Genius by Stephen Hawking

We all have questions.

Big questions.

Am I here for a reason?

It's part of what it means to be a human.

Do I control my own destiny?

My name is Stephen Hawking and I believe that

anyone can answer big questions for themselves.

That's awesome.

So, with the help of some ordinary people...

Oh! And a team of experts...

In a flash came to him the notion that

there might be a single wall.

We are going on the ultimate voyage.

It's a complete head trip.

A quest to answer the greatest

mysteries of the universe.

I'm not ready to make that leap.

It's so messed up.

Using the power of the human mind.

It's a very exciting moment.

Yes.

Because anyone can think like a genius.

"Genius by Stephen Hawking"

was made possible in part by

contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Why are we here?

Have you ever wondered why we are here?

I think most people have.

If we could answer it, maybe we could

all get along with each other a little better,

which would be good.

Some believe in a higher being who created us for a purpose.

Others say that life is just a random chain of events

with no real meaning.

But I believe there is another way to answer the question.

If we look at the facts, we can work it out for ourselves.

So, I've asked 3 ordinary people

to come on a journey.

A series of puzzles and challenges awaits them.

They'll be given equipment and instructions to help.

Can they solve the mysteries and try to answer

this fascinating question?

Why am I here?

I really can't tell you.

Am I an accident? Are we all an accident?

Ah, I don't think we are.

Is there a reason we're here?

That would almost presuppose somebody putting us here.

I am here, but that's all I know.

To start this journey, I want my volunteers

to make a basic realization.

So, I have brought them to this ancient English castle.

When it was built nearly 600 years ago,

the word "science" was almost unknown.

People thought the universe was magically controlled

by all-powerful beings.

But magic is not always the best way to explain things,

which is what I want them to grasp at this special dinner.

Wow.

It's so weird.

Pretty spooky.

Romantic and haunting at the same time.

- What? - Spinning plates.

Oh, my goodness.

It was spooky. It was great.

So cool.

It's magical.

Perhaps the room is full of poltergeists.

How are they levitating?

No idea.

Slightly scary.

If you had done this some hundreds of years ago,

you would have been hung.

And, you know, the first thing that crossed my mind is,

"where are the strings?"

What is the purpose of that blowing?

It could be magic.

Could be magic. Maybe it is.

I'm... I'm not a believer.

Of course, I don't believe in magic either.

But I do believe in human curiosity.

Mine's not spinning, yours are.

Yeah.

Wonder why that is.

Our desire to understand has allowed us

to achieve great things

and finding out how things work is fun.

Ha ha!

In my mind, looking at the plates floating,

it was about, "how are they floating?"

And more importantly, "why are they floating?"

Bon appetit.

Thank you.

- Cheers, guys. - Cheers.

I wanted to see if there was really anything

underneath it that might have been hidden,

that could possibly be spinning it,

but there didn't seem to be.

And so that's when I figured it had to be

some kind of, you know, technology.

She's taken it all apart.

Guys.

Nice.

Gonna kick you out.

It's clearly a magnet. Magnets.

Is there somebody under there?

No, there's nobody under there.

Electromagnet.

It's a hexagon.

They found out the secret of

Magnets.

The force that the two magnets exert against each other

causes the plates to hover in the air above the table.

But what do levitating plates have to do with

our central question... Why are we here?

Once the plates have fallen,

the idea of magic soon kind of disappears.

It comes back to it's just a trick.

So, once you might have been hung,

but now it's just magnets.

That's pretty cool.

It just shows the progression of humanity

from not understanding to completely understanding

how to do something like that

and not having it be magical any more.

It was about the journey from

the magical to the practical with science.

Now they are starting to unlock the mystery.

The universe is not controlled by magic

but by a set of rules that we call the laws of nature.

To find out how we discovered these laws,

we're going to meet one of my heroes.

He lived in a little English village over 300 years ago.

When it comes to human knowledge of nature,

the period between roughly 1500 and 1700

gets remembered as the scientific revolution

because it brings in a number of fundamental changes in outlook

that remain indispensable to what we call science.

For many people, the outstanding figure of

the scientific revolution, the culminating figure

is Isaac Newton.

And for getting a grip on just what it is Newton achieved,

we could do no better than to be standing right here in front of

the very apple tree from which fell the apple

that gave Newton the idea of the law of universal gravitation,

or so the story goes.

It's 1666.

He was sitting under the apple tree

and he watched an apple fall to the ground.

And in a flash came to him the notion that there might be

a single law, which governs not just

the pull of the earth on an apple

but the pull of the earth on the moon.

A single law, a law of attraction

between all of the particles across the cosmos.

That was the law of universal gravitation.

By the age of just 25,

Isaac Newton single-handedly changed

the way we see the world.

Magic was no longer needed to explain how the universe worked

or why we might be here.

Instead, the laws of nature

could be explained using reason...

And written down in a book.

Here we have Isaac Newton's masterwork,

his "Principia Mathematica,"

the mathematical principles of natural philosophy,

published in 1687 in Latin.

This is where Newton set down his 3 laws of motion

and the law of universal gravitation

and set them to work to account for the system of the heavens:

The tides, comets, and other natural phenomena.

In this extraordinary book, Newton explained

how the universe works in a way that

no one had been able to before.

His work ushered in the modern age of reason,

underpinned by science.

Newton becomes the first scientific celebrity;

he is revered as a hero of the enlightenment.

This book becomes the background and the platform on which

natural science in all its variety

grows up in the 18th century.

Thanks to geniuses like Newton,

science gradually begins to explain the world.

And even, I think, why we are here.

I've got the magic touch then. Oh.

My volunteers have taken their first step

to making that realization for themselves.

Being in this amazing setting really helped me,

I think, get in the mindset of people, for example,

of the middle ages and how they would have perceived something

as being completely magical.

That's really cool.

I totally think we can use the laws of science

to understand the universe and therefore deduce

why we might be here.

We have seen that the universe is governed by laws,

but how does that help us work out why we are here?

Now I want my volunteers to understand