my body.

My movements were becoming even more erratic,

though I was determined not to worry my family,

so I tried to keep it to myself.

Stephen went home for Christmas after one term

and the symptoms that he had

had become too severe to hide from his parents.

His father insisted on taking him to, I think, the family doctor first

and then that doctor recommended a specialist in London.

So, after Christmas, Stephen and his father went to London

and St Bartholomew's Hospital.

STEPHEN'. I was in hospital for two weeks

and had a wide range of unpleasant tests.

They took a muscle sample from my arm and stuck electrodes into me.

Then they injected some liquid into my spine and took X-rays.

Eventually, I was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis...

...otherwise known as motor neurone disease or ALS.

The prognosis was not good.

I was given two to three years to live.

It was always hard to tell how Stephen took it,

because for one thing he wouldn't talk about it.

You know, if you can't do anything about it, you...

probably don't want to talk about it, or...

...or have people talk about it.

He did seem pretty depressed

and I don't think he accepted it emotionally.

The whole family went to pieces.

It was such a shock for everybody.

My aunt turned white in the night

and we all thought he'd be, you know...

he was not going to be able to live for very long.

Not knowing what was going to happen to me

or how rapidly the disease would progress,

I was at a loose end.

The doctors told me to go back to Cambridge and carry on with my research...

...but I was not making much progress and anyway

I might not live long enough to finish my PhD.

I felt somewhat of a tragic character,

I took to listening to Wagner.

The Annunciation Of Death)

Wagner's The Annunciation Of Death made a great impression on me

when I first heard it, as I had just developed motor neurone disease.

I identified with it and still do today.

But as it turned out, I didn't die.

At first, the disease seemed to progress fairly rapidly.

As time went by, however, it seemed to slow down.

I also began to make progress with my work.

But what really made the difference

was falling in love with a girl called Jane Wilde

whom I had met about the same time I was diagnosed.

This gave me something to live for.

Oh, he was great fun, he was eccentric.

I was really drawn to his very wide smile

and his beautiful grey eyes...

...and I think that's what made me fall in love with him.

We were going to defy the disease,

we were going to defy the doctors

and we were going to challenge the future.

Jane was beautiful and gentle

and seemingly undaunted by the harsh reality of my illness.

Falling in love and getting engaged

was the motivation that I needed.

If I were to get married, I had to get a job,

and to get a job I had to finish my PhD.

I therefore started working hard for the first time in my life.

To my surprise, I found I liked it.

Well, Stephen had found his groove, he'd found his trajectory

and when Stephen finds a trajectory he pursues it.

It was terribly exciting because he had been so depressed

and here he was with a new lease of life.

Perhaps because I realised I might not have much time,

I renewed my efforts

to tackle the big question in cosmology in the early '60s...

...did the universe have a beginning or not?

Many scientists were instinctively opposed to the idea of a big bang,

because it implies a moment of creation...

...the hand of God.

For me, though, religion has no role to play in physics,

so I wondered if the big bang could have happened on its own

without the need for a god to get it going?

The key was in the theory of black holes.

At the time, physicist Roger Penrose was working on what happens

when a star collapses under the force of its own gravity.

Penrose claimed the star would crush itself

to a tiny point of infinite density

where even time itself would come to a stop.

He called it a "singularity" - the heart of a black hole.

When I was doing this work on gravitation collapse, black holes,

I'd never heard of Stephen,

so I had a little private session, and he was somebody

who picked up ideas quickly.

He sort of stood out as being someone

who asked extremely awkward questions. I do remember that!

I worked relentlessly to see

if I could apply the notion of a singularity to the entire universe.

Then, suddenly, I had it.

I imagined going backwards to the beginning

and worked out that, right at the start,

the universe would have been a singularity too.

Here, time stops - you've reached the true beginning of everything.

There is no previous time in which the universe could have had a cause.

It spontaneously created itself in the big bang.

The work that Stephen did basically showed there was

a singular state which couldn't have come

from a previous universe.

So you could say it is a theory which tells you the universe had a beginning.

By addressing the question of creation

that physicists had avoided,

I had controversially shown the laws of nature suggest

there is no need for a creator or a god.

The universe just came into existence all by itself.

My findings about the big bang and the possible beginning

of the universe gave me the results I needed to enhance my PhD.

I applied for a research fellowship

at Gonville and Caius College which proved successful.

The money from the fellowship meant that Jane and I could get married,

which we did in July 1965.

We had the maximum number of guests in the tiny chapel.

Stephen was walking with a stick and he was losing strength in his arms

and we went off for our honeymoon to upstate New York

to a physics conference at Cornell University

and there I got to know that a goddess in Stephen's life,

with whom I was sharing the marriage, was physics!

STEPHEN'. After returning from our honeymoon,

Jane and I bought a house

in Little St Mary's Lane in the centre of Cambridge.

In March 1966, I completed and submitted

my PhD thesis, with the help of Jane,

who had spent many painstaking hours at the typewriter, typing it up.

The findings in my thesis greatly enhanced my reputation in cosmology.

Stephen's profile certainly did, I think, rocket.

It's important to know that there was a big bang

because that governs our cosmology.

It's also important to know what it was like

and why it was like what it was like,

because when you trace back everything in nature

you get ultimately to the big bang,

and the fact that it was a singular state

is very much part of that understanding.

Stephen, I'll just do a quick recap, um... of my PhD, yeah? That's fine, yeah?

STEPHEN'. My early work went some way to answering

how our universe began,

but there is still plenty more to find out.

Brane-world black holes should radiate if they aren't extreme, but slowly.

At Cambridge, I mentor a new generation of cosmologists

who are tackling ever-tougher questions.

It's this work that I enjoy the most.

You might as well say the Schwarzschild solution doesn't exist

because it radiates.

Well, I'll have to think about it.

He's in the office every day and, I mean, it's basically

for us PhD students. It's great - I mean, he's there for us

if we want him to, kind of, right, so, no, no, I mean, it's... it's a great privilege.

STEPHEN'. I have always wanted to share my enthusiasm and excitement.

There's nothing like the eureka moment

of discovering something that no-one knew before.

I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.

My next major eureka moment happened

when I was least expecting it.

In the autumn of 1970,

I had been concentrating my research on black holes.

By now, Jane and I had two children -

Robert, aged three years, and Lucy, who had just been born.

One evening in November, as I was getting ready for bed,

an idea charged through my brain.

Only cosmologists would truly grasp it,

but it would greatly enhance my reputation.

I was sitting on one side of the bed

and Stephen was sitting on the other side of the bed

tussling with his buttons

and this was one evening when he took longer about it than usual.

So I finished feeding the baby

and then he said...

think I've solved a problem. "

STEPHEN'. Suddenly, I had a revelation about what happens

when two black holes collide and merge.

I realised that the surface area of the new black hole

could only get bigger - it could never decrease in size.

This may sound like an obscure discovery,

but it revealed some fundamental properties of the universe.

Even though few physicists could understand it at the time,

for me, it was very exciting.

I was writing the rule book for black holes.

Now my voice would really be heard.

I knew he'd done something very important,

so I was absolutely thrilled

and this, of course, made his name in a big way in physics -

he'd been recognised as somebody with great potential,

but now he really had a discovery to his name.

STEPHEN'. By the early 1970s, my career in cosmology

and my understandings of the universe were beginning to blossom.

But as my mind grew in confidence

my body was going into a rapid decline.

At home, I was reluctant to ask for help from outsiders

and was relying upon Jane more and more to help me

get up in the morning, get dressed and get to work.

And when I got to Cambridge I needed my students to help me too.

Are we signing this?

Yes.

I first met Stephen

in 1972 at Cambridge when I became his PhD student.

He was in a wheelchair, but a push wheelchair,

and so I also had a role in helping him - with eating

and moving around and having coffee and tea and things like that,

so it was a rather unusual relationship.

In those days, Stephen, of course, was still speaking with his voice,

but his voice was still weak,

so it wasn't so easy to hear what he was saying.

And, indeed, when I travelled with Stephen,

I would often be acting as an interpreter,

so Stephen would say something

and if the person he was speaking to couldn't understand,

I would then repeat it.

STEPHEN'. Although I was becoming increasingly trapped

inside my dysfunctioning body, fortunately my mind was unaffected.

I had a new big question I felt compelled to find the answer to.

My reputation in the field of black holes was established

as we entered a golden age.

But my next discovery would throw

all of cosmologists' findings to date up in the air.

The calculations I was working on

in valved what happened to particles on the edge of a black hole

that were sucked in and disappeared.

To my great surprise,

I found that some particles could escape the black hole,

which seemed to make a mockery of the known laws of physics.

At first, I thought this must be a mistake.

I do remember when he was working on this problem

and, indeed, I even remember when he told me he was working out

the quantum effects of these black holes and he seemed to be getting

this flux of particles coming out.

When Stephen's thinking about a problem

he will become obviously obsessed with it.

It was a very intense period.

It was when he could be surrounded by children

and not notice what was going on, because he was like Rodin's Thinker

with his head in his hands,

often accompanied by Wagner blaring out from the loudspeakers.

It used to drive me spare!

Finally, after months of exhaustive work,

I found what I was looking for.

Contrary to all previously held theories on black holes,

I discovered that they must emit particles,

like a hot body losing heat.

This "evaporation" meant, in theory,

a black hole could eventually disappear.

I announced my findings on St Valentine's Day in 1974

at a cosmology conference in Oxford, to a packed audience.

He came to an end.

And there was absolute silence in the lecture hall...

...and I can see it now - the chairman of the lecture

jumped to his feet and instead of saying,

"Oh, I must thank Professor Hawking for his remarkable lecture,"

he said, "This is preposterous! I have never heard anything like it!"

The whole place was abuzz.

People couldn't believe what they had heard.

My controversial discovery

initially shocked the world of physics...

...but eventually it became accepted and known as Hawking radiation.

I am proud to have discovered it.

This was a remarkably important result because it was a result which...

unified relativity theory and quantum theory and thermodynamics.

And physics is really all about unifying ideas.

These three subjects seemed to be brought together

and this was the first time we'd seen that kind of unification.

Every now and then in physics, you get a result which is...

it's so beautiful, it really is like rolling candy on the tongue.

Oh, I was enormously proud...

enormously proud of what Stephen had achieved.

After! announced my theory of Hawking radiation

and a later discovery of exploding black holes,

a procession of international awards followed.

In the spring of 1974, I was inducted into the Royal Society,

one of the most prestigious bodies of scientists.

My name now sat alongside Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

A year later, I received the Gold Medal for Science,

from Pope Paul VI.

Aged 32, I was thrilled to have such high-profile awards to my name

and exciting new opportunities beckoned.

- # All the leaves are brown - # All the leaves are brown

- # And the sky is grey - # And the sky is grey

- # I've been for a walk - # I've been for a walk

- # on a winter's day - # on a winter's day

- # I'd be safe and warm - # I'd be safe and warm

- #11'! was in LA - #11'! was in LA- #

In 7.974, doors started to open for me- -.

...and I was invited on a visiting professorship

to the California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles.

This meant moving with the whole family for the academic year

and the lure of the American West Coast was irresistible.

We were in the midst of a revolution

in the application of quantum physics to black holes.

I was simply hoping to have a year in which

the result would be better science done by Caltech scientists,

by my research group and others

and better science done by Stephen.

STEPHEN'. Life in California was very different from Cambridge.

I now had a large salary and a big house

just a stone's throw from the university.

Well, America could have been on another planet.

We were living in the lap of luxury,

no expense spared to make us welcome,

and this great gift of an electric wheelchair

provided for Stephen's use.

Yet, although we had all the mod cons that America could offer us,

it was becoming clear that the demands of home life on Jane

were becoming too intense.

Looking after two young children

and trying to cope with my ever-increasing disabilities

were causing too much strain.

I could not see my way through

what it was going to demand of me...

...and this wonderful idea came to me -

if we were going to go to California

and the students were going to come too,

why didn't we offer them a bed in our house

in return for some help with Stephen?

Of course, it's not the normal relationship

between a student and the PhD supervisor,

but, for me, that was a good deal because I lived rent free

in exchange for sort of helping Stephen out around the home,

you know, at bath times and helping with meals and things like that.

STEPHEN'. But the excitement of a new life in California

was harshly interrupted by my motor neurone disease.

The physical symptoms took an irreversible turn for the worse.

That was the year in which he lost the use of his hands.

When he arrived, he could still write equations,

though with some difficulty.

By the end of the year, he couldn't.

So it was... in terms of his physical development,

it was a more difficult period.

On the other hand, in terms of his mental development,

as he gradually lost the use of his hands,

he further developed his unique ways of thinking

by manipulating shapes and topologies in his head

and became even more advanced than the rest of us.

By losing the finer dexterity of my hands,

I was forced to travel through the universe in my mind

and try to visualise the ways in which it worked.

He could move at lightning speed across the frontiers of knowledge

and see things that nobody else could see.

The disability forced him to carry himself in new ways, new directions.

STEPHEN'. Turning problems over in my mind has been my main method

of discovery for nearly half my life now.

While all around me people have buzzed away,

deep in conversation,

I have often been transported afar,

lost inside my own thoughts, trying to fathom how the universe works.

When we returned from California in the summer of 1975,

much of the future, living with my illness, seemed uncertain.

So Jane and I took comfort in the security of a happy family life...

...and, to make home life easier,

we realised my disabilities meant that we needed

a student living with us full-time.

I knew that Stephen Hawking was a brilliant scientist

and I was told that he was severely disabled

and I was told that his voice was very weak,

so it would probably take about a week

before, you know, I could understand what he was saying.

Of course, because of Stephen's circumstances,

you could say no day was really normal.

Stephen had these massive batteries that... in his wheelchair

and, of course, he had spares, and so I loaded as many as I could

on the bottom of Stephen's wheelchair

and Stephen didn't know that I had loaded it down so heavily

and I didn't want to have to carry the thing, so he starts up the hill

and then I see him turning the corner and he's about...

1 O... about 20 metres away and I see him slowly tipping backwards

and he fell over into the bushes.

Yeah, it was somewhat alarming to see the master of gravity being overcome

by the Earth's gravitational field and falling into the... into the bushes.

I went up to retrieve him and he was, of course, quite upset

and it was perhaps good

that I couldn't understand all that he said on that occasion.

I could have caught that if I realised it was gonna stop.

Although my increasing disabilities

were greatly affecting my life more and more,

I was fiercely reluctant to accept nursing care.

I was convinced that I could build a team of people around me

who could care for me in their own way.

We didn't have any nurses

at all in the department - that was part of my role. I would look after him.

- You'd like to reply to that one? - Mm-hm.

Well, I had to wipe his nose,

comb his hair for him if it was falling down into his eyes

and I could see that when he was eating or drinking

this could cause a problem and a very big one for me

because I didn't have any nursing training whatsoever.

He would have these coughing fits that would be quite severe

and, you know, you'd sort of think he was gonna choke and die at any moment.

I felt responsible to try to give him the best care that I could,

but it was scary thinking what might happen to him.

One night Stephen had the most horrendous choking fit

and I just didn't know what to do

and everything just shook,

windows rattled, doors shook.

It was the most terrifying experience

and it could have been critical.

Although I was able to live and work as I wanted,

I was never really able to understand

the strain it was placing on the people around me...

...especially my wife, Jane.

I was beginning to feel that there were two faces to our situation...

...one was the public image, the wunderkind of physics, um...

who had overcome motor neurone disease,

who was whizzing round the world in his wheelchair

to receive honours and medals,

and the other side, the other face, was the home situation,

where sometimes the illness forced us into our own little black hole.

The decline in my health was a stark reminder that time was against me.

Yet despite the pressures on my family

I was determined to realise a lifelong ambition

by writing a popular book about how the universe had begun.

I wanted the book to be read

by millions of people around the world, like a bestselling airport novel.

I did not think it would work.

I did not think it would work because basically

if you look at all the other books in airports

there are none like that!

STEPHEN'. However, I felt sure that the mass market

would want to know about how the universe began.

By 1984, I had completed the first chapter.

There was great interest in him.

He was a great public figure,

so actually every publisher in town was interested in the book.

I guess we had a contract ready for him to sign

and I had heard that he was going to be in Chicago,

so I was there and waiting,

and then this car pulls into the parking lot

and this gentleman gets out and he goes back to the passenger door

and scoops out what looks like a kind of life-size, broken doll into his arms,

and brings it back to the wheelchair

and kind of gently eases the doll into place

and suddenly the doll becomes animated.

As soon as that hand is on the controls,

the thing literally kicks into life, spins around two, three times and takes off.

And then Brian shouts to me, I've gotten out of my car,

he shouts, "Is that you? Is that Peter Guzzardi?"

and I said, "Yes, it's... it's me!"

and he says, "Well, quick, follow us - that's Professor Hawking!"

I signed up with Peter

and set to work completing the first draft of my book.

I tried to simplify the physics as best I could, and by the end

I was pleased and felt it was in pretty good shape.

But Peter wasn't convinced.

I was pretty disappointed, yeah.

I thought, "This is gonna be really difficult. "

But I just decided we'd made a substantial commitment to it

and, by God, we were gonna do this book,

so let's just start slogging and then maybe lightning would strike,

or something wonderful would happen.

Lightning did indeed strike,

but not in the way that Peter and I were hoping.

That summer, I had taken a break from rewriting,

to travel to Switzerland on holiday...

...but while I was there I caught a chest infection

that developed into pneumonia and quickly became very serious.

I was put into a drug-induced coma and onto a life-support machine.

The doctors thought I was so far gone,

they offered to Jane to turn off the machine.

But she refused.

Finally, Jane insisted that I was flown back to Cambridge.

I remember very vividly

walking through the doors and being really

quite rocked by what I saw when I got in there

and I realised that Stephen was really very, very ill.

Things were not looking good.

He could have died.

We were just told that he couldn't breathe

and, of course, we knew how weak he was at that time, and he had been ill before

and we all knew that he was on borrowed time.

STEPHEN'. The weeks of intensive care were the darkest of my life.

I felt I had always fought my illness so hard that I was not prepared

to give in so easily.

Slowly, the drugs began to work and the infection passed,

but the surgeons had to perform a tracheotomy to allow me to breathe,

which made a small incision in my windpipe

and connected me to a ventilator via the hole in my throat.

As a result, I was now robbed of the ability to talk.

I faced a life unable to properly communicate.

It was a very worrying time for everyone around him

and you're thinking, "Do you think you'll ever be able to talk again?"

or, "How will you work if you can't talk?"

So, yes, it was a very bleak time.

All hopes of finishing my book, and perhaps even my career,

seemed to be over.

It was very tense for everybody. It was incredibly tense.

It was difficult to think that Stephen was going to come out of there

and be OK.

As the weeks of my recovery turned into months,

it became obvious to me, and everyone around me, that being on a ventilator

meant that I needed constant care and monitoring to keep alive.

This was a very big realisation that things were going to dramatically change

and that this was going to be needing 24-hour-a-day nursing care.

Their lives were never, ever going to be the same again.

Once nurses came into the house... life changed.

And that was very difficult for all of us - for me, for the children.

Home was no longer home.

There was no privacy, no privacy,

because the walls were listening to everything.

Despite the intrusions on family life,

with the nurses' help, I grew stronger.

Yet I still felt trapped inside my body.

For a time, at home, I could communicate

only by raising my eyebrows

when someone pointed to letters on a card.

All thoughts of work and finishing my book grew distant.

But then, quite unexpectedly, a glimmer of hope

came from across the water.

I got a call from a physicist and he said, "I know

"you're working on computer systems for people with ALS."

He says, "I've got someone in England,

"he's a professor of physics,

"who lost the ability to speak and he needs a system. "

The system was called Equalizer

and the top part of the screen was a set of letters,

rows of letters, and then the bottom part of the screen was rows of words -

36 very frequently used words,

so he could choose the top part or the bottom part.

He learned that very quickly and I was blown away by it.

He was... He was scanning just amazingly fast.

STEPHEN'. I had enough movement in my right hand

to be able to click the computer system and write the words I wanted.

Finally, I was free to communicate again.

I was keen to make up the lost time that my illness had forced upon me.

I had a stack of notes from Peter Guzzardi

suggesting changes and clarifications to my book,

but I needed practical help with the rewrite at my end,

someone who could act as a go-between.

...is keeping the graphic as simple as we can.

The people in the States

were speaking on a loudspeaker phone in his office

and Stephen was writing, using his new computer system on the screen

and then you would say what he was saying over the phone.

We were just sort of cobbling it together,

I think, is probably the right term.

I had no idea what was going on on Stephen's side of this,

where it seems that he was persuading Stephen that this was OK,

helping Stephen off the walls if Stephen started to think,

"Why the hell am I spending all this time

"making this idiot understand this basic stuff?"

After months of work, the rewrite was complete.

None of us really knew whether the book would be liked

and would sell as we all hoped for.

All we could do now was give it a title -

A Brief History Of Time - send it off to the printers and wait.

But to everyone's surprise the book sold copy after copy

and very quickly bookshops were selling out.

When it hit the bestseller list, you're obviously surprised.

It was a pleasant surprise and it certainly was a surprise.

I don't think you'll find anybody - maybe I'm wrong - who'll say,

"'Oh, yes, we knew all along this was going to be a major hit. "

I had no expectation that it was going to be

the number-one bestselling book in the world.

I mean, not just here, but in Germany, Slovenia,

France, Italy - everywhere in the world there was the hope

that someone had found the mystery of life.

And from then on it was just a race to keep the book in print

and marching towards a million copies sold.

You know, it was very gratifying!

Er, you know, in the 38 years that I've been in this business,

um... I don't think I've ever had a book

that stayed at the top of the bestseller list that long.

Well, I was amazed at how well it did. I think it worked.

He inspired people.

He gave people some overall sense of the birth of the universe

and it made this subject become a subject of conversation

among people in all walks of life.

Professor Stephen Hawking's book

A Brief History Of Time, an unlikely

but successful publishing phenomenon...

A Brief History Of Time has sold about eight million copies...

A popular book about his theories

is already topping the American bestsellers' list...

The hugely successful A Brief History Of Time

by Stephen Hawking...

A Brief History Of Time stayed in the bestseller list

for over four years

and entered into The Guinness Book Of Records for doing so.

To date, over 10 million copies have been sold worldwide.

Over the next few years, a lot of fuss was made about my book.

I became famous nationally and around the world,

as it was translated into 40 different languages.

...delighted to welcome Professor Stephen Hawking.

STEPHEN'. I was invited onto chat shows...

Well, I think people do think of you as a genius,

not just as a disabled genius.

- and I've made a cameo appearance on Star Trek,

my favourite sci-fl' show.

- You are bluffing. - Wrong again, Albert!

I enjoyed the media attention

and witnessing everyday people getting more involved in understanding

the physics of our universe.

But soon the press wanted to know more about me, my illness

and my family life.

He wanted this worldwide celebrity, he enjoys that.

Part of his whole outlook on life and his science is that it's fun

and celebrity was fun

and he embraced it

in a way that was not necessarily very good for the family, the children.

So this was a further real problem in the marriage.

We were engulfed and swept away

by this great wave of fame and fortune...

...and I have to say

that really it all got rather too much for me to cope with

and I suppose that's when we ceased to be as happy as we had been

and when the marriage broke up

I felt as if a rug,

not just had been pulled up from under my feet,

but the earth had opened up under that rug and swallowed me up,

because the marriage had been my raison d'étre.

And it took me quite a little while to recover my sense of my own identity.

It was clear that my life and Jane's

were beginning to follow different paths.

In 1990 we separated, and were divorced in 1995.

In the same year, I announced my engagement to Elaine Mason

and married again.

Elaine had been one of my nurses

from the start of my 24-hour wraparound care.

Over the years, we had become extremely close as Jane and I drifted apart,

each seeking comfort and love through new relationships.

Elaine became closer to Stephen than any of the other nurses.

When he travelled, he would prefer to have her with him over the others.

It became a close relationship.

STEPHEN'. My marriage to Elaine was passionate and tempestuous.

She saved my life on several occasions

and we were together for 11 years, before divorcing in 2006.

The low point was when the press printed unsubstantiated allegations

that I had been the victim of domestic violence.

To my mind, this was a gross invasion of our privacy

and it was an extremely hurtful and damaging time for us both.

Unfortunately, being in the public eye can have its drawbacks.

Living a very public life does, however, have its upsides too.

At work, I am often visited by famous people who share

an interest in space and the universe we live in.

Sometimes, even astronauts drop by.

My voice is listened to because I did something 43 years ago

and I have the sense of humans

reaching outward and succeeding,

but I believe that he is valued more because

he has the pure analytical combined with

the philosophical

that comes from his understanding

of the beginnings and the ends of the universe.

STEPHEN'. I have often dreamt about travelling through space myself.

Recently, I got closer by experiencing a zero gravity flight.

I t was also a moment that temporarily stripped me of my disability -

a feeling of true freedom.

I believe the pioneering efforts of the early astronauts like Buzz

need to be taken onto the next level.

I am convinced that one day

humans will have to colonise other planets in order to survive.

Space travel will become an everyday necessity.

Until then, I hope to be one of the first ordinary people

to blast off into space.

But I will need a little help.

I just couldn't think of anybody in the world

that we'd rather send to space than Stephen Hawking,

and, you know, we haven't offered anybody a free ticket,

but it was the one person in the world that we felt, you know,

we'd love to invite you to space.

Pressure check.

And it was incredible when he accepted and I went up and saw him that day

and he told me to hurry up

and get the spaceship built because he wasn't going to live forever,

and hopefully next year we'll take him up and I think that, you know,

he feels that if he goes into space personally, he can... he can lead the way.

STEPHEN'. My hopes for space travel have been with me throughout my life.

But as my wheels are still firmly planted here on Planet Earth,

I will keep on dreaming.

As I am now considered a so-called "famous" person,

more and more of my time is taken up with my public life.

For this, I rely greatly upon my team around me.

You are really the gatekeeper in this role.

You get the general fan mail, hero-worshipping him, really,

then you get people who are obsessed

with religion and God and the fact that Professor Hawking doesn't appear to have

a god as such that they can, um, feel comfortable about,

so you get a huge range of what we call the "god letters",

and then you get letters from the disabled,

serious scientists - mostly people

full of admiration for Professor Hawking and what he has achieved.

He is a great iconic figure

and he enjoys his public appearances

and it's great that, you know, he's still very engaged

with everything that surrounds him.

So if you want to explore the inside of a black hole,

choose a big one.

People have searched for many black holes of this mass

but have, so far, not found any.

This is a pity because, if they had, I would have got a Nobel Prize.

If you had asked me 40 years ago

if I ever thought I would be talking in front of a sell-out crowd

and be a part of popular culture, I would have laughed.

But if my getting involved with the zeitgeist that is upon us

has encouraged people to question our universe, then I am OK.

Stephen Hawking!

- The world's smartest man. - What are you doing here?

If you are looking for trouble, you've found it.

Yeah, just try me, you... Oh!

He's willing to teach people in whatever way he has to teach people -

you can't take yourself too seriously no matter how intelligent

or how important the work you're doing is.

- This is Jim's phone. - It's for me!

- It's such an honour.... It's for you. - Hello!

Whenever I do a talk show, I'm trying to think of ways to do things

that are completely different and completely ridiculous.

Most people see Dumb & Dumber and they assume that that's who I am,

so I thought, "Well, wouldn't it be wonderful to, like, partner up

"with the smartest man on the Earth?"

Oh, excuse me!

Hello.

Oh, hi, Stephen Hawking! I can't believe it!

He was wonderful. He was just fantastic.

I was... I was expecting him to be so serious about himself

and, er, I think it was a relief for him

to, er... to completely make fun of the whole thing.

It's amazing.

Yeah, I know.

He did a great job of doing the lines that I'd written

and... and, er, and he was just gung ho the whole time.

OK.

Oh!

No, you're a genius!

No! You are!

After we did the routine, we kind of struck up a friendship,

so I was invited to his home

and one of the funny highlights of the night

was that, er... was that while we were having dinner

I asked him, you know, just for a picture,

"Could you run over my foot with your wheelchair?"

And that... So I have a picture of me grimacing in agony and stuff,

so it was wonderful, wonderful to be there, wonderful to talk to him

and ask him important questions like,

"How many Higgs boson does it take to screw in a light bulb?'

And, er, I think he's still struggling with that.

Look out!

It has been a lot of fun and also very strange

to see myself depicted in so many ways,

but perhaps the strangest is to have had

part of my early life portrayed by an actor.

I felt a huge onus of responsibility to get that part of his life right.

There was so much that happened to him.

It's a terrifying prospect

to have a completely functioning mind inside a body

that locks you in, that keeps you stationary.

One of the things I wanted to get right was to show the stages

of the progression of his condition and where the instability and fear came from.

The very obvious details, such as being at the top of a flight of stairs,

that suddenly becomes the most enormous obstacle,

being on any sort of uneven ground - those feelings of vulnerability.

He's incredibly stoic.

I think that was probably the case when he was younger as well.

I think he rolled up his sleeves and got on with it,

and look at the results.

I mean, it's self-evident -

the man became, er, a spokesperson for the most complex ideas.

Right, Stephen, we're going to put

your hat on you, so you don't get wet.

The straps go round, so it holds the hat on.

- Look at you! - He thinks we're mean.

"Have you got a hat?" "Yeah, gangster hat. "

It's the don!

STEPHEN'. One advantage of being a public figure

is being asked to do special things.

Today I am centre stage at the opening ceremony of the Paralympics Games

and it's an honour to do so.

Ever since the dawn of civilisation,

people have craved for an understanding of the underlying order of the world.

There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions

of the universe...

...and what can be more special than that there is no boundary?

And there should be no boundary to human endeavour.

The Paralympic Games are all about transforming our perception of the world.

We are all different.

There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being,

but we share the same human spirit.

However difficult life may seem,

there is always something you can do and succeed at.

The Games provide an opportunity for athletes to excel,

to stretch themselves and become outstanding in their field.

So let us together celebrate excellence, friendship and respect.

Good luck to you all.

Oh! Goodness!

Oh!

STEPHEN'. Having lived on this wonderful planet for over 71 years,

I feel my proudest achievement has been to inspire people

to think about the cosmos and our place in it.

Since I believe there is no afterlife,

I think it's important to realise

we only have a very short time alive and should make the best of it.

Today, I enjoy time together with family and friends...

...and despite my disabilities

I'll always keep wondering about the mysteries of the universe.

Stephen's been ill since he was 20.

You come to terms with the impending bereavement

and then suddenly find that it's not that impending after all.

I'm sure there's plenty more he'd like to know about.

Think how awful it would be to come to the end of questions.

Stephen will carry on until they... push him underground.

You... You don't just stop your mind.

Stephen's always had this determination to survive, I guess,

and every time Stephen gets critically ill, I always think

"Oh, dear, I hope," you know, "he's going to get through this time,"

and he always does.

He's just got this tremendous determination to live

and I... and I do think there is such a thing as the will to live.

There are several components to his long survival.

One is that he's, by a very large margin,

the most stubborn person I've ever met.

He is one of those very few people

who can see far beyond the borders of current knowledge

and see how things really work and set the directions

for other people's research and attempts to prove him right or wrong.

To recover from a broken marriage, it was very, very difficult.

At first, we were in touch...

...but then it got very, very difficult,

but, lately, we have been able to associate.

I call on him perhaps once a fortnight.

All those years with Stephen were a huge part of my life.

They were my young years.

They were my children.

And I can't just wipe those from the record, and I wouldn't want to.

It would be self-destructive to wipe those away

and I'm very, very proud of what Stephen has done.

STEPHEN'. Life has thrown at me both good times and bad.

Perhaps it is human nature that we adapt and survive.

As for me,

I have lived with the prospect of an early death most of my life.

I am not afraid of dying, but I'm in no hurry to die.

I have so much I want to do and find out first.

So, for now...

...goodbye and thank you for coming on a journey through my world.