type the author or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can also share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> and now kitty ferguson talks about physicist stephen hawking's life and work at princeton university in new jersey. it's about an hour. >> well, it's a pleasure and a privilege to have been invited here to talk to you about stephen hawking and be about, um, my experiences writing a book about him, "stephen hawking, an unfettered mind." some of you may already know

hawking's science well. nearly everybody knows something about him as a person. his disability, his legendary courage, his unlikely celebrity, and then a few ugly rumors about him as well. but he's more than a legend or a celebrity, he actually is a real person. and it's been my luck to get to know him just a little bit. i wouldn't claim, it would be inaccurate to say that i know him well. in fact, i think it might be inaccurate to say that more than two or three people in the world know stephen hawking well, and even they have their doubts. the way he communicates through his computer using very few words which it takes him a long time to produce means there's always something of a distance. um, and his, he, he doesn't give

very much away. he says exactly what he wants to say and no more. further more, he has no body language, and his synthetic computer voice conveys no emotion whatsoever. when you're sitting with him, you often wonder whether he's telling a joke or not. but he does have facial expressions still. and the people who made that star trek episode with him had him playing a poker game with isaac newton, albert einstein and star trek's data. those people were amazed at the variety of his facial expressions. which doesn't sound to me exactly like recommended that highly for a poker game, but evidently he impressed them with that. he's lost some of that mobility since then, but he still has that great, big, wonderful grin. the history of my book, this

book, started 18 months when my publisher in great britain asked me to update a little book that they had published back in 19 91, i think, 20 years ago. called stephen hawking, a quest for a theory of everything. at that time he published that as a little paperback, and it had become a bestseller in britain. what they wanted now was me to add maybe an updated chanter and change it a little bit so that they could make it into an e-book which had never been done before with this book. i began to work on it and soon realized that a little updating and tweaking of those earlier chapters really wasn't going to do it. and i ended up writing a whole new book which cannibalized the first book.

it's not completely complimentary, but he did give his blessing to the writing of it. however, he did not have any control about what i said in it. i did let him read it, of course, and i passed by him all the quotations that would be used in it. but that's the only control he really had over it. but so much had happened since since 1989, so much science, so much new material about relationships in his life, so much new material about events in his life that had happened before 1989 that i had covered somewhat in the old book that this had to be a completely new book. now, the research with this book was not entirely in scientific papers, scientific journals, books, interviews, newspaper articles in britain and america. my husband is an academic, and his field is global studies, global economics, global

history, global, everything to do with globalism. and we have many friends who go on sabbatical. during the 20 years since i wrote that first book about stephen hawking, all these friends sent me clippings about stephen hawking from all over the world. and i stored them away in a box, and last year i got out the box. so that my bibliology my includes things like the south china morning news, the west australian from perth, you might get the impression that kitty ferguson does exhaustive research all over the world, but it's all thanks to those clippings that were sent to me. another slightly unorthodox source was cambridge, england, itself because my husband and i live there for part of every year now, and we have been going there ever since we first went there on sabbatical ourselves in

1986. so we know a lot of people there. and everywhere you go in cambridge, you encounter people who have little stories to tell about stephen hawking. unlike these people, the woman who cuts my hair has relatives who was a carpenter when stephen hawking's wheelchair slipped on the ice and turned over. and this young man was the first to get to him and cover him with a jacket and call the emergency people. a lot of the people at the college who are affiliated with him, carried stephen up and down the stairs there before that college had an el sater. it's not gossip, it's just interesting little incidents. stephen hawking has lived in

that town for 50 years, and it is a small town. one challenge in writing the book was to be certain i was writing the book stephen hawking: unfettered mind, and not the legend of stephen hawking. i think any biographer has an almost irresistible urge to fictionalize their subject, and i do wonder what i did to keepler, right? because it's even more of a problem when it's a historical subject. but there you get all the information together you can, and then you do the best you can. when it's somebody that's still alive, you really have a certain obligation to them to make it a little more real than that, to keep it a little more authentic. and i had the advantage of going in fairly often to talk to him. occasionally, when i had a book

coming out, i'd give him a copy, i would go in with that purpose so that through the years and especially when i was writing this book, i would see him this person. and i would think about what i'd written about him, and be i would think, no, it isn't quite right, i'm fictionalized him a little bit. it's so easy to do. it's just the choice of a word, the tone of a paragraph, the urge to make something just a little more dramatic or a little more funny, and it's so easy to do and so hard to resist. i also felt obliged to respect to a certain extent, to a large extent really, his own interpretation of himself in a way which you wouldn't do of a historical figure. some reviewers have taken me to task for writing an uncritical biography. what they would like, i think,

is the biography i might write 15 years after he died when you really can step back and evaluate a person a little better than you can when they're still alive. but it's not uncritical, it's critical in places. as a matter of fact, i wondered, you know, what he would think of certain -- he's known to get very angry with writers and people who try to interpret his life. but there was no mushroom cloud over cambridge, england, and my invitation to the 70th birthday party was not revoked, so i think it passed muster, or else he didn't read it all. [laughter] now, many be of you know i'm not a mathematician by training. my degrees are in music from the julliard school, and i'm very often asked why it was at age 48 that i suddenly decided to put all that aside and start writing books and lecturing about

science, science history and, um, scientists for the popular market, for intelligent people who aren't scientists. we all hear that there's somehow a connection between music and mathematics, but you don't often hear of a musician deciding to write a science book, it's not unheard of, and some people said perhaps julliard had an outstanding physics department. [laughter] no, that's not the reason, that's not it. i never took physics at julliard, so i don't know. but it was reading a brief history of time that was the watershed in my life. i did understand the book. i had to work at it a little bit, but i understood it, and i thoroughly enjoyed it. my husband is still mystified remembering that he would watch me giggling while i read it. but it's an enjoyable book, and it's a lot of funny things in it. and i must shared my enthusiasm

for the science with my daughter, my 8-year-old daughter, because she decided to do a science fair project on black holes. she went to the library, and she came home with several books on black holes that were appropriate for her age, science books, and she also brought back that big, black book called "gravitation." [laughter] you know that book. [laughter] yes. now, kay eleven is very intelligent, she's well grown up now, and she's something of a whiz in genetics and biology, but at 8 years old she wasn't a prodigy, and there is a lot of that book she didn't understand. but we talked about it a lot, and then we danced around the living room pretending we were foe tons and pretending we were part call pairs at the event horizon of a black hole, and the upshot was that caitlin really

came up with an award-winning project. it was a wonderful project. and i decided to write a story, write a book for children or young people her age and a little bit older about black holes. at the physics conference that preceded stephen hawking's 70 birthday party in january, i met -- i knew john wheeler, but i hadn't met charles publisher, and i in conversation mentioned dancing around the living room, and he seemed quite delighted by that, and he said i think that's probably the only time that my book has been choreographed, and i'm sure it was. [laughter] anyway, yes, i decided to write a children's book on black holes, and that decision led to my first meeting with stephen hawking.

it wasn't easy to get an appointment. his assistant kept saying, yes, i'll make an appointment, and i'll get back to you. this continued not to happen to the point where it became embarrassing to keep phoning her about it, and i decided to try an end run. i knew that he often worked late with his graduate assistant in his office after nearly everyone else had left, and i suspected that in the evening like that the phone that would normally just ring in her office would ring in his office. so i gave that a try, and sure enough the graduate assistant answered, and he was right there with stephen hawking, and i told him what he wanted, and he said, well, i'll ask stephen, and i'll get back to you. and i thought, well, that's the end of that. about two minutes later he said steven would be happy to help

you if you want to come in tomorrow at 5:30. so this was quite interesting. one thing was that i had kind of, was just getting over the flu at that time, was afraid of taking him germs, so i went quickly to the doctor the next morning to make sure i wouldn't be taking any germs to stephen hawking, and also i do remember that it was affecting my voice, so i was talking like that. i think i sounded like max kennedy. [laughter] but anyway, so there i was 5:30 the next day, arrived there at -- it was a dark night already at 5:30, it was november, and the common room where they have tea earlier in the day was completely dark except for just a little outlined light around stephen hawking's office door. the young lady who had brought me from reception showed me the way there, paused, and i said shall i knock? and she said, i haven't the

slightest idea, and i thought, is he that frightening? i thought, this is ridiculous. i felt a little bit like dorothy going in front of the wizard of oz for the first time. it was intimidating. usually, when you go to visit stephen hawking, you have somebody brief you a little bit. his graduate assistant will tell you that you don't sit across the desk from him. there's a chair there, but you don't sit there, you sit beside him so that you can both see his computer screen where he's choosing the words to make up his sentences. you're also told that you don't kind of second guess him. you let him finish your sentence even if you know where it's going and it's going to take him ten minutes to get there, you wait. but once he has created those

sentences across the bottom of his screen, you don't have to wait for him to cause his computer voice to say it, you can continue the conversation at that point. this kind of thing. i didn't know any of that, and the only other person there that evening was a young man, a carer, one of his nurses, but this young man was also there for the first time that evening, so we were both equally ignorant. and there was stephen hawking looking even more devastatingly disabled than i had expected. but i waited, i wasn't sure whether i should start the conversation, but this time he was doing, controlling his computer with a little hand-held mouse-like device. he was clicking that a little bit, so i waited, and then his voice said, hello. and things just became more comfortable then. i mean, obviously, he was comfortable with this very odd, bizarre situation, so i was too. the room -- talking with him --

very quiet because he's making his words go on the screen. it's very quiet, it's very peaceful, but at the same time it's sort of charged with energy. and you just hear that little, those little mechanical noises. well, one with of the reasons i wanted to talk with him was i had come up with some questions that some didn't know the answers to, so i thought i better talk with him. i don't flatter myself to think that these were such advanced questions, i have a feeling they were such naive questions that they were having trouble answering them. i think it's always more difficult for a research student to answer really naive questions than it is for someone who's more experienced in the field. i always found john wheeler here at cambridge perfectly happy to answer the most naive question. he was always good at that.

but anyway, as our little interview went on there, i asked stephen where i might read him something, a bit of this book that i was writing. and i began to read it, and as i read it i thought to myself that it sounded so stuffy and boring, and i stopped, and i apologized. and i said, i'm sorry it sounds so stuffy and boring, but this is my first book, and my editor says this is serious science, and it must be treated seriously. and stephen hawking answered, it should be fun. and i said, i know it should be fun, but i don't know how to convince my editor. and be so he clicked a little more, and the oracle spoke: tell him i said so. [laughter] as you might guess, i didn't have any problem with my editor after that. he knew that stephen hawking's telling it, so that was all right.

but this is more than just an endearing little anecdote because it should be fun is the spirit in which stephen has done all his science, t the spirit in which -- it's the spirit in which he has conveyed that science to many people who have no scientific background, many young people. he doesn't just try to explain his science to all of us, he tries to take us along on this adventure. and that's the way he works. now, i had sort of a backstage experience of all that when in 2000 he was writing "universe in a nutshell," and my publisher in new york, phantom doubleday dell, also his publisher in new york, asked me whether -- they actually hired me to help edit the book. and my duty was to help him make it simpler, help him make it more easy to understand.

stephen was okay with that. i didn't know how he would take it, especially since his editor had sent me a draft, and i had been trying to help her understand that this was going to make a book. and i made little glosses in the margins, and some of them were not complimentary. she sent the whole thing to him, and i thought, oh, this is ridiculous. anyway, he was okay with that. so we worked together by e-mail for a couple of months, and then i went -- i was in the united states then. then i went over to cambridge to spend a couple of weeks there with him in his office. so there we were, again, facing the screen where he was choosing his words, and another screen which had the manuscript of the book on it. um, we came -- i was, i prepared very carefully by knowing exactly which phrases and paragraphs i was going to bring to his attention. so we scrolled down, and i sat

down and said, steven, i think the words there are too much physics jargon. i think it needs to be stated in everyday words, if you can do that. and so i heard this little clicking, and pretty soon his voice said, it seems clear to me. and i thought, oh, we really are in trouble. [laughter] this is not going to work. then i looked over at him, and i saw this big smile, and he was looking at me like seeing how i was going to take that, and i knew he was having me on. and it all worked very well. he was very conscientious, taking my, my advice about what was too difficult. now, i'd also prepared ahead of time many ways which i thought would make it simpler. he didn't take any of my suggestions. he did it all himself in his own way. and he said i get very upset

when people say i helped him write that book or, hen forbid, that i collaborated with him, and i do hear that sometime when people are talking, some reviewers of the book. that's not true. all i was was a guinea pig. i was the person to try it on and see where it needed to be simpler. but i do think that book turned out very well, and i like to think that i did contribute something to it by just telling him what needed to be simpler. so when i, when people ask me, you know, what it is that has won him all this worldwide attention and made him such a popular figure, such a well known figure, um, and made him such a celebrity, one of the things i do point to is the way that he does make his science such an adventure for us all. but that doesn't explain it all, of course. i think another part of the explanation is that the area of science he works in, his, his

part of science does conjure up a sense of wonder, a sense of tread anything the borderlands of human knowledge; black holes, origin of the universe, questions about whether the loss of information in black holes undermines physics, the possibility that our universe is just one of perhaps an infinite number of universes connected by worm holes perhaps. um, he dares to venture, and he dares to try to take us with him to those remote outposts where the known meets the unknown and perhaps the unknowable. the outpost that john wheeler used to call the flaming ramparts of the world. um, it borders on science 2006 to us, but stephen was asked whether he'd ever written

science fiction, and his answer was, i hope not. at his 60th birthday party ten years ago, his colleague, gary gibbons, in his tribute quoted the poet robert browning, saying, ah, what a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what with's the heaven for? now, gibbons wasn't implying that stephen had gotten in beyond his depth and should be forgiven for it, at least i don't think that's what he meant. but stephen asked daunting, arguably unanswerable questions, things like what is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes the universe for them to describe? why is there something rather nonnothing? why does the universe go to the bother of existing? these are questions that stray into philosophy and religion, sensible science seldom asks. they're largely irrelevant to

the everyday pursuit of most science. and even though, um, the cover of his recent book "the grand design" promises that this book is going to tell us the ultimate answers, it doesn't actually, and stephen goes on asking the questions. ever since then he's still going on saying, you know, i long to know these answers. also in that same book he writes that it is meaningless to ask whether the answers he proposes or anyone else proposes at that level really represent reality. and all of which causes his reductionist, atheistic statements that he often makes to the media seem not quite stephen hawking. whether you agree with him or not, they seem a little too earth-bound, a little too glib, more so than he usually is. but it wouldn't be correct to stop with his science in trying to explain his appeal.

he would probably wish it otherwise, but his disability and even more than that the astonishing good-humored way he simply dismisses that disability are a vital part of his public image. the author oliver saks who wrote "awakening" and "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" wrote about a kind of health, a strength, a grace that go beyond the depth of any illness, and he could have been describing stephen hawking. another of the questions i'm frequently asked about steven is what is his most significant contribution to science. i believe that most of his academic colleagues would say his establishment that black holes emit hawking radiation. this was an unexpected discovery

back in the 1970s, unexpected to steven, certainly unexpected to the rest of the scientific community. it took some time to be accepted. he got some ridicule at first. but it has stood the test of time and is likely to stand the test of more time. since then his work has become more speculative. testing big ideas, throwing out mind-boggling suggestions and proposals and dealing with those more fundamental l questions. for instance, his and jim's no boundaries theory for the origin of the universe this -- in which in a very, very early universe the dimension we think of as time was fourth space dimension. now, stephen seems today there a lot of what he's written to assume that the no boundaries

proposal is correct and that it is safe to build other theories on the no-boundary condition, as he calls it. great, great majority of his colleagues, i think, would not agree that it is that -- don't accept it to that degree. um, some of his other proposals and that sort, you know, the labyrinth of universes and worm holes and all that, these are pretty speculative things. his comment to his colleague, kip thorn, that i'd rather be right than rigorousalled a shift in -- signaled a shift in his way of doing science. what he meant was if you take too long trying to underpin everything with unassailable mathematics, you're liable to miss the forest for the trees, and he would prefer to be, perhaps, 90% certain and then move on.

his latest ideas haven't received the same level of acceptance as hawking radiation has. at least not yet. but they do serve a certain different purpose. he throws out these ideas, and everybody scurries around. it causes a lot of interest, a lot of activity. a lot of people who do a lot of math mathematics and calculation see whether stephen is right. so it's not just throwing out science fiction. and in spite of his tendency to become more speculative, one of his recent contributions with jim and thomas herring to -- and this was something that he insisted had to be in my book. it was something i really hadn't realized he had done, but he pointed me to the papers and said this has to be in there, was to suggest a way of determining from evidence actually available in our universe from the cosmic microwave background radiation so clearly depicted on this

globe, determined from evidence there whether or not our universe part of a multiverse of the sort suggested by eternal inflation. so it's not all just wild speculation, they actually made a proposal that can be tested or potentially can be tested. we have to wait for the data from the plank satellite and maybe even satellites beyond that. but it's possible, perhaps, to test this. ..

then his courtship of jane wilde later to be jane hawking a very moving story because it took place in the context of his coming to terms with his disease and her coming to terms with it not only with the disease but with the prospect of water that time seemed to be a very early death. he had only been given two years to live. then he goes on to the birth of his children, the failure of that first marriage and the second marriage all the things he would you would expect from a biography. i have also included subscription to my own experience which i mentioned already and there's just a cornucopia of science in the book, not only his science but

the science that have both interested him and most influenced him and then there is all sorts of the wonderful betsy has made with his colleagues about the black hole,, can there be such a thing as a negative singularity? is information irretrievably lost? i keep encountering bad sign never knew he had made and never knew about settling them and all of those documents with this thumbprint on them. this is a big activity. and i explained the science or what i hope is the simpler level that he is explained in his own books. is one of my great joys to find ways to explain things mentally in ways that can be understood. my father was a musician but he also loved mathematics and

science in whenever he read a lot of science. what he said was that, what he said was that he never felt he really understood anything unless he could explain it to us kids. and this was when i was about nine years old. if he couldn't explain it to us, and he didn't really understand it. and also, the inspiration has been john wheeler here at princeton. and the drawings and things to explain things. one of the greatest compliments i had was to have john wheeler put one of my drawings up on his office door. he didn't put it there to show what shouldn't be done. but one of my favorite reviews of any of my books was one that appeared in a periodical that i think was called the taxi drivers time and this reviewer said, this was a review of my first stephen hawking book in

1989. it said, come it said in my book, this is the book that tells us what the levy hell a brief history of time was all about. [laughter] and for those who never made it past chapter 2. [laughter] and i thought well, i hope that 22 years later i am still capable of that type of explanation. if you follow stephen hawking's science chronologically through his life if i is done in this book, rather than getting hit piecemeal as we often do, you discover that he has some rather healthy habits of pulling the rug out from some of his own discoveries and some of his own assertions. of all the stereotypes that have plagued men and women of science, surely one above all has lost harm. science can be -- scientists can be pictured as evil, mad, cold,

self-centered, absent-minded and even square yet survive easily. unfortunately, they are often pictured as life in that can distort the picture of science past redemption. whether or not you agree with that stephen hawking certainly seems to have done his best to a race erase that stereotype by changing his mind relatively quickly. in his doctorate dissertation in the 1960s he proved that the universe had to have begun as a singularity with everything compressed to a point of infinite destiny and space, time and curvature with the laws of physics and all hope of a scientific explanation breaks down. however, in the 1980s, a return to contemplating the early universe when jim harden

started bringing in enforcements from the quantum theory and discovered that, using imaginary ties which is a mathematical device which allows the time dimension to be equal equally space to mention chronological time meaning the singularity and the universe doesn't really have a beginning. meanwhile, he had discovered that the area of the border of the black hole can never get smaller. then the hawking radiation discovered that it could get smaller and the upshot but that was another reversal. after years insisting that everything that happens has happened or ever will happen, determined by either god or a theory of everything, he came up with something called the information paradigm.

the question is, what happens when a black hole grows smaller and smaller and eventually disappears entirely? what happens to the things that were trapped inside? what happens to the stars that collapsed to form it? where does it all go? stephen was insisting that all of this information trapped in a black hole was lost irretrievably from our universe. now naïvely -- that is not really a problem. a star that collapsed, maybe some gases. traditionally if you -- a few unmatched socks are in there or astronauts who should not have gone there in the first place, should've known better but this is pretty trivial when you talk about having lost the universe but that is not the case. such information undermined the whole theory and much of our everyday view of life.

the sort of predictability that science depends on as well as yours in my reliance on effect and cause and a dependable way. potentially undermined by a loss of information from our universe. now in 2004 hawking came up with what he felt was a solution to this problem so we wouldn't have to worry about it any more. some of his more astute colleagues such as roger penrose, think that his arguments for the information paradox were more powerful than his solution. but if all of this weren't enough it all seems minor in contrast to the hawking's most recent announcement that he suspects that it is not going to be popular for anyone ever to discover a fundamental theory of the universe, the theory of everything.

which is something he had spent his life hoping for, but in m theory that qwest has fragments. we can only know several approximations with the underlying theories, six approximations, if we think about it, one supergravity. but we don't know how to formulate a theory of a single set of equations in arguably we never will. so that is a huge turnaround for him. and here is another change in his thinking. changing his attitude toward the anthropic principle, anthropic thinking which in case you need reminding answers the question why is the universe as we observe it so perfectly fine-tuned for our emergence of intelligent life and our

existence? that fine-tuning is the origin of the universe is so precise and so unlikely as it seems to be nothing short of minute -- regulus. the anthropic answer again in its simplest form to the question, why do we observe the universe this way is that if it were otherwise we wouldn't be allowed to observe it at all or to ask the question. stephen hawking's attitude towards that anthropic answer when they wrote a brief history of time in the 1980s, was that having it all to stay happy chat, having it all -- was as he put it a counsel of despair, a negation of all our hopes of understanding the underlying order of the universe. but lately he has been attributing a great deal of power to anthropic thinking in something he calls his top down approach. when he and jim harto were developing fair no value

proposal in the 1980s, they used a device invented by the physicist richard feynman called -- and it involves tracing all topical histories of our universe and then calculating which are more likely than others, which were more probable. he didn't do that with a history of our universe. we don't have concrete knowledge about the beginning although we do know quite a bit about point b where we are today. you can imagine a lot of possible.amex but most of them will not the fine-tuned in the way we know our universe has to be. as to produce us as we are at point b. we need a very special, specific point a so by what miracle was point a?

stephen hawking recommends we look at it all from a different perspective. what he calls his top-down approach. tracing the alternative histories of the universe not from point a 2. b, but backwards from point b to point a. our presence at point b, the fact of our being here while living on this universe cates which histories this universe could and could not have had. in a sense we create the history of the universe by being here and by observing it. take for example the fact that we have four dimensions or for observable dimensions in our universe, three of space and one of time. in m theory there is no overall ruled that the universe would have three dimensions of space and one of time. the range of possibilities

include any number from zero to do 10 based emissions and even in some versions with more than one time dimension. are dimensions of space and one of time may not be the most probable situation, but nevermind that in top-down thinking. three dimensions of space and one of time is the only situation that is of interest to us. now considering the universe the old way from the bottom up, there seems to be no discoverable reason why the laws of nature are what they are and not something different. but we do observe the laws of nature to be what they are, and we are here, so hawking says why not start with that? our presence is hugely significant. and as he restates the anthropic rentable, obviously when the

beings on the planet to support life examine the world around them they are bound to find their environment satisfying. just as we buy bye-bye the fact of our presence in our universe we also choose the history of our earth and their cosmic environment that allows us to exist. that is the top-down approach. now you might expect hawking, this is his top-down cosmology that he is preaching now, to say that we, the observers, are the answer to the fundamental question why is there something rather than nothing? what is that we put in the unit -- equation that makes the universe? maybe we are the first cause. maybe we don't need a creator. our presence chooses that all of us that exist and no other argument is possible are required. but he doesn't use that argument. he does not use that in his

book, the grant assigned and he didn't you said in a discussion he and i had in november of 2010. whenever i ask stephen a question i try to put it in a form where he can answer yes or no. he doesn't usually stop. usually goes on to talk about it. but i try. but i mentioned the question the history of time. what is it that inspired him -- using top-down thinking, his answer was, he answered no. that was the end of that matter. it would be interesting to hear him in a discussion with john weaver who is no longer with us. john weaver describes a independence universe in which we can't have the laws of nature unless there are observers which

makes you wonder you know if there were no observers, if we disappear from the scene there were no no longer any observers, will there be a history of the universe anymore and it's a very interesting question, but it does plan to the same way of thinking, this top-down way of thinking. now, whenever i finish the draft of a book, i have my husband read it he cuts my husband in his field is global studies. he is not a scientist but he is has a very good example of the target audience for my books. intelligent people who are not scientist. he claims that he can understand anybody can but he is not really that -- but he read where i quoted stephen hawking is saying something about, that he is still a child who has never grown up, still asking how and why questions, and occasionally

finding an answer that satisfies him. my husband read that, occasionally finding an answer that satisfies him, and he penned in, for a wild. and i thought, yes, i left that in the book. that is exactly right. that is stephen hawking. that is the nature of his adventure, find the answer that satisfies him but he said he is often an interaction, sometimes undermining what he said previously. what will be stephen hawking's legacy? any of you young enough to be alive 30 or 50 years from now? yes, yes. i know what he would like. he would like to be remembered for his science. if everybody could forget about the fact that -- that would be fine with him. i think of the author john milton, the poet john milton in paradise lost and he wrote that when he was completely blind.

that is not what you think of with john milton and i looked it up in wikipedia and there is no mention of his blindness until way down, many paragraphs and it's just mentioned in passing. and i thought, wouldn't stephen love that, to have himself remembered for his science and nobody even think of the fact that he was disabled. but what of his science? we don't know what will be remembered. will be no bill proposal become part of the mainstream of the physics of cosmology or will it always be just an interesting beautiful proposal that has never had that much impact or acceptance, and will people go on being troubled, walking around with the information paradox? will things like the little invention of his round the year 2000. it seems to be sitting on the shelf now and stephen wasn't paying any attention to it.

what about things like that? will they be remembered? i think that is legacy definitely will be twofold if nothing else. first, the excitement he has generated about science, cosmology. when i attended the academic conference that receded his 70th birthday back in january, i counted all these -- an interesting conference because it had all the gray eminence as of this field and it had all these young people too. among the young people there were physicists that already are really contributing to the well-known important universe and doing exciting work. some of them are stevens former students and some of them or not, but again and again i heard them say or heard someone say, i was reading a brief history in time when i was a teenager that got me into this field. that is why i am working in

cosmology and science today. that is a huge legacy. that is a wonderful thing. and also second, i think he will continue to stand as a towering example of courage and determination and good humor in the face of an overwhelming obstacle. real-life demonstration that what human beings can accomplish, the kinds of work they can do, the great things can be accomplished in life can even be splendid and it doesn't all have to be just where the sun is shining anywhere in the peak of health. as you may know stephen hawking didn't get to his 70th birthday party. he was too ill. he was very very seriously ill. indeed i think most people come every time this happens everybody thinks oh that's the end but this time it seemed worse than usual.

but i just had an e-mail this week from the secretary. via sheer huge effort of determination he is back in the office. he is there. the first time he is on a respirator most of the time rich was not true before. nevertheless he is attending in march to come to the texas at cook's branch and intending to go to caltech. this is a man who just won't be defeated by his physical problems. it's amazing. i am the same age as stephen. i turned 70, three weeks before he did and i'd did tell him he had better respect his elders. i won't be around 50 years at from now unless we have a huge breakthrough in health, but as long as i am alive, i want to remember how he go poke the passion for me and science and

the fun it has been exploring all that science and the fact that none of my eight books wouldn't have been written that i never encountered him. his wonderful self mocking humor and the wonderful smiles and that would delight the universe. he really has had a tough road through life. if you talk of it in terms of the bridge game he was dealt a ridiculously unbalanced hand, and he made a grand slam of it. he has set an example for all of us, and i know that, not everything he has done has been so a lot of bull. he can be arrogant and can certainly be stubborn. he can be self-centered and may may be asked to be self-centered to survive, but i have gotten to know him and i really like the man. so, thank you.

[applause] so does anybody have any questions? if you are one of my boasts of -- most basic audiences. i used to give talks on black holes for the scientifically inept and i don't think you fit that category. i always say you know, don't be afraid to ask naïve questions. i'm sure no one here would ask a naïve question but you are welcome to do it. i also have to say this stephen hawking says when nobody asked the questions that means either no one understood anything or everybody interested everything. this wasn't that kind of the lecture but anyway with that encouragement, yes? he has children? >> he does. he has three children, the same

age as my children so they have got to be about 43, 44, 41 and 31 in age. [inaudible] >> his oldest son is in information technology. he has a degree from, which college, in cambridge corpus christi i think. but, he was a natural science major but i'm not sure exact way, he is physics i guess but that is what he does now. and his mother, jane hawking, that was something that he was interested in and was really brought to a head when he was just a kid. they had a sabbatical at caltech and he met another oiler who was really into that and that was what got him interested. i have experienced this myself, when you go on sabbatical it becomes a watershed for the whole family, in the case of my

husband. when i started writing about science was when he went on sabbatical and we look at that too is a watershed. his daughter, his daughter has written a couple of children's books with stephen. they are called george's cosmic adventure, george is key to the universe. they're wonderful books. i wonder if we have those in the library. do we have them? i will have to tell her i recommend them. they are wonderful. they are fiction. what is interesting is he meets a scientist who lives next door to him who is so clearly stephen hawking as he would be without his disability. it is so clear, it's the same person but anyway then they have these adventures. it is sort of science-fiction but they are huge huge sections of the book that are kind of

removed. they are different color print in those are the sections that are the real science. there is a lot about lack holes, various things like that. they are wonderful books. they are really terrific. >> you touched on this a little bit but didn't he give some notoriety for saying that he did believe in god and god was reconciled with science and then reversed himself as you are saying? >> i don't think he has ever said he believed in god. in a brief history of time he talked about the no boundary and because it wipes out at beginning. there is no beginning to the universe and he wipes out the need for a creator. he has made some very atheistic statements to the media about, believe in an afterlife is a fairytale because we are all

computers and when the computer gets up, it just dies, sort of one reductionist idea of ourselves as computers. i think somebody said yeah but you can take the whole intellectual content of the computer and put it on a memory. is that like reincarnation? [laughter] but i did get a question about his religious beliefs when i did a talk in cambridge and i said that stephen hawking, before encountered him at all, i believe the old statement that there are no atheists in foxholes and he is definitely in a foxhole. but when i said that i made a mistake and i said that there are no atheists in wormholes. it just got quiet with all these bunch of physicists there and they said, i'll but there aren't.

[laughter] he tends to make his atheistic statements to the press. one thing that i would personally hate to see as part of his legacy would be to turn a whole lot of intelligent young people into unthinking atheists. i think decisions of belief and unbelief deserve a lot of consideration, deserve a lot of investigation, deserve a lot of experimentation actually and shouldn't be made just because some charismatic figure like stephen hawking make statements to the media. i think i would that would be an unfortunate legacy. so let's not end with that. anybody else?

maybe that is that. >> you. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books.