that makes you a radical. and i've always been a person who believed that people should not interfere with the. i should be able to do my own thing without, so long as i don't violate the rights of other people. >> more with walter williams sunday night at 8 p.m. eastern and pacific on c-span's q&a. >> welcome to c-span2's booktv. every weekend we bring you 48 hours of books on history, biographies and public affairs by nonfiction authors. ..

kennecott eastern on afterwards linda killian rights the swing vote, most powerful marketing independent voters and they have the side in every election since world war ii. tonight at 8:00 eastern david brock and roger nails turned in a working to an extension of the republican party and sunday night at 10:00 syndicated talk radio host marc levin and his thoughts on merit cobia, the unmaking of america. >> kitty ferguson talk about stephen hawking's life and work. did is about an hour. >> it is delightful to talk to you about stephen hawking and my experience writing a book about

him. "stephen hawking: an unfettered mind," "stephen hawking":his life and work. some of you already know his science well and everyone knows something about him as a person. his disability, his legendary courage, is unlikely celebrity and a few ugly rumors about him as well. he is more than a legendary celebrity. he is a real person and it has been my luck to get to know him just a little bit. i wouldn't claim to say i know him well. i think it might be inaccurate to say that more than two or three people in the world know steven hawking well and even they have their doubts. the way he communicates, through

his computer using words which take a long time to produce, he is always something of a distance. he doesn't give very much away. he says exactly what you wants to say and no more. furthermore he has no body language and his synthetic computer voice conveys no emotion whatsoever. when you are 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 star trek episode 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. does not sound like it would recommend itself for a poker game but evidently he impressed them with that. he lost some of that ability

since then but still has that wonderful grin. the history of my book, this book, started 18 months ago when my publisher in great britain asked me to update a little book they had published in 1991, 20 years ago. called stephen hawking, a quest for a theory of everything. they published that as a little paperback and it has become a best seller in britain. we updated a chapter and change it a little bit so they could make it into an e-book which has never been done. i began to work on it and soon realized a little updating and tweaking of those chapters wasn't going to do it.

i ended up writing a whole new book. it is critical of him in some places. not completely complementary. and gave his blessing to a writing of it. he had no control over what i said. i passed by him all the quotations. that is the only control over it. so much had happened since 1989, so much science, so much new material about relationships in his life and events in his life that happened before 1989 that i covered it, this had to be a completely new book. research was not entirely his scientific papers and interviews

and newspaper articles in burton and america. my husband is an academic and everything to do with global. we have many friends who go on sabbatical. during 20 years since i wrote that first book about stephen hawking all these friends had clippings about steven hawking from all over the world. and last year i got out the box so my bibliography had things like china morning news, west australian from perth, hindu times. i get the impression kitty ferguson does exhaustive research all over the world but it is all thanks to those clips. another slightly unorthodox source was cambridge itself. my husband and i lived there

part of every year and we have been going there ever since we first went there on sabbatical ourselves in 1986. we know the town well and a lot of people there. everybody who goes well encounter people who have little stories to tell about stephen hawking. the woman who cuts my hair has a relative working as a carpenter on a house when stephen hawking's wheelchair slipped on the eyes and turned over. this young man was the first to get to him and cover him with a jacket and all the emergency people. someone else had an automobile accident and the driver, the first wife. a lot of people at the college, carrying stephen up and down the stairs before the college had an

elevator. all these little incidents, it is interesting little incidents. stephen hawking lived in that town 50 years and it was a small town. one challenge in writing this book was to be certain i was writing the book "stephen hawking: an unfettered mind" and not the legend of stephen hawking. any biographer has an almost irresistible urge to fictionalize their subject to. and i do wonder what i did to kepler because it is even more problem in a historical subjects. you get all the information you can and do the best you can. when it is somebody who is still alive you have a certain obligation to them to make it a little more real and keep it a little more authentic.

i had the advantage of going in fairly often to talk with him. not a lot occasionally. i would take him a copy. if i was writing something and have a question i would go in for that purpose. especially when i was writing this book i would see him in person and i would think about what i had written about him and think it isn't quite right. i have gone a little bit astray and fictionalized him little bit. it is so easy to do. the choice of a word, the tone of a paragraph, the urge to make something a little more dramatic, a little more funny. so easy to do. so hard to resist. i felt obliged to respect to a large extent is don't interpretation of himself which you would not do with a

historical figure. some reviewers have taken me to task for writing an uncritical biography but 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 are still alive. that is not an critical. it is critical in places. i wonder what he would think. he gets very angry with writers, but there's no emotional cloud and smite invocation to this was not revoked so i think it passed muster or else -- many of you know that i am not a mathematician or scientist by training all the science and mathematics have been part of my life since i was a small child. my degrees are in music from the

juilliard school and very often ask why age 48 that are suddenly decided to put that aside and start writing books and lecturing about science, science history and scientists for popular markets. for people who are not scientists? we all hear that there is a connection between music and mathematics but you don't often hear of a musician who decided to write a book -- some people said we have an outstanding physics department. but that is not the reason. i never took physics. but i was reading a brief history of time. was a watershed in my life. i did understandable. i had to work at it but i thoroughly enjoyed -- still

mystified remembering he would watch me giggling. an enjoyable book and a lot of funny things in it and i must have shared my enthusiasm with my daughter. decided to do a science fair project. she went to the library and came home with several books on black holes which was appropriate for her age. science book. elson brought home a big black book by commissioner for and wheeler called gravitation. caitlin is very intelligent and something of a whiz in genetics, biology. but she wasn't a prodigy. there were a lot of books she didn't understand but we talked about a lot and we danced around the living room pretending we

were photons beleaguered, pretending we were particle pairs at the center of a black hole and the upshot was caitlin came up with an award winning project. with a wonderful project and i decided to write a book for children and young people her age and older about black holes. as an aside i have to mention the specific conference that preceded stephen hawking's birthday party in january. imac -- i knew kit form and i'm --kip thorne and john wheeler. i mentioned in the living room, he seemed quite delighted with us and he said that is probably the only time in my book has been choreographed. i am sure it was.

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. i got in touch with his secretary, his personal assistant and she kept saying i will get back to you. this continued not to happen to the point where i became embarrassed to keep phoning her about it and decided to try a end run. i knew he often worked late with his graduate assistant in his office and i suspected that in the evening the phone that would normally ring in her office would ring in his office. i gave that i. sure enough to graduate assistant -- right there with stephen hawking. i told him what i wanted and he

said i will ask steve and and get back to you. i said i guess that is the end of that but two minutes later he phoned back and said stephen will be happy to help you if you want to come in tomorrow. this was quite interesting. we were just getting over the flu at that time and afraid of taking him germs. i went to the doctor the next morning to make sure wasn't taking germs to stephen hawking and i do remember the effect in my voice and i was talking like that. astounded like jackie kennedy. but anyway there i was. i arrived the next day. it was november. in the common room where they have tee earlier in the day. was completely dark except for an outline around stephen hawking's office door. the young lady who brought me

from reception showed me the way, paused and i said shall i knock? she said i haven't the slightest idea. i said is he that frightening? this is ridiculous. i felt a little bit like dorothy going into the wizard of oz for the first time. was intimidating. but usually when you go to visit stephen hawking you have somebody greet you a little bit. his graduate assistant will tell you that you don't sit across the desk from him. there is a chair but you sit beside him so you can see his computer screen where he is choosing the words to make up his sentences. you are also told that you don't second-guess him. let him find words. let him finish his sentence even if you know very well where it

is going and will take ten minutes to get there. once he has created those sentences on 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. i didn't know any of that and the only other person there was a young man, one of his nurses the pursuit for the first time -- will be ignorant. there was stephen hawking. more devastatingly disabled than i expected. hy wasn't sure whether i should start a conversation but this time he was doing a hand-held mouse like the vice -- device and then his voice said hello. and things became more

comfortable. obviously he was comfortable with this bizarre situation so i was too. no one was talking to him on screen. is very peaceful but at the same time sort of charged with energy. you just hear this little mechanical morris. one of the reasons i wanted to talk with him was a had been talking about the things i was riding in my black hole book. there were questions they didn't know the answers to so i thought i had better talk with him. under a flat russell to think these research against questions that they didn't know the answer. i feel they were such naive questions that they were having trouble answering them. it is more difficult for a research student to answer 9 eve questions than for someone who is more experienced in the

field. john wheeler was perfectly happy to answer the most naive questions. he was very good at that. as the interview went on, i asked whether i might read him a bit of the book i was riding and i began to read it and as i read it i thought to myself it sounded so stuffy and boring and i stopped and i apologize and i said i am sorry it sounds so stuffy and boring but this is my first book. and my editor says it is serious science and must be treated seriously. steven hawking answered it should be fun. i said i know it should be fun but i don't know how to convince my editor. so he clicked a little more and the oracle spoke. tell him i said so.

as you might guess i didn't have any problem with my editor after that. but this is more than just an endearing little anecdotes because it should be fun if the spirit in which steven has done all his science and the spirit in which he conveyed that science to many people who have no scientific background, he doesn't just try to explain his science to all of us. he tries to take as long on this adventure and that is the way it works. i had back stage experience of all that went in 2000 he was writing universe in a nutshell and my publisher in new york, also his publisher in new york asked me whether they hired me to help edit the book and my duty was to help him make it

simple. make it more easy to understand. he was ok with that. i didn't know how to take that. is editor sent me -- drafted part of the book and i had been trying to help her understand it was going to make a book. she had some doubt whether it was going to fit together and a mark in the margins. some were not complementary. i thought this is ridiculous but he was okay. we worked together by e-mail for a couple months than i was in the united states. then i went to cambridge. so we were facing the screen where he was choosing his words and another screen with the manuscript of the book. i prepared very carefully by

knowing exactly which paragraphs are was going to bring to his attention. so i said the words are too much physics jargon. it needs to be stated in everyday words if we could do that. so i heard this little clicking and he said it seems clear to me -- and i thought we are in trouble. this is not going to work. jenna looked over at him and saw this big smile and he was looking at me like hell i was going to take that and i knew he was carrying me on and it worked very well. he was very conscientious taking my advice about what was too difficult. i also prepared in many ways that i would have revisited.

analogies or suggestions and as i suspected he didn't take any of my suggestions. he did it all himself his own way which i get very upset when people say i helped him write the book or heaven forbid that i collaborated with him. i do hear that sometimes. people are talking that way. that is not true. i was the person to try it on and see where it would be simpler. but i think that book turned out very well and i did contribute something to it by telling him what needed to be simpler. so when people ask me what it is that has won him worldwide attention and made him such a well-known figure, and made such a celebrity, one of the things i point to is the way he does make

his science such an adventure but that doesn't explain it all. another part of the explanation is the area of science he works in, his part of science does conjure up a sense of wonder. basins of trading in the borderlands of human knowledge. black holes, origin of the universe, questions about whether the loss of information in black holes undermines physics, that our universe is one of perhaps an infinite number of universe is connected by wormholes perhaps. he dare to venture into those remote outposts where the known meet the unknown and perhaps the unknowable. john wheeler used to call at the flaming ramparts of the world.

it borders on science fiction. steven was asked if he had ever written science fiction and his answer was i hope not. on his 60th birth a party ten years ago, his colleague gary givens in his tribute quoted the poet robert browning saying a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what is heaven for? he wasn't implying stephen had gotten beyond his depth. i don't think that is what he meant. but stephen asked don king, arguably unanswerable questions like what is it that brief fire into the equations and makes the universe for them to describe? why is there something rather than nothing? why does the universe go to the bottom of existing?

these stray into philosophy and religion. something that science seldom asks. they're irrelevant to the everyday perception of most science. the cover of the book the grand design promised that this book would tell us the ultimate answers, it doesn't actually and stephen goes on asking the questions. everson fbn he keeps saying i long to know these answers. also in that same book he writes with the answers he proposed or anyone else proposes at that level really represent reality. all of which causes his more dogmatic reductionist statement that he often makes to the media seem not quite stephen hawking. would you agree with him it

seems too earthbound big remorse over and he usually is. 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 the astonishing good humoured way he dismisses that disability are a vital part of his public image. oliver sacks who wrote awakening, and they go beyond the depths of any elements and could have been describing stephen hawking. another of the questions i am frequently asked is what is his most significant contribution to science? in most of its academic

colleagues would say it would be his establishment that black holes he match blackbody radiation a.k.a. talking radiation. this was an unexpected discovery in the 1970s. unexpected to 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 and throwing out mind-boggling proposals and dealing with more fundamental questions. for instance is no boundary theory for the origin of the universe in which a very early universe, the dimension we think of as time was a fourth space

dimension. steven seems today from a lot of what he has written to assume that the no boundary proposal is correct and that it is safe to build other theories on the no boundary condition as he calls it. great majority of his colleagues would not agree -- don't accept it to that degree. some of his other proposals of that sort, wormholes and all that are pretty speculators of things. his comments to his colleague i kip thorne that i would rather be right than rigorous signals a shift in his way of doing science. if it takes too long trying to underpin everything that is unassailable in mathematics

you're liable to miss the forest for the trees. he would prefer to be 90% certain and then move on. his latest ideas haven't seen the same level of success. they do serve a certain purpose. he throws out these ideas causes a lot of interest and a lot of activity. lot of people who do a lot of mathematics and calculations. is not all for nothing. not just throwing out science-fiction and in spite of his tendency to become more speculative, one of his recent contributions was something that he insisted had to be in my book. it was something i have no ideas on but he pointed me to the papers. to suggest a way of determining

from evidence actually available in our universe from the cosmic microwave background radiation, determined some evidence whether or not our universe is part of a multi verse. they made a proposal that potentially can be tested. we have to wait for the data from the plank satellite and satellites beyond that. the possible to test it. in my biography i intervene sections having to do with hawking's personal life and his science. you have a sort of personal story line with respect from a biography beginning from his childhood in a loving family

living in a spooky house in england following through his childhood and teenage years and he practically did no work whatsoever and into his first year as a graduate student at cambridge went he was diagnosed with his motor neuron disease, lou gehrig's disease and his courtship with jane wilde, moving story because it took place in the context of his coming to terms with his disease and her coming to terms with not only the disease that his ability -- the prospect of what was going to be a very early death. then goes through the birth of his children, the failure of that first marriage and second marriage and all the things you expect from a biography.

this included descriptions, a cornucopia of science not only in his science but would influence him. is cygnus x 1 a black hole? is there such a thing as a naked singularity? is information irretrievably lost in a black hole? i kept encountering things i never knew he made. always a document with his thumb print on it. this is a big activity. a slightly simpler level than he explained it in his own book. it is one of my great joys to find ways to explain things

simply in ways that can be understood. my father was a physician but also love mathematics and science and he read a lot of science and what he said once he never felt he understood he understood anything unless he could explain it to us kids. this is when i was 9 years old. if you couldn't explain it to us he didn't really understand it. and also inspiration to me has been john wheeler at princeton and the way he did a little drawing and one of the greatest compliments i ever had was to put my drawings on his office door and didn't put it there to show what shouldn't be done. one of my favorite reviews was one that appeared in periodicals

called the taxi driver times end this was a review of my first seed and hawking book in 1989 which said this is a book that tells us what the bloody hell a brief history of time was all about. for those who never made it past chapter 2. i hope 22 years later i am still capable of that kind of explanation. if you follow stephen hawking's science chronologically for his life as i have done in this book rather than just a piece as we often do you understand he has healthy habits of pulling the rug out from under his own discoveries and his assertions. isaac asimov once wrote of all the stereotypes that have plagued men and women of science

surely one above all has brought harm. science can be scientists and pictured as evil, bad, colt, self-centered. will absent minded and even square and survive easily. unfortunately they are often pictured as a right. that can distort the picture of science test redemption. whether or not you agree with that stephen hawking seems to have done his best to eraser that stereotyped by changing his mind so frequently. in his doctoral dissertation in 1916s he concluded that the universe had to have begun with a singularity where everything was compressed to a point of infinite density and space time curvature where the laws of physics and all hope of a

scientific explanation breaks down. however in 1980s he returned to contemplating the early universe bringing in an reinforcements from quantum theory and discovered using imaginary time which is a mathematical design which allows the time dimension to become a fourth space dimension, chronological time loses all meaning, singularity is veered away in the universe doesn't really have a beginning. meanwhile he had discovered the area of the event horizon of a black hole can never get smaller. than the discovery of hawking radiation showed it could get smaller. another reversal. after the years insisting that everything that happens and has happened endeavor will happen is the tournament by a theory of

everything, he came up with something called the information paradox. what happens when a black hole grows smaller and smaller and disappears and highly? what happens to what was trapped inside? what happened to the star that collapsed? where does it go? stephen was insisting that all of this information trapped in a black hole was lost irretrievably from our universe. we fink that is not really a problem. a star collapsed. maybe some gas. traditionally an astronaut who should not go there and should have known better, but this is pretty trivial when you talk about having lost the universe.

and the everyday life. the predictability that science depends on as well as my reliance on, as in a dependable way and potentially undermined by information from our universe. in 2004 he came up with a solution to this problem. some of his more astute colleagues such as roger and rose in his arguments for the information peridots are more powerful than his solutions. all this rogue pulling were denied, all things minor in contrast hawking's recent announcement that he suspected is not going to be possible for

anyone ever to discover a fundamental theory of the universe. of everything. which is something he spent his life hoping for. in m theory that has fragmented. we catalina several explanations for the un -- underlying theory. you think of string theory and supergravity but we don't know how to formulate the underlying theory of a single set of equations and arguably we never will. so that is a huge turnaround for him. there is another change in his thinking. changing his attitude towards the anthropic principle which in case you need reminding it answers the question why is the

universe as we observe it? fine tuned for the emergence of intelligent life and our existence? that fine-tuning of the origin of the universe and so unlikely as to be nothing short of miraculous. the and tropicana answer in its simplest form to the question why do we observe the universe this way is that if it were otherwise we would not be around to observe it at all or to ask a question. stephen hawking's attitude toward that anthropic answer when he wrote a brief history of time in 1980 was having it all, a stroke of good fortune was a counsel of despair. a negation of our hopes of understanding the underlying order of the universe. but lately he has been contributing power to anthropic

thinking in his top down approach. when he and jim hart will were developing their no boundary proposal they used a device invented by richard feynman called some over history. it involved tracing all possible histories of our universe and calculating which are more likely than others legal which are more probable. not that he did that with the history of our universe. we don't have concrete knowledge about point a the window a bit about point be where we are today. we can imagine a lot of possible point as but most of them would not be fine tuned in the way we know our universe had to be in order to produce us as we are now at point be.

we need a very special, specific point a. by what miracle was point at a like that? steven hawking recommends we look at it from a different perspective. what he calls the top-down approach. tracing alternative histories of the onerous not from point at a to point be but backwards from the present time from point be to point a. our presence at point been, the fact of our being here, our living in this universe dictates which history this universe could or could not have had. we created history of the universe by being here. take for example fact the we have four dimensions in our universe. three of space and one of time.

in m. there's no rule that there would be three of space and one of time. even in some versions more than one time to mention. our three dimensions of space and one of time may not be the most probable situation. in top down thinking, three dimensions and one of time, the only situation that is of interest to us. 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. so hawking says why not start

with that? our presence is hugely significant. as he restates the anthropic principle obviously the planet that supports life, they are bound to found their environment satisfies the conditions they require to exist. just as we by the effect of the presence of our universe we also choose the history of birth and our cosmic environment. that is the top down approach. in my expect hawking with his top down cosmology to say that we the observers are the answer to the fundamental question why is there something rather than nothing? what brief fire into the equation? maybe this is where the buck stops. maybe we are the first part. maybe we don't need a creator. our presence chooses and all the rest of it exists and no other

argument is possible are required. but he doesn't use that argument. he doesn't use that in his book the grand design for the discussion he and i had in november of 2010. had tried to put it in a form -- he usually goes on. i tried. i mentioned the question, what breathe fire into the equation. using top down thinking is the answer us? he answered no. that was the end of that matter. interesting to hear him discussing with john wheeler who is no longer with us, john wheeler proposed the observer dependent universe in which we

can't have the laws of physics or laws of nature and less there are observers. if there were no observers, if we disappear from the scene there are no longer any observers will there be a history of the universe anymore? and interesting question. the same way of thinking, this top-down way of thinking. when i finished the draft of a book i have my husband read it because my husband fielded global studies. he is not a scientist but is a very good example of the target audience. intelligent people. he claims if he can understand it anybody can. but he read the close of the book, i quoted stephen hawking saying he is still a child who had never grown up asking how

and why questions, occasionally finding an answer that satisfied him. occasionally finding an answer that satisfies him and and in for while. and i thought i met that in the book. that is exactly right. that is the nature of his adventure. find a nature that satisfies him but soon he loses direction. sometimes undermining what he said previously. what will be stephen hawking's legacy? young enough to be alive, yes, what will we be saying about him than? i know what he would like. he would like to be remembered for his life. forget he was disabled. i think of the author john

milton who wrote paradise lost. he was completely blind. how many people know that? that is not what you think of. i look it up wikioedia in and it is only mentioned in passing. he is remembered for his science and no one ever thinks of the fact that he was disabled. we don't know what will be remembered. will be no boundary proposal be part of the mainstream of theoretical physics and cosmology? or will always be interesting beautiful proposals, will people go on being troubles and working around the information paradox? a little invention of his that seems to be sitting on the shelf

now. what about things like that? will it be remembered? i think his legacy definitely will be twofold. first the excitement he has generated about science and cosmology. when i attended the academic conference that preceded his 70th birth day. and it was interesting because it had all the gray eminences of his field and all these young people too. among the young people there were physicists contributing to well-known areas and exciting work. some of them are his former students and some are not. but again and again i heard them say reading a brief history of time when i was a teenager that

got me into this. that is why i am working on cosmology and science today. that is a huge legacy. that is a wonderful thing. and also i think he will continue to stand as a towering example of courage and good humor in the face of overwhelming obstacles. our real life demonstration that what human beings can accomplish and the kinds of things they can face and the kind of work they can do and great things can be accomplished and life can be splendid. you may know steven hawking didn't get to his 70birthday party. he was too ville. very seriously ill. people think this is the end.

this time it seemed worse than usual. i had an e-mail this week from his secretary that a huge effort of determination, of first time he is on respirator which was not true before. nevertheless he was intending in march to come to the conference and go to cal tech. this is a man who won't be defeated by his physical problem. amazing. i am the same age. i turned 70 before he did and told him he'd better respect his elders. i won't be around 50 years from now. but as long as i'm alive i want to remember how much his passion

for science and exploring all that science and effect that none of my books would have been written had never encountered him. his wonderful self mocking humor and wonderful smile and delightful universe. really had a tough road through life in terms of a bridge game. he was dealt a relic -- ridiculously unbalanced hand and made a grand slam. he set an example for all of us. not everything he has done has been so laudable. he had -- pecan be arrogant and stubborn and self-centered and maybe he has to be self-centered to survive but i have gotten to know him just a little. i really like the man.

so thank you. [applause] does anybody have any questions? one of my most basic audiences. black holes for the scientifically in that. i don't think this is in that category. don't be afraid to ask now leave questions. i am sure no one here would ask a nighty question but you are welcome to do it. and stephen hawking says nobody asks the question that means nobody understood everything for everybody understood everything. with the fact encouragement.

he has three children the same age as my children. about 44 or 41 and 31 in age. his oldest son is in information technology. he has a degree from cambridge the additional corpus christi, i think. he was a natural science major but i am not sure exactly, civics i guess but that is what he does now. his mother jane hawking claims his interest in that was when he was just a kid and they had a sabbatical at caltech and he met another boy who was really into that. and have experienced it myself. when you go on sabbatical in a

watershed for the whole family. i started writing about science on sabbatical. that too is a watershed. his daughter has written a couple children's books with steven. george's key to the universe, they are wonderful but to have those in the library -- do you have them? they are wonderful. they are fiction. he meets a scientist who lives next door to him who is so clearly stephen hawking as he would be without his disability. so clearly the same person. anyway they have these adventures and it is sort of science fiction but there are

huge sections of the book that are in a different colored print and those are the sections that are the real science. there's a lot about black holes and various things like that. wonderful books. a really terrific. >> maybe the wrong person but didn't he get notoriety for saying he didn't believe in god and god was incompatible with science which reverses would you were saying? >> i don't think he ever said he believes in god. in a brief history of time he comes out with the no boundaries proposal and begins with no beginning to the universe and wipes out the need for a creator. he said some very atheist

statements to the media about belief in an afterlife and the fairy tale because we are already computers and when the computer gives up it just dies. one reductionist idea of ourselves as computers. i think somebody said you can take the intellectual content of computers and put it on a memory stick. is that like reincarnation? i did get a question about his religious beliefs in cambridge and i said before i encountered him i thought -- are believed the old statement that there are no atheists in foxholes. when i said that i made a mistake and said there are no atheists in wormholes. got quite a laugh.

i bet there aren't. what else? he tends to make these statements. one thing i would personally hate to see as part of his legacy would be to turn a whole lot of intelligent young people into and thinking atheists. decisions of belief for non believe deserve consideration and investigation and experimentation and should be made just because a charismatic figure like stephen hawking makes statements to the media. i think that would be an unfortunate legacy.