Hawking: Can You Hear Me?

Peter: I'll never forget that

first meeting with Stephen

in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn in Chicago.

A small compact car kind of pulled into the parking lot.

Someone got out, went back to the trunk

and took out this collapsible wheelchair.

Suddenly, this wheelchair kind of spun to life,

spun around literally did a 360

and took off across the parking lot.

I guess I opened my door at that point and this young man said

"Uh, Peter Guzzardi, is-- is that you?"

"Is that Peter Guzzardi?" And I said, "Yes, it's me."

And he said, "Well, that's Professor Hawking."

"And we've gotta go, we've gotta go after him."

So, I-- I start to blather a little bit.

It's like, "How are you Professor Hawking?"

"It's wonderful to meet you."

And then there was this-- this kind of silence.

Stephen Started to emit sounds

and the graduate student translated.

What-- what this young man said to me was,

"Where's the contract?"

All that came to mind was, you know, like, "Uh-oh!"

This is not gonna be easy.

The book about scientific theory

has been a top best seller.

Woman on TV: It's called "A Brief History Of Time"

and it was written by a remarkable scientist

named Stephen Hawking.

Man on TV: The man often compared to Galileo,

Einstein and Newton.

Peter: Stephen really was this strong willed man

who was singularly focused

on what he wanted to accomplish

and was gonna move Heaven and Earth to do it.

Soon it will have been in the best seller list

longer than any other book in history.

Lucy: Who knows what else he would have done.

What else would he have achieved if he hadn't had

motor neurone disease.

All the time I knew my father...

he was 24 hours off dying.

Um, the fact that it didn't happen is a miracle.

Stephen: Can you hear me?

I was 20 in October 1962.

I had moved to Cambridge to undertake my Ph.D.

It was a very cold winter and my mother persuaded me

to go skating on the lake in St. Albans.

I fell over and had great difficulty

getting up again.

My mother realised something was wrong

and took me to the doctor.

Mary: Stephen was first diagnosed

with the motor neurone disease

shortly after his 21st birthday.

Stephen ended up in St. Bartholomew's hospital

where I was...

a pre clinical student.

The prognosis he was given was a maximum of three years

with a rapid deterioration before then.

Stephen: At first I became depressed.

There didn't seem any point working on my Ph.D.

because I didn't know if I would

live long enough to finish it.

Ammar: Professor Hawking was diagnosed

in the early 1960's.

There was no treatment that could prolong survival.

That is essentially a death sentence.

The nerve cells controlling

the muscle movement die off.

Eventually, the patients lose the ability to walk,

to use their arms, to speak, to swallow or to breathe.

Most people feel very, very low.

And some people find it very difficult to come out

of that in a positive state of mind at all.

Stephen: While there is life, there is hope.

I had come to Cambridge to do Cosmology

and Cosmology I was determined to do.

Mary: Stephen was always one for puzzles.

Wanting to... work out the logic of things.

Stephen: I had a passionate interest in model trains.

I was always very interested in how things operated.

And used to take them apart

to see how they worked.

My aim was always to build working models

that I could control.

If you understand how the universe operates

you control it in a way.

Mary: All scientific laws are hypothesis.

The mathematical rules that will tell you

how other things will behave.

Stephen was always looking for the rules

that would let him win.

Stephen: I began to make progress in my work.

There was also a young woman called Jane

whom I had met at a party.

It makes me laugh even to think of him now.

Jane: I was an undergraduate

in London at the time.

I was drawn by his sense of humour and his wide smile.

And he had his beautiful grey-blue eyes.

I thought he was so clever.

He had his own particular charm...

which was very attractive.

Conversations were

always entertaining,

always funny, and Stephen

always had the last word.

He had a romantic side,

as he invited me to May Ball in Trinity Hall

soon after we met.

And that's a very romantic thing to do.

That was fun.

Mary: My family had considerable reservations.

Your son gets terminally ill

and suddenly introduces a girl that's

someone he wants to get married to.

It doesn't sound like a very good

basis for a marriage,

and does the girl know

what she's letting herself in for?

Jane: We were in love with each other

and I thought to myself,

"Well, really he may have

only two years to live."

But this was in the '60s,

"I might have only four minutes to live."

John F. Kennedy: This latest Soviet threat

must and will be met with determination.

Nobody knew when the next confrontation was going to be

which could lead to a nuclear war

and we would have four minutes warning of that.

Jane: July the 15th, 1965.

It was a very happy day and a very beautiful day.

We were married in the chapel in Trinity Hall...

where he was a post graduate student.

From the outside, Jane's decision was most unwise.

But it was Jane's decision.

Lucy: One thing that always strikes me

is the courage of both my parents.

It's quite extraordinary

when you think of what happened to those two,

probably rather naive, quite innocent 21 year olds.

Nobody could have foreseen what lay ahead of them.

We set off for New York state...

for a physics conference.

That was really our honeymoon.

It was almost as if everything had to be sacrificed

to what I call the worship of the Goddess of physics.

Roger: When I first encountered Stephen Hawking...

it was a kind of lazy journalistic cliche to say

that he was a new Einstein or the new Newton.

But certainly even right at the outset of his career...

Stephen Hawking wasn't just thinking big,

he wasn't just thinking enormous,

he was thinking cosmic,

about the whole universe.

Stephen: The big question in cosmology in the early '60s

was "Did the universe have a beginning?"

Roger: Stephen really started thinking

about the birth of the universe in mathematical form.

Stephen: I showed that the universe had to have

had a beginning...

in the singularity or Big Bang.

Roger: The Big Bang theory is a really extraordinary idea

you know, you look around the universe

look around your surroundings and the thought that you,

your house, the Earth, the solar system,

everything you can see was packed into this

unimaginably small space is an extraordinary thought.

Jane: Survival... and physics

were the prime motivators in his life.

Plus his children.

Mary: When Robert came along that was a surprise.

They hadn't been married that long.

And the normal pattern at that time

was to have your family when

you had a secure income to support them.

But Stephen obviously, didn't have time.

Robert: My father would sometimes be

deep in thought about whatever topic was on his mind,

whether that was scientific or not.

And so, sometimes it would be

hard to get his attention.

But that's I think sometimes

can be the case for most fathers.

He wanted to be involved as a father

but his disability meant that

he wasn't involved in some things that

normally as a father would be.

Jane: He very rarely spoke about his illness

but when he did, he said that the advantage of his illness

was that he was able to devote himself 100 percent

to his work.

He didn't have to change nappies,

he didn't have to make cups of tea,

he didn't have to cook meals.

But he could just get on with concentrating on physics.

He started using a wheelchair shortly after Lucy was born.

Lucy sat on Stephen's knee.