Hawking Page #5

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Scared that I might run amok, I think.

Rules, rules, rules.

Penrose lecture at London. Otherwise engaged?

Stephen?

You alright?

- Fine. Fine.

- Oh, your two favourite words.

- Is it alright for me to come?

- Fine.

No it's not your turn.

What are you doing?

It's in the rules, I've croqueted you

so I go again.

- Can you keep doing that?

- Of course I can!

It's what you're supposed to do, get your opponent's

ball as far away from yours as possible and then...

What? What, it's what you

do in croquet!

Go on. The Penrose lecture at London,

it's alright.

Go, now!

Work!

You all have big biceps.

You're right armed.

Because you spend half of your lives scrawling

tonnes of chalk dust, across miles of blackboard.

I...

...don't do that.

I have something magic and wonderful

to tell you about.

It's fast, it's rigorous,

and you don't need big muscles.

It's called topology.

Pictures, not equations.

And nothing moves faster than light.

186 000 miles a second, light is the fastest.

Easily fast enought to overcome

the gravity pull of, say, the Sun,

or the Earth, and escape.

The speed is high enough to get away

from the gravity pulling it back.

What if the Sun were more concentrated?

What if the Sun were collapsing?

The density becomes huge,

the gravity pull enormous.

Now nothing can stop

gravity pulling everything in.

Even light.

A singularity forms.

What is a singularity?

A singularity is a place,

where matter, light, space,

- time -

- everything, fold in on themselves

and disappear.

It's profound and total nothingness.

Everything in nothing.

Up until now all of you people,

with your big biceps and your big equations

have always said: "Oh my big equation

is ending in a singularity, I must be wrong!"

It's what frightened Einstein.

Singularities can't exist because the laws

of science don't allow for them.

- Wrong. Singularities do exist.

- For perfect spheres, for idealised stars.

No. For real stars.

Real stars do it too;

singularities are out there.

There are places were science

and rules break down,

where there is no matter,

no space, nothing.

Where everything, including time,

does not exist.

And when a star collapses,

a singularity is inevitable.

Topology doesn't bother with the messy stuff,

abot particles, and how they move,

it's about how things connect.

- Big thinking.

- Big bold thinking.

It takes you into places

where the rules say you can't go.

And it's fast. You say that it's fast.

I've tried to be truthful with you.

I'm not going to stop now.

There's nothing more we can do.

There's no treatment, Stephen.

I'm sorry.

They've washed their hands of him.

- We've got to carry on, Frank.

- Carry on? Carry on?!

We have to do a lot more

than carry on.

Vitamin B, hydroxycobalamin, steroids.

I haven't washed my hands of you,

they're wrong.

You understand? They're wrong,

the lot of them.

You don't ever talk about his illness.

He doesn't speak about it.

We respect that, it's simple, really.

And what do you think of me?

I mean, what do you think I should do?

Sorry, no that's not fair,

don't answer George.

You probably think I should take myself of back

to St. Albans and look for a nice husband.

I think it's terrific you don't talk about

his illness.

The blue lights are picking up the fluorescence

you get in washing powder,

that is why their shirts are illuminated.

- They're very strange!

- The dresses are new.

They haven't been washed,

so they're not fluorescent.

There you are, you see?

Great scientist.

I can tell you all about how

washing powders react under blue light.

One of the great questions of our time.

Whether Tide or Daz is under blue lights!

Do you want to dance?!

I don't know what you should do.

I know what you want.

- House, garden, children, work.

- A life together.

The impossible.

I've been thinking about Galileo and

what you said about him frightening people.

Imagine what if must have felt like

to be told that the Sun didn't go round the Earth.

Horrible! Or that the Earth isn't flat.

It is, isn't it?

Flat, Jane? Don't tell me it isn't flat.

Oh no, oh no! If you look me in the eye now

and tell me it isn't flat, I don't know what I do.

I'd be - inconsolable, totally desolate.

Stephen!

Did you have any idea what it might be?

Did you think you knew?

Or was it just guessing? Is that what you're

trying to say?

A Nobel Prize for guess work?

Is that the story you're after?

Let me tell you something.

Are we still filming?

Good.

In 1939, my mother and father put me on a train

filled with Jewish children heading to England.

Kinder transport.

Are you ok?

The Nazis were letting some children go.

Not the adults, just some children.

At the station my mother looked in to my face

and said to me to look out for my little brother,

not to let our suitcase out of my sight

and don't lose your name tag.

Arno Penzias, here.

You lose your name tag,

you lose your name and you lose everything.

- And she went.

- How old were you?

- I was six.

- Did you see her again?

I was six, my little brother was five.

She didn't cry.

She made like it was a normal thing,

and not crying was part of that.

Can you imagine how hard

it must have been not to cry?

To put your boys on a train like that

and not to cry?

I've hated suitcases ever since.

He likes to unpack.

My mother and my father got out.

Six months later we sailed for America together.

England saved my life.

America gave me a brand new one.

But I never, I never dreamed of this happening.

We discovered this.

We found this, we discovered this.

What is it?

This clock.

It was fine whe I got it. Then I went to America

and it started to run backwards.

Stops my student getting too

complacent about the nature of time.

- I don't know why I came here, I was just...

- The music.

- Bach didn't finish it.

- He died before he finished it.

But it's so perfect.

Everything he's done before is so perfect.

It doesn't end.

You can hear it after it stops.

Listen.

Can you hear it?

Can you hear it?

I'll see you in Cambridge.

- I thought that was us.

- So did I.

- But it wasn't.

- No, it was them.

Backwards now.

We are having a time of it!

It's this platform, platform one.

It's never straightforward, you know.

You don't know what's going to happen next.

Sometimes I tell my husband about it,

but he doesn't listen.

He just says, it's platform one!

It's a Cambridge platform, of course strange

things are going to happen.

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