Hawking Page #2

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- Pointing at the stars.

And picking up the hiss.

And at the first time I saw that horn,

you know what?

- Well, they flew right out of her.

- Who?

The pigeons.

The twenty foot horn had a couple of pigeons living inside it.

- Pigeons?

- Pigeons!

What was it for, the 20 foot horn?

Apart from pigeon nesting.

We wanted to measure noise

from the outer edges of the Milky Way.

- Arno built a cold load.

- What's that?

- Five imperial gallons of liquid helium.

- You know how much helium that is?

It's a hell of a quantity of helium.

Gives you an unbelievably accurate reference

against which you can measure the noise you receive.

Arno was very precise.

He makes these things better than anyone.

- Maybe it's the German in me.

- You're German?

First six years of my life and a big chunk

of my temperament.

Bob made a great switch.

To connect the receiver alternately to the antenna

and the cold load reference.

Were you born in Germany?

- When? The 1940's?

- No. 1930's.

Noise is heat.

The higher the heat the more intense the noise.

You may wanna ask, did we get noise?

We got a lot of noise. Which means a lot of heat.

Far more than a Milky Way should have given us.

That was our work from then on in.

Day after day, what's all this heat?

What the hell is this hiss?!

Died in the night, poor lamb.

What's happening to me?

- Usually, I would sit down with the patient and his family

- Please.

Motor neurone disease.

What, what is it, what happens?

Motor neurones in the brain,

which signal movement, they are dying.

So?

The brain stops telling muscles to move, the signal's not sent,

the muscles are not used, so they waste away slowly.

- How slowly?

- Muscle wastage causes immobility.

- How slowly?

- It's gradual paralysis.

And then, then what?

The respiratory muscles unlike most other muscles,

work automatically.

- Breathing.

- Yes. They don't waste away so quickly.

- But they do, they do waste away.

- Yes.

So what, I won't be able to breathe properly?

Or I won't be able to breathe at all,

something like, um, drowning?

What about the brain, I mean the brain itself?

Untouched.

The brain is left untouched.

He's young, that'll work in his favour.

Frank?

I remember when he was about eight years old

and we were in the garden with a telescope.

And Stephen said to me:

where do stars come from?

I didn't know the answer.

And you called him into bed and...

...he wanted to know the answer to his question very badly.

And I said not to worry,

I'd find out for him.

I never did.

- You've never been a sentimental man, Frank.

- No.

- I don't think we can afford for you to start now.

- I looked it up.

The younger you are when you get motor neurone disease,

the quicker the deterioration.

Being young is a

...is a bad thing Isobel.

Two years probably, no more.

- Then we must support him.

- Yes.

You do it by carrying on!

You do it, by living and carrying on!

He's going back to Cambridge, to his life.

- Do you know what Hoyle says?

- What?

If you could drive the car straight upwards,

you'd reach space in half an hour.

How long to drive around the Milky Way?

You multiply the diameter of the galaxy

by the distance of one light year.

- Easy.

- The calculation?

The car. Just been to India and back, remember?

- How long does it take to complete a PhD?

- Depends on the subject.

- With the fair-wind?

- With the fair-wind and a good brain, two years.

- What's the name of your supervisor?

- Sciama. Dennis Sciama.

5 869 713,6 million miles - around the Milky Way.

The heat we were receiving from out there,

should have been two degrees colder than the cold load, the reference.

- But it was hotter, three degrees hotter.

- Hotter than the Milky Way could produce.

Hotter than the sum of all the galaxies beyond.

So we think..

It had to be something closer to home.

We had an idea. Was that you who had the idea?

I don't remember. Oh we had a whole laundry list of ideas.

Maybe it was me. Maybe it was you.

You were a team.

- Maybe it was me.

- What was the idea?

There was some high-altitude bomb testing back in the 50's.

Maybe it's the leftover radiation, maybe our hiss is fallout.

But it would've diminished over the time

and what we were getting

- Totally constant. No diminishing.

- Back to the laundry list.

Sciama.

Dennis, yes.

I don't know. S-H-A-R-M-A?

Um, I think it's Italian.

Dennis Sciama?

- Yes?

- Frank Hawking.

Hello, young man.

- Do I know you?

- Stephen Hawking.

- I applied for you to supervise my PhD.

- Too busy was I?

Yes I think so.

- Brains, balls and cash.

- I'm sorry?

Physics, in this country, it's a battlefield and a bloody one.

You need brains, which ought to be enough, but it isn't cause you need cash

to fund whatever you're brain's working on,...

...and to get cash out of anyone in this country you need balls,

because they'll try and stop you.

You'll see.

You found a subject?

Any ideas?

- I don't know yet.

- Well when you do, remember this.

You'll have to fight for what you believe in

tooth and nail or the buggers will stop you.

Physics means everything to him.

I want him to be happy, Mr. Sciama.

- What can I do?

- I want you to set him a question that he can...finish.

Something easy enough for him to finishbefore he dies.

Could you do that? Please?

My students and my science are everything to me.

I try to be true to both.

Which is why I can't do what you ask me Dr. Hawking.

I'm sorry.

Cosmology. The ghetto science.

All speculation and no proof.

The ghetto science?

How did we get here, where are we going,

what is time?

- It asks all the big questions.

- Stephen!

Have you got a subject?

Have you brought a big idea back with you?

- No.

- Plenty of time. Plenty of time.

The greatest achievement of physics

in the twentieth century -

Rutherford, Oppenheimer, what have they given us?

The atomic bomb?

What's the point in asking, how we got here

and where are we going,

if Einstein and your mob

have already got us ready for anything.

Blaming Einstein for that is like blaming Isaac Newton

for plane crashes because he discovered gravity.

Very clever, very smart.

But smartness isn't the real world, is it?

- Cosmologists aren't interested in the real world.

- You see that girl?

- What about her?

- Stephen's going to make her fall in love with him.

- Using only Einstein's theory of relativity.

- What???

- A pound says it can't be done.

- I really don't think this is a good idea.

The honour and integrity of our entire subject

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