Hawking (2004) Movie Script
It has to be back to the beginning.
Is that what he's doing?
Yes, yes.
Good.
One thing I have to
know before we start.
When did you meet him?
Back then?
In 1963 you're talking about.
What did you make of him?
We didn't. We didn't meet him.
He was in England,
we were in New Jersey.
Wait a minute
We didn't even know he existed.
Did we know he existed?
We had no idea who he was,
Stephen Hawking. Who's he?
- Fifteen years ago Bob.
- Can you believe it?
- Time flies, huh...
There was no beginning of the universe.
Past, present, future, the universe has always existed,
and it always will.
- Stephen?
- It stays the same.
Stephen?!
What is it?
What is it??
OK wait, how long we got here?
I don't wanna be late, Arno Penzias was
late for his Nobel Prize? I don't think so.
- Are we filming now?
- Yes.
I swear to you, that this is the most profound thing
you will hear in your entire life.
The sound or the story?
The sound or the story?
What's the difference?
There you are. Your mother sent me to find you.
--a new matter, which is being created to replace old matter,
this process has always existed and will continue forever.
Nothing changes,
nothing has ever changed.
It's my theory.
And I've given it a name.
I've called it "steady state".
- Good night.
- Good night professor Hoyle.
That's Hoyle?
That's Hoyle.
- Hello.
- Hello. Who are you?
I'm Jane Wilde.
- We haven't, have we?
- No.
I'm a friend of Stephen's.
We met at another party and
he invited me to this party.
Isobel!
Hello.
- How are you?
- Fine.
Good. You?
- I'm still fine, thanks!
- Sorry.
Your um.your...
Oh no, thanks. Thank you very much.
- Oh, they're a terrible fiddle, aren't they.
- Yes. Terrible.
Thanks.
Stephen!
It's a party. People might want to dance.
You can't dance to Wagner.
To Stephen!
Happy birthday.
- Should we go outside?
- What?
It makes me feel...small. Very small.
All that out there. Us, here.
Don't worry. Galileo was wrong.
St. Albans is absolutely the centre of the universe.
- Galileo died, 321 years ago today.
- On your birthday?
Changed the way we
thought about everything.
People are frightened of change.
My father and I used to come out here
in the middle of the night to look at stars.
I actually saw a star die once.
Course it actually happened about 200 000 years ago,
but the news didn't reach St. Albans until 1956 - light's fast, but it isn't that fast.
Sorry. Physics.
They're all so far away.
But they don't seem it, I mean,
you feel like you might stretch and reach
and you might just touch them.
Better hurry up with your stretching and reaching
because they're getting further away.
What?
The galaxy is moving away from us.
The closer ones at about six million miles an hour
and the distant ones at about two hundred million miles an hour.
I believe in God.
- Oh sorry, I just wanted to say it, I don't know why.
- It's alright.
You said you felt small. Does God make you feel less small?
There's nothing wrong with feeling in science, feeling matters.
All the best ideas are felt and argued about later.
Einstein said he could feel in his little finger
if an idea was right.
- So you're in good company. And you like Wagner.
- Actually...
- No, I don't. I think he's ...
- What?
Pompous. And ridiculous.
- Who do you like then?
- Rachmaninoff.
- What?
- Nothing.
Brahms?
- Stephen?
- I didn't say anything.
- The Beatles.
- Who?
- Nevermind.
- Jane?
Yes?
- Please, please me.
- What?
Love me, do.
We should go in.
- I can't get up.
- Come on.
- I can't!
- Very funny!
I can't get up Jane!
I'll go and get help.
Hello? Jane? Hello? Can you hear me?
- What's wrong with you?
- I can't get up.
Well, give me your hand.
- Will it hurt?
- The truth? Yes.
A little bit more.
That's good. Now hold, hold still.
This might be a little bit more uncomfortable.
- How old are you Stephen?
- I'm 21.
- How old are You?
- I'm older than you.
- How much older?
- I'm 33.
Same age as Marilyn Monroe in Some like it hot.
And what do you do?
Oh no, wait let me guess. Umm, insurance salesman?
Or banking maybe?
- I'm aI'm a cosmologist.
- Oh, good for you!
Just started my PhD.
Or rather I've just started to think about
what my PhD might be.
Now this will take about five minutes.
Sometimes it helps to talk about something completely different.
To take your mind off all this.
And then your time suspended in space will pass more quickly.
- Time and space do not exist independently of each other.
- Is that so?
Or the universe.
Really?
Matter and energy in the universe warp and distort space-time.
Space-time's curved.
Hello?
No. No, we don't know.
Lots of tests.
Yes he is. Goodbye.
- Who was it?
- The girl from the party.
The x-ray of your spine with the dye in shows
that you don't have anything pressing on your spinal cord.
- That's good isn't it?
- It's a process of elimination.
You were a team.
I mean you're both getting the Nobel Prize this evening.
I put him up for the job.
And they wouldn't let me in on an interview.
So I loitered around.
And when Bob and the interview committee came out
doing their handshakes
and thank you for coming and we'll let you know, I moved in.
You gave him the job, right?
You gave Bob the job, didn't you?
There was this kind of embarrassed pause,
so I told them straight.
Bob and I are gonna walk down the corridor right here
and right out that door right there.
And if you don't want Bob to have a job that he was born to do,
then you call it before we go through that door.
- Longest walk of my life.
- Sixty two paces.
And we never looked back.
- They won't tell me what they're thinking.
- Doctors don't.
- They don't know themselves yet.
- I'm a doctor, Isobel, I know what they're like.
- You're tropical disease expert, dad.
- I know doctors!
- What Isobel?
- Nothing.
I'll arrange for you to have a private room.
No.
I'll stay on the ward like everyone else.
So, have you applied for Oxford or Cambridge?
They don't want me.
I was thinking of Westfield.
It's an all ladies college.
On the Burton model, I suppose.
And..and it's quite
Scrabble. Let's play scrabble.
Leukaemia.
He's twelve.
It was beautiful.
I came out of the woods and there it was.
A perfect piece of equipment.
The antenna.
A great big horn like a gramophone horn
lying on its side.
The size of a house.
In the middle of a field, on a hill,
20 miles out of New York City.
- Picking up the hiss.
- 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
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 shit. 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 shit 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
like each other, you watch.
Another lunch of advanced theoretical physics.
- Hello.
- Hello.
Tomatoes. Could you? Thin slices.
- Hello. Roger Penrose.
- Yes, I know.
Have you two met?
Prosciutto. Help yourselves.
Mozart could go to sleep and wake up with whole symphonies
in his head and no idea how they got there.
A whole symphony in his head, complete.
How can that be?
Music is temporal. How can you pack a whole
symphony into just one moment?
Well maybe it's because music is a way of thinking
that is way beyond language.
Maybe that's what genius is.
Thinking without time.
All roads lead to physics.
I think thought, mathematical thought,
can exist completely without words.
I don't think thinking is verbal.
In fact, I think words come in the way.
I think you can do it without words.
Poets have always been obsessed with time.
- Shrinking it, controlling it, stopping it.
- T. S. Eliot?
"Time present and time past are both perhaps
present in time future,
and time future contained
in time past."
Rupert Brooke:
"Stands the church clock still at ten to three?"
Blake: "To see a world in grain of sand
and a heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour."
- L. I. Merick.
- Who?
"There was a young lady named Bright,
whose speed was faster than light.
She set out one day in a relative way
and returned on the previous night."
- It's unstable.
- Sorry?
- Go on.
- It's unstable.
You need a negative energy field in order to create
the new matter, which makes it unstable.
- Hoyle's steady state?
- It's problem, isn't it?
Isn't it?
- You like Hawking very much, don't you?
- Hm.
- Will he have the time?
- What?
Does he have enough time left to get what he's after?
I hope so.
A time-symmetric new theory of gravity.
It's brilliant. Hoyle at his best.
- Did you start as his PhD student?
- Are you after my job?
- Did you?
- Are you?
- No.
- Yes. He's a great scientist.
His work on the production of uranium inside
stars is - what's the word...
Beautiful. And so is this.
I do the checking. It should be refereed by a committee
but Hoyle doesn't have time.
Can I see it?
- I have to go.
- Just give me a few more minutes.
- I have to go now.
- Leave it with me.
- OK, but don't -
- What? Eat it?
Just leave it on my desk.
Up early?
- Are you alright?
- Yes, fine.
You look like you've had a wild night.
Something like that.
So the Royal Society this afternoon?
- You're giving the paper today?
- Yes.
You remember Stephen Hawking?
The new theory we have formulated differs
in its global implications from the usual theory in that,
whereas in the usual theory the negative sign at the constant
of proportionality which appers in the field equations,
is chosen arbitrarily.
In the new theory, there's no such ambiguity.
The sign must be minus, and further the magnitude of g
follows on from a determination of the mean density of matter,
thereby enabling the cosmologist to know
how hard he'll hit the ground if he falls off a cliff.
Any questions?
You want to say something young man?
Your calculation is wrong.
The advanced field diverges.
- The advanced field does not diverge.
- I'm afraid it does. It's all wrong.
Would you like to tell us how you know this,
young man?
I worked it out.
- You worked it out during the lecture?
- No, I had a privileged early glimpse at the paper.
- Who put you up to that?
- What?
That stunt in there. Who put you up to it, eh?
- Somebody's put you up to sabotaging me.
- It's just wrong, that's all. I had to say it, didn't I?
The physics is wrong.
Why did you show him the paper?
I hate them being shown to any bugger.
- Science isn't theatre.
- It needed to be said.
In that way?
How long has it been, since you've started with me?
- You don't like the idea of me attacking steady state theory...
- You didn't answer my question.
- ...because you're a steady state man yourself.
- OK, I'll answer it for you. Twelve months.
- So the idea of me attacking the steady state theory...
-My father ran a cotton mill.
When I was twenty-one, I told him
I wanted to be a physicist. He hated the idea.
He wanted me to take over the business from him.
So he told me that I couldn't be a physicist,
unless I got a fellowship to pay for it.
He thought I wouldn't get it.
He thought I would buckle.
- And I worked like a dog...
- What does this have to do with me attacking steady state...
I know what it is like to have obstacles in your path.
I know what it's like to be told you can't do something.
That's why I became a teacher.
I would never, ever stop a student of mine from pursuing
something because I didn't agree with their opinion. Never.
I know you can do more than make
brilliant attacks on others.
Do something! All of your own.
Be original.
Look out!
Maybe it's New York!
- Maybe the hiss is New York we said.
- New York? How?
We figured, that if any city in the world can give you
three degress of hot radio noise, it must be the Big Apple.
My family alone could probably make this much hiss.
- We were struggling to think what else it could be.
- You were guessing?
How could we claim to be making very sensitive radio astronomy
measurements, with all that manmade stuff around.
We pointed the antenna at New York City,
all that energy spread out across the northern horizon;
arcing from subway rails, hum from power lines,
the radar amplifier at Kennedy Airport spewing out radio noise by the kilowatt.
And I'm thinking, just maybe, just maybe, this town,
this town of all towns might crank up three degrees of hiss.
You said you were from Germany.
When did you leave Germany?
Maybe we should stop filming?
I came to America when I was six years old.
We lived in a two room apartment in the garment district.
Me, my brother and my parents and
the cockroaches in the kitchen.
We were poor.
That's why I became a physicist. Not to get rich,
not to win the Nobel, to stop being poor.
New York wasn't it. We pointed the 20 foot horn
at the city and it gave us a reasonable amount but -
- Not enough heat.
- Not enough.
To win the Nobel Prize, you
have to find something. Am I right?
It's not about thinking,
or theory...
- It's about discovery.
- But do you have to be looking for the thing that you find?
Science can be slow work.
It's hardly ever about Eureka moments in the bath.
You need precision, tenacity, dedication.
German talents.
Your visitor, Mr. Hawking.
He wouldn't let me out of sight, not once.
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.
It's the platform for Cambridge.
Nobody else knows it's there
apart from...
- Cambridge types.
- Backwards. Backwards!
-Yes dear.
- You reverse time, of course!
- You reverse the direction of time.
- Yes.
- Are you a Cambridge type?
- Yes. And I love you deeply and forever.
Roger!
Roger Penrose!
Stop!
- You all right?
- What would it all look like?
- What?
- What if Einstein was right ?!
- About what?
- Pencil! And some paper!
Chalk.
- Time-space diagram. What comes first?
- Space. Time?
You have to think about reversing
the direction of time.
Time going the other way.
- What? What for?
- Go on, don't stop! Go on!
- Now, the present us.
- Here we are, looking back through time.
- Light, dense matter, in space.
- Warping space-time?
Causing the light rays, bending the light rays
towards the centre.
Look, the past is pear shaped.
What are you saying?
What if the whole of the universe were trapped
in a region whose boundaries reached to zero.
A singularity, nothingness?
Your theory works for collapsing dying stars.
It proves that a singularity must exist.
What if it works for this? Could it work Roger?
What would it mean if it did?
- A collapse in reverse.
- Which is?
An explosion!
Bang!
- Trinity Hall.
- Sorry what?
- Trinity Hall!
- What are you saying?
Write it down.
Why don't you write it down?
- Trinity Hall!
- I'm sorry mate.
- Trinity Hall.
- Oh, right! What's the matter with him?
- Have you heard of Bishop Usher?
- Seventeenth century.
He calculated the date
of the start of the universe.
- How?
- By adding up all the ages of people in the Old Testament.
- And how old is the universe?
- It started at some point at the night
of 22nd October 4004 BC.
- So old!
- So old.
There's something I want to ask you.
Where was I going when I saw you at the station?
No...
Stephen?
- Are you all right?
- Fine.
The thing is...
I was wondering...
...whether you consider marrying me.
- You probably want time to think about it.
- I love you.
Does that mean you're about to say no?
Time.
Time to think.
- Stephen.
- Not now, John.
Think about time going in the opposite direction.
What?
Singularities.
A collapse, everything into nothing, yes?
So reverse the time, so the collapse
is an explosion.
- Nothing into everything.
- You're talking stars.
No, no, I'm not talking about stars.
I'm talking about the beginning
of the universe.
That Roger Penrose.
Clever of me to find him.
- I told you you could help him.
- He helped himself I think.
- That's your other talent.
- What?
Preposterous modesty.
There you are. Where have you been?
Dennis Sciama wants to see you.
He semed very serious.
The first three chapters...
...nothing special.
The fourth...
Mozart.
Oh! Hello.
- Jane, women waren't allowed.
- No, not allowed. Against the rules!
I...I'll go.
Hello.
Goodbye.
I, er...
I have to go and see the bursar at Caius.
They've given me a fellowship.
Are you coming?
It's the same rule for everyone at Caius.
No special treatment when it comes to housing.
- I'm not like all the rest.
- That's what they all say.
You listen to me. And listen very carefully.
This man cannot walk upstairs.
His illness won't allow it
and his illness will get worse.
He needs housing with easy access
and you are going to find it for him,
because if you don't all the newspapers
will hear about how the bursar of this college
treats a man of huge courage, a brilliant mind
and a capacity to imagine faith like...
like a piece of nothing.
Do you understand me?
And he's going to be my husband.
What he's done is to make Einstein work.
He's made Einstein...
There's a word that physicists like to use
very occasionally.
"Beautiful."
He's made Einstein beautiful.
Yes but what...
What has he done?
Your son has opened up something which I thought,
we all thought, was closed.
Einstein appeared to be predicting it
and then he turned away.
There could have been a beginning.
The universe...
... may not always have been here.
If you are right, which you are not,
there should be some left over radiation from the Big Bang
and somebody should have heard it.
But they haven't, have they?
I wonder why that could be?
Could it be because it isn't there?
Where's the fossil, Hawking?
Where's the fossil?
We have to go.
It connects, do you understand?
It goes right through Dachau.
Right through childhood.
Right through cockroaches and suitcases
and right through America and the American dream,
which I have lived.
Do you understand me?
This noise...
...this goddamn beautiful hiss...
...it connects.
It's the sound of the beginning of time.
The leftover heat from the Big Bang.
The three degrees that hasn't cooled yet.
It's everywhere.
- It's all around us.
- It's fifteen billion years old.
- And we found it.
- That's our discovery.
We have to go get the prize, Arno.
- What was there before the Big Bang?
- Whatever it was, it wasn't time, or space, or matter.
- There's room for God.
- Yes, in theory.
So what now?
I'm going to eat crme brulee
and a huge number of chocolate truffles.
And fight very hard to get you to see
how wonderful Wagner is, and how Brahms is not so wonderful.
I meant with work.
A theory of everything. I have been looking
at the very big,
and now I want to look into very small,
and see how one may unify gravity and quantum mechanics.
- And how long might this theory of everything take?
- Twenty years, no more than that.
- That fast?
- That fast.
I belive in the possible.
I believe, small though we are,
insignificant though we may be,
we can reach a full understanding
of the universe.
You were right when you said
you felt small looking up at all that out there.
We are very, very small,
but we are profoundly capable of very, very big things.
Where are you going?
Things to do.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
A Big White Wolf, rosehipsyrup and kate221b
Is that what he's doing?
Yes, yes.
Good.
One thing I have to
know before we start.
When did you meet him?
Back then?
In 1963 you're talking about.
What did you make of him?
We didn't. We didn't meet him.
He was in England,
we were in New Jersey.
Wait a minute
We didn't even know he existed.
Did we know he existed?
We had no idea who he was,
Stephen Hawking. Who's he?
- Fifteen years ago Bob.
- Can you believe it?
- Time flies, huh...
There was no beginning of the universe.
Past, present, future, the universe has always existed,
and it always will.
- Stephen?
- It stays the same.
Stephen?!
What is it?
What is it??
OK wait, how long we got here?
I don't wanna be late, Arno Penzias was
late for his Nobel Prize? I don't think so.
- Are we filming now?
- Yes.
I swear to you, that this is the most profound thing
you will hear in your entire life.
The sound or the story?
The sound or the story?
What's the difference?
There you are. Your mother sent me to find you.
--a new matter, which is being created to replace old matter,
this process has always existed and will continue forever.
Nothing changes,
nothing has ever changed.
It's my theory.
And I've given it a name.
I've called it "steady state".
- Good night.
- Good night professor Hoyle.
That's Hoyle?
That's Hoyle.
- Hello.
- Hello. Who are you?
I'm Jane Wilde.
- We haven't, have we?
- No.
I'm a friend of Stephen's.
We met at another party and
he invited me to this party.
Isobel!
Hello.
- How are you?
- Fine.
Good. You?
- I'm still fine, thanks!
- Sorry.
Your um.your...
Oh no, thanks. Thank you very much.
- Oh, they're a terrible fiddle, aren't they.
- Yes. Terrible.
Thanks.
Stephen!
It's a party. People might want to dance.
You can't dance to Wagner.
To Stephen!
Happy birthday.
- Should we go outside?
- What?
It makes me feel...small. Very small.
All that out there. Us, here.
Don't worry. Galileo was wrong.
St. Albans is absolutely the centre of the universe.
- Galileo died, 321 years ago today.
- On your birthday?
Changed the way we
thought about everything.
People are frightened of change.
My father and I used to come out here
in the middle of the night to look at stars.
I actually saw a star die once.
Course it actually happened about 200 000 years ago,
but the news didn't reach St. Albans until 1956 - light's fast, but it isn't that fast.
Sorry. Physics.
They're all so far away.
But they don't seem it, I mean,
you feel like you might stretch and reach
and you might just touch them.
Better hurry up with your stretching and reaching
because they're getting further away.
What?
The galaxy is moving away from us.
The closer ones at about six million miles an hour
and the distant ones at about two hundred million miles an hour.
I believe in God.
- Oh sorry, I just wanted to say it, I don't know why.
- It's alright.
You said you felt small. Does God make you feel less small?
There's nothing wrong with feeling in science, feeling matters.
All the best ideas are felt and argued about later.
Einstein said he could feel in his little finger
if an idea was right.
- So you're in good company. And you like Wagner.
- Actually...
- No, I don't. I think he's ...
- What?
Pompous. And ridiculous.
- Who do you like then?
- Rachmaninoff.
- What?
- Nothing.
Brahms?
- Stephen?
- I didn't say anything.
- The Beatles.
- Who?
- Nevermind.
- Jane?
Yes?
- Please, please me.
- What?
Love me, do.
We should go in.
- I can't get up.
- Come on.
- I can't!
- Very funny!
I can't get up Jane!
I'll go and get help.
Hello? Jane? Hello? Can you hear me?
- What's wrong with you?
- I can't get up.
Well, give me your hand.
- Will it hurt?
- The truth? Yes.
A little bit more.
That's good. Now hold, hold still.
This might be a little bit more uncomfortable.
- How old are you Stephen?
- I'm 21.
- How old are You?
- I'm older than you.
- How much older?
- I'm 33.
Same age as Marilyn Monroe in Some like it hot.
And what do you do?
Oh no, wait let me guess. Umm, insurance salesman?
Or banking maybe?
- I'm aI'm a cosmologist.
- Oh, good for you!
Just started my PhD.
Or rather I've just started to think about
what my PhD might be.
Now this will take about five minutes.
Sometimes it helps to talk about something completely different.
To take your mind off all this.
And then your time suspended in space will pass more quickly.
- Time and space do not exist independently of each other.
- Is that so?
Or the universe.
Really?
Matter and energy in the universe warp and distort space-time.
Space-time's curved.
Hello?
No. No, we don't know.
Lots of tests.
Yes he is. Goodbye.
- Who was it?
- The girl from the party.
The x-ray of your spine with the dye in shows
that you don't have anything pressing on your spinal cord.
- That's good isn't it?
- It's a process of elimination.
You were a team.
I mean you're both getting the Nobel Prize this evening.
I put him up for the job.
And they wouldn't let me in on an interview.
So I loitered around.
And when Bob and the interview committee came out
doing their handshakes
and thank you for coming and we'll let you know, I moved in.
You gave him the job, right?
You gave Bob the job, didn't you?
There was this kind of embarrassed pause,
so I told them straight.
Bob and I are gonna walk down the corridor right here
and right out that door right there.
And if you don't want Bob to have a job that he was born to do,
then you call it before we go through that door.
- Longest walk of my life.
- Sixty two paces.
And we never looked back.
- They won't tell me what they're thinking.
- Doctors don't.
- They don't know themselves yet.
- I'm a doctor, Isobel, I know what they're like.
- You're tropical disease expert, dad.
- I know doctors!
- What Isobel?
- Nothing.
I'll arrange for you to have a private room.
No.
I'll stay on the ward like everyone else.
So, have you applied for Oxford or Cambridge?
They don't want me.
I was thinking of Westfield.
It's an all ladies college.
On the Burton model, I suppose.
And..and it's quite
Scrabble. Let's play scrabble.
Leukaemia.
He's twelve.
It was beautiful.
I came out of the woods and there it was.
A perfect piece of equipment.
The antenna.
A great big horn like a gramophone horn
lying on its side.
The size of a house.
In the middle of a field, on a hill,
20 miles out of New York City.
- Picking up the hiss.
- 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
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 shit. 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 shit 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
like each other, you watch.
Another lunch of advanced theoretical physics.
- Hello.
- Hello.
Tomatoes. Could you? Thin slices.
- Hello. Roger Penrose.
- Yes, I know.
Have you two met?
Prosciutto. Help yourselves.
Mozart could go to sleep and wake up with whole symphonies
in his head and no idea how they got there.
A whole symphony in his head, complete.
How can that be?
Music is temporal. How can you pack a whole
symphony into just one moment?
Well maybe it's because music is a way of thinking
that is way beyond language.
Maybe that's what genius is.
Thinking without time.
All roads lead to physics.
I think thought, mathematical thought,
can exist completely without words.
I don't think thinking is verbal.
In fact, I think words come in the way.
I think you can do it without words.
Poets have always been obsessed with time.
- Shrinking it, controlling it, stopping it.
- T. S. Eliot?
"Time present and time past are both perhaps
present in time future,
and time future contained
in time past."
Rupert Brooke:
"Stands the church clock still at ten to three?"
Blake: "To see a world in grain of sand
and a heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour."
- L. I. Merick.
- Who?
"There was a young lady named Bright,
whose speed was faster than light.
She set out one day in a relative way
and returned on the previous night."
- It's unstable.
- Sorry?
- Go on.
- It's unstable.
You need a negative energy field in order to create
the new matter, which makes it unstable.
- Hoyle's steady state?
- It's problem, isn't it?
Isn't it?
- You like Hawking very much, don't you?
- Hm.
- Will he have the time?
- What?
Does he have enough time left to get what he's after?
I hope so.
A time-symmetric new theory of gravity.
It's brilliant. Hoyle at his best.
- Did you start as his PhD student?
- Are you after my job?
- Did you?
- Are you?
- No.
- Yes. He's a great scientist.
His work on the production of uranium inside
stars is - what's the word...
Beautiful. And so is this.
I do the checking. It should be refereed by a committee
but Hoyle doesn't have time.
Can I see it?
- I have to go.
- Just give me a few more minutes.
- I have to go now.
- Leave it with me.
- OK, but don't -
- What? Eat it?
Just leave it on my desk.
Up early?
- Are you alright?
- Yes, fine.
You look like you've had a wild night.
Something like that.
So the Royal Society this afternoon?
- You're giving the paper today?
- Yes.
You remember Stephen Hawking?
The new theory we have formulated differs
in its global implications from the usual theory in that,
whereas in the usual theory the negative sign at the constant
of proportionality which appers in the field equations,
is chosen arbitrarily.
In the new theory, there's no such ambiguity.
The sign must be minus, and further the magnitude of g
follows on from a determination of the mean density of matter,
thereby enabling the cosmologist to know
how hard he'll hit the ground if he falls off a cliff.
Any questions?
You want to say something young man?
Your calculation is wrong.
The advanced field diverges.
- The advanced field does not diverge.
- I'm afraid it does. It's all wrong.
Would you like to tell us how you know this,
young man?
I worked it out.
- You worked it out during the lecture?
- No, I had a privileged early glimpse at the paper.
- Who put you up to that?
- What?
That stunt in there. Who put you up to it, eh?
- Somebody's put you up to sabotaging me.
- It's just wrong, that's all. I had to say it, didn't I?
The physics is wrong.
Why did you show him the paper?
I hate them being shown to any bugger.
- Science isn't theatre.
- It needed to be said.
In that way?
How long has it been, since you've started with me?
- You don't like the idea of me attacking steady state theory...
- You didn't answer my question.
- ...because you're a steady state man yourself.
- OK, I'll answer it for you. Twelve months.
- So the idea of me attacking the steady state theory...
-My father ran a cotton mill.
When I was twenty-one, I told him
I wanted to be a physicist. He hated the idea.
He wanted me to take over the business from him.
So he told me that I couldn't be a physicist,
unless I got a fellowship to pay for it.
He thought I wouldn't get it.
He thought I would buckle.
- And I worked like a dog...
- What does this have to do with me attacking steady state...
I know what it is like to have obstacles in your path.
I know what it's like to be told you can't do something.
That's why I became a teacher.
I would never, ever stop a student of mine from pursuing
something because I didn't agree with their opinion. Never.
I know you can do more than make
brilliant attacks on others.
Do something! All of your own.
Be original.
Look out!
Maybe it's New York!
- Maybe the hiss is New York we said.
- New York? How?
We figured, that if any city in the world can give you
three degress of hot radio noise, it must be the Big Apple.
My family alone could probably make this much hiss.
- We were struggling to think what else it could be.
- You were guessing?
How could we claim to be making very sensitive radio astronomy
measurements, with all that manmade stuff around.
We pointed the antenna at New York City,
all that energy spread out across the northern horizon;
arcing from subway rails, hum from power lines,
the radar amplifier at Kennedy Airport spewing out radio noise by the kilowatt.
And I'm thinking, just maybe, just maybe, this town,
this town of all towns might crank up three degrees of hiss.
You said you were from Germany.
When did you leave Germany?
Maybe we should stop filming?
I came to America when I was six years old.
We lived in a two room apartment in the garment district.
Me, my brother and my parents and
the cockroaches in the kitchen.
We were poor.
That's why I became a physicist. Not to get rich,
not to win the Nobel, to stop being poor.
New York wasn't it. We pointed the 20 foot horn
at the city and it gave us a reasonable amount but -
- Not enough heat.
- Not enough.
To win the Nobel Prize, you
have to find something. Am I right?
It's not about thinking,
or theory...
- It's about discovery.
- But do you have to be looking for the thing that you find?
Science can be slow work.
It's hardly ever about Eureka moments in the bath.
You need precision, tenacity, dedication.
German talents.
Your visitor, Mr. Hawking.
He wouldn't let me out of sight, not once.
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.
It's the platform for Cambridge.
Nobody else knows it's there
apart from...
- Cambridge types.
- Backwards. Backwards!
-Yes dear.
- You reverse time, of course!
- You reverse the direction of time.
- Yes.
- Are you a Cambridge type?
- Yes. And I love you deeply and forever.
Roger!
Roger Penrose!
Stop!
- You all right?
- What would it all look like?
- What?
- What if Einstein was right ?!
- About what?
- Pencil! And some paper!
Chalk.
- Time-space diagram. What comes first?
- Space. Time?
You have to think about reversing
the direction of time.
Time going the other way.
- What? What for?
- Go on, don't stop! Go on!
- Now, the present us.
- Here we are, looking back through time.
- Light, dense matter, in space.
- Warping space-time?
Causing the light rays, bending the light rays
towards the centre.
Look, the past is pear shaped.
What are you saying?
What if the whole of the universe were trapped
in a region whose boundaries reached to zero.
A singularity, nothingness?
Your theory works for collapsing dying stars.
It proves that a singularity must exist.
What if it works for this? Could it work Roger?
What would it mean if it did?
- A collapse in reverse.
- Which is?
An explosion!
Bang!
- Trinity Hall.
- Sorry what?
- Trinity Hall!
- What are you saying?
Write it down.
Why don't you write it down?
- Trinity Hall!
- I'm sorry mate.
- Trinity Hall.
- Oh, right! What's the matter with him?
- Have you heard of Bishop Usher?
- Seventeenth century.
He calculated the date
of the start of the universe.
- How?
- By adding up all the ages of people in the Old Testament.
- And how old is the universe?
- It started at some point at the night
of 22nd October 4004 BC.
- So old!
- So old.
There's something I want to ask you.
Where was I going when I saw you at the station?
No...
Stephen?
- Are you all right?
- Fine.
The thing is...
I was wondering...
...whether you consider marrying me.
- You probably want time to think about it.
- I love you.
Does that mean you're about to say no?
Time.
Time to think.
- Stephen.
- Not now, John.
Think about time going in the opposite direction.
What?
Singularities.
A collapse, everything into nothing, yes?
So reverse the time, so the collapse
is an explosion.
- Nothing into everything.
- You're talking stars.
No, no, I'm not talking about stars.
I'm talking about the beginning
of the universe.
That Roger Penrose.
Clever of me to find him.
- I told you you could help him.
- He helped himself I think.
- That's your other talent.
- What?
Preposterous modesty.
There you are. Where have you been?
Dennis Sciama wants to see you.
He semed very serious.
The first three chapters...
...nothing special.
The fourth...
Mozart.
Oh! Hello.
- Jane, women waren't allowed.
- No, not allowed. Against the rules!
I...I'll go.
Hello.
Goodbye.
I, er...
I have to go and see the bursar at Caius.
They've given me a fellowship.
Are you coming?
It's the same rule for everyone at Caius.
No special treatment when it comes to housing.
- I'm not like all the rest.
- That's what they all say.
You listen to me. And listen very carefully.
This man cannot walk upstairs.
His illness won't allow it
and his illness will get worse.
He needs housing with easy access
and you are going to find it for him,
because if you don't all the newspapers
will hear about how the bursar of this college
treats a man of huge courage, a brilliant mind
and a capacity to imagine faith like...
like a piece of nothing.
Do you understand me?
And he's going to be my husband.
What he's done is to make Einstein work.
He's made Einstein...
There's a word that physicists like to use
very occasionally.
"Beautiful."
He's made Einstein beautiful.
Yes but what...
What has he done?
Your son has opened up something which I thought,
we all thought, was closed.
Einstein appeared to be predicting it
and then he turned away.
There could have been a beginning.
The universe...
... may not always have been here.
If you are right, which you are not,
there should be some left over radiation from the Big Bang
and somebody should have heard it.
But they haven't, have they?
I wonder why that could be?
Could it be because it isn't there?
Where's the fossil, Hawking?
Where's the fossil?
We have to go.
It connects, do you understand?
It goes right through Dachau.
Right through childhood.
Right through cockroaches and suitcases
and right through America and the American dream,
which I have lived.
Do you understand me?
This noise...
...this goddamn beautiful hiss...
...it connects.
It's the sound of the beginning of time.
The leftover heat from the Big Bang.
The three degrees that hasn't cooled yet.
It's everywhere.
- It's all around us.
- It's fifteen billion years old.
- And we found it.
- That's our discovery.
We have to go get the prize, Arno.
- What was there before the Big Bang?
- Whatever it was, it wasn't time, or space, or matter.
- There's room for God.
- Yes, in theory.
So what now?
I'm going to eat crme brulee
and a huge number of chocolate truffles.
And fight very hard to get you to see
how wonderful Wagner is, and how Brahms is not so wonderful.
I meant with work.
A theory of everything. I have been looking
at the very big,
and now I want to look into very small,
and see how one may unify gravity and quantum mechanics.
- And how long might this theory of everything take?
- Twenty years, no more than that.
- That fast?
- That fast.
I belive in the possible.
I believe, small though we are,
insignificant though we may be,
we can reach a full understanding
of the universe.
You were right when you said
you felt small looking up at all that out there.
We are very, very small,
but we are profoundly capable of very, very big things.
Where are you going?
Things to do.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
A Big White Wolf, rosehipsyrup and kate221b