Hawking Page #3

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is at stake here.

Alright, alright, I'll do it.

One gin and tonic and I think that's -

Excuse me, have you got the time please?

I make it half past seven.

What time do you make it?

- You already know the time.

- I know my time.

Are you trying to be funny?

Time's not a universal quantity.

We used to think that it was, we used to think that it was just there,

marching on at the same pace for everyone everywhere,...

...like a railway track that stretched to infinity.

Time was eternal. Now we know that it isn't.

- Wow.

- You have to know this is incredibly important.

Time's not a background thing,

it's not an absolute, it can switch,

everything else is measured. It's dynamic.

- Dynamic?

- Active.

- Active?

- Wonderful.

If you were to travel East very very quickly -

- Out of sight, to the Far East?

- The Far far East.

Oh completely out of sight.

Yes, completely out of sight. And I stayed here

your time would slow down relative to mine.

- Like I'd get really really slow...

- If you went very very fast.

If I went very very fast,

I'd get really really slow.

Your time would, relative to mine.

Totally out of sight.

Time's very important.

- What star sign are you?

- What? I don't know.

- You alright?

- Fine.

- Beer?

- Yes please.

Did you want another?

Who is that?

Roger Penrose. Brilliant brain.

He'll be a professor within three years.

Sorry, could I?

The thing is just then, um...

I was thinking about

mathematics and not beer,

and sometimes when I'm thinking

in a number of different dimensions

I can't come back very

quickly to words and beer,

and whether I want more of it.

It's because of the

pictures in my head, uh...

I don't know how to make

the words come. You see...

- Pint or...?

- Yes, please.

Poor orchestration, overly romantic,

Wagner despised him.

The feeling was mutual.

- What?

- Brahms despised Wagner.

Well you can't get compare the two.

For one thing the...

- Stephen!

- Yes?

Hello.

Hello.

- Are you alright?

- I'm fine.

- Denmark's a prison.

- Then is the world one.

A goodly one; in which there are many confines,

wards and dungeons. Denmark being o' of the worst.

We think not so, my Lord.

Why then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing

either good or bad, but thinking makes it so:

to me it is a prison.

Why then your ambition makes it one;

'tis too narrow for your mind.

Oh God, I cold be bounded in a nut shell,

and count myself a king of infinite space,

were it not that I have bad dreams.

What are you thinking?

- I was...thinking about Einstein and relativity.

- Oh!

- And stars.

- Oh.

It's possible for a perfect star to collapse into nothingness.

If it's a perfect sphere then it can collapse

and become infinitely dense,

so dense that everything is pulled down into nothing.

But the conditions have to be right.

What conditions?

If it is a perfect sphere, if the place be very moving,

if the evening's very beautiful, the conditions have to be ideal.

It's possible for the pull of gravity

to stop everything escaping.

Everything in nothing.

- Oh no!

- Wasn't that bad, was it?

My bag, I left it in the theatre.

Ah...

Shall we?

Oh we can see a star, look.

There, you see?

Found it!

Hamlet doesn't act. That's his fatal flaw,

if he acted, if he did something -

- It would be a shorter play.

- He'd save his life.

Everybody wants Fred.

I've been thinking about a subject for you.

- Faraday rotation.

- Boring.

- Mach's principle?

- Formulations I've seen are not well defined.

- They're my formulations.

- Action!

The universe expands.

As galaxies move apart, new galaxies are formed

to fill the gaps left behind.

The new replaces the old at just the right rate.

Nothing changes.

Wherever you are in the universe; Andromeda,

Mars or Scarborough, it always looks the same.

Because it is the same.

I want to do something significant.

The universe is a steady state universe.

- It is very attractive, steady state, right?

- Cut! Thank you.

- And reassuring.

- Yes.

Maybe it's attractive because its reassuring.

Emotionally its far harder to conceive of a universe that's started,

a universe that hasn't always been around.

- Einstein?

- Look what he did when his work looked

like it was predicting there was a beginning to the universe.

He ran away from the prospect to the beginning.

No because he saw that the beginning would mean

a breakdown of all the laws of science.

How can science explain something that isn't there?

That's the thing about the idea of a Big Bang.

The thing about the idea of a Big Bang

is that it's wrong. Irrational and wrong.

It's my term, Big Bang. I made it up.

Do you know why I called it that?

Because it sounds like a cartoon.

Big Bang theory is cartoon physics.

Dennis agrees, with me, don't you Dennis?

Lunch?

- The Pope was a Big Bang man.

- Because?

Because before the Big Bang, there was nothing!

No space, no time, no matter.

No science, no rules, which leaves room for guess who?

Lord God almighty.

Religion is the enemy of science, young man.

If Catholicism had its way, we would all still be living

on a flat Earth at the centre of the universe

with hell down below and heaven just somewhere

to the left of the moon.

This is 1963. God is dead.

Stay away from Big Bangs,

cartoons are bad for you.

- White dielectric material.

- I'm sorry?

Lots of it. Inside the antenna horn.

It had to be it. It had to be the cause of the hiss.

- White dielectric material?

- Yes.

Pigeon sh*t. All over the horn.

- You know what we did?

- Unbelievable.

- What did you do?

- We posted them.

- The pigeons?

- We posted the pigeons.

The people we work for had internal mail

and offices all over America.

We posted the pigeons as far away

as we could send them.

- Did it work?

- They came home.

- They were homing pigeons.

- They weren't ready to leave.

So what did you do?

- He....he, um...

- We...had the pigeons shot.

- No, Bob had the pigeons shot.

- You killed the pigeons?

- A technician.

- A technician killed the pigeons.

And then we cleared out all the white

dielectric material from inside the horn.

On our hands and knees in our white lab coats,

inside the horn scraping away the white stuff.

- And?

- The pigeons were innocent.

The hiss was still there.

The pigeon sh*t was not the hiss.

Is that alright? Can I say that on television?

What am I doing wrong Dennis?

- Dennis?

- Yeah.

- Do you hink I could have some more paper?

- Dennis's study. You know where it is.

It's Stephen. I think they're gonna

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