A Brief History of Time Page #2

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you know, debating... you can

quite happily debate about anything...

including theology...

and the existence

or otherwise of God.

And then someone gets bored...

or Journey Into Space comes on,

or something like that...

and the argument breaks up.

In an unchanging universe...

one can imagine

that God created the universe...

at literally any time

in the past.

On the other hand...

if the universe is expanding...

there may be physical reasons...

why there had to be a beginning.

An expanding universe

does not preclude a creator...

but it does place limits...

on when he might have

carried out his job.

When the family went to India...

it was arranged that Stephen should

come and live with us for a year.

He decided it would be nice...

that we should have...

Scottish dancing in the evening.

Mind you, this was

quite an ordinary house...

but we had rather a lot of room

and a large hall...

and so we bought some records...

and a book about what to do...

and Stephen took charge.

And he insisted

you put on a jacket and a tie.

And then he was

the master of the proceedings.

And Stephen took it

very seriously.

But then he liked dancing,

you see?

There were

four physicists in my year...

Gordon Berry...

Richard Bryan...

Stephen...

myself.

I first remember Stephen...

on an occasion when Gordon and I

went up after dinner to his room...

to try to find him.

And Stephen was up there...

with a crate of beer...

slowly drinking

his way through it.

He was only 17.

He couldn't legally go into a pub.

He'd gone up to Oxford

ridiculously early.

We used to have

what we called a gathering net.

We used to organize a beer party

and various things like that...

to gather all these... collar

as many freshman as we could get...

to get them to join

the Boat Club.

And that's how

we collected him, you see?

But the question always

with Stephen was...

"Should we make him

the cox of the first eight...

or the second eight?"

Well, coxes can be

adventurous...

and some coxes can be

very steady people.

He was rather

an adventurous type.

You never knew quite

what he was going to do...

when he went out with the crew.

I think he used to bring his work

with him into the boat sometimes.

His sort of thinking gear

was going...

on different levels.

We were asked

to read chapter 10...

in a book called

Electricity and Magnetism...

by Bleaney and Bleaney,

an unlikely combination...

a husband-and-wife team...

and at the end of that chapter,

there were 13 questions...

all of them

final honors questions.

I discovered very rapidly

that I couldn't do any of them.

Richard and I worked together

for the week...

and we managed to do

11/2 questions...

which we felt very proud of.

Gordon refused all assistance...

and managed to do one

all by himself.

Stephen, as always,

hadn't even started...

but the next morning,

he went up to his rooms at 9:00...

and we came back about 12:00,

maybe five past 12:00...

and down came Stephen, and we were

in the college gateway, the lodge.

"Ah, Hawking," I said, "how many

have you managed to do, then?"

"Well," he said, "I've only had time

to do the first ten."

I think at that point we realized that

it's not just we weren't in the same street.

We weren't on the same planet.

I once calculated...

that I did

about 1,000 hours' work...

in the three years

I was at Oxford...

an average of an hour a day.

I am not proud

of this lack of work.

I am just describing

my attitude at the time...

an attitude that nothing

was worth making an effort for.

He used to produce his work

every week for tutorial...

and, as he never

kept any notes...

or papers

or that sort of thing...

on leaving my room, he would normally

throw it in my wastepaper basket.

And when he was with

other undergraduates at the tutorial...

and they saw this happen,

they were absolutely horrified...

'cause they thought, he did

this work in probably half an hour...

If they could have done it in a year, they

wouldn't have thrown it in the wastepaper basket.

They would've put it

in a frame on their walls.

Because of my lack of work...

I had planned

to get through the final exam...

by doing problems

in theoretical physics...

and avoiding any questions

that required factual knowledge.

I didn't do very well.

I was on the borderline between

a first-and second-class degree...

and I had to be interviewed

to determine which I should get.

They asked me

about my future plans.

I replied,

if they gave me a first...

I would go to Cambridge.

If I only got a second...

I would stay in Oxford.

They gave me a first.

I drove Stephen

and his young brother...

out to Woburn Park...

and he climbed a tree.

He was testing himself out, I think.

I didn't realize.

He did manage to climb a tree...

and go along a branch of it

and get himself down.

I think he began to notice

that his hands...

were less useful

than they had been...

but he didn't tell us.

Univ has these square staircases...

which are round

but they're square.

It was just coming down

from one of the rooms.

Steve actually fell on the stairs

coming downstairs...

and kind of bounced

all the way down to the bottom.

I don't know if he lost consciousness,

but he lost his memory.

We took him to either my room

or someone's room.

The first question of course

was, "Who am I?"

We told him,

"You're Steve Hawking."

Right away he would ask again,

"Who am I?"

"Steve Hawking."

Then, after a couple of minutes,

he remembered he was Steve Hawking.

Then we'd say, "Do you remember

going down to the bar..."

and having a drink

on Sunday night?"

Or, "Do you remember coxing

on the river on Monday?"

And his memory

came back gradually...

until he could remember the previous

day's events, and then the previous hour...

and by the end of the two hours,

he could remember everything.

The question was,

"Well, maybe you've lost...

some of your mind

because of this."

And so Steve decided,

"Well, I'll take the Mensa test."

We said,

"Of course you'll get in."

But he came back delighted

he was able to get into Mensa.

Absolutely delighted.

I felt that there were two areas...

of theoretical physics...

I might study at Cambridge.

One was cosmology,

the study of the very large.

The other was

elementary particles...

the study of the very small.

However, I thought

elementary particles...

were less attractive...

because there was

no proper theory.

All they could do...

was arrange

the particles in families...

like in botany.

In cosmology,

on the other hand...

there was

a well-defined theory...

Einstein's general theory

of relativity.

It was a very cold year...

and the ice

on Verulamium Pond...

it was frozen there...

and we all went skating.

And Stephen managed

to skate fairly well...

but then, he and I

were close together.

He wasn't skating

in a very advanced way...

but nor was I,

if it comes to that.

He fell...

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