as far as i can tell we probably have readers from all over the world in fact he has readers

from the united states, canada, mexico, jamaica, peru, [inaudible] guatemala, argentina brazil, coaster rica [inaudible] ♪ and probably even pasadena. [laughter] >> thank you. >> my pleasure. >> thank you everyone for joining us for this evening's event. my name is kim sutton and i'm the host of the event. before we begin i want to encourage you all to check out the lineup of upcoming virtual events by visiting. one of our many upcoming events we are looking forward to is tiffany in conversation with ellie about the new book say it louder black voters, white anarchists seen saving our democracy. that's next friday the 18th.

please remember to follow us on twitter, facebook and instagram. tonight we welcome leonard and rob paulson. leonard received his phd in the theoretical civics from the university of california berkeley, was an alexander von humboldt fellow at the max planck institute and was on the faculty of california institute of technology. his previous books include the bestsellers the grand design and a brief history of time, both with stephen hawking. subliminal which was the winner of the eo wilson literary science award, and war of the world viewworldviews with deep n oprah as well as elastic and the upright thinkers. joining this evening for a conversation about the new book stephen hawking a memory of

friendship and physic one of the most influential physicists of the time, he touched the lives of millions. recalling his nearly two decades as hawking's collaborator and friend, he brings this complex man into focus in a unique and a deeply personadeeply personal p. he puts us in the room as he indulgence her passion and curry and love, death and disability and grapples with a deep question of philosophy and physics. the deeply affecting account of friendship teaches us not just about the nature and practice of physics but also about life and the human capacity to overcome daunting obstacles. joined in conversation by voice actor rob paulson who is in a voice actor for nearly three decades and is the voice of pinky from pinky and the brain, donatello from teenage mutant ninja turtles and carl weser

from jimmy neutron. he's one and any award, peabody award and three emmys for his voice acting. his memoir, voice lessons, was released last year and ironically a man that uses his voice for work, he found himself with throat cancer but thankfully recovered and is now the spokesperson for the agency's oral, head, neck cancer program. this evening's event will include a q-and-a. please use the q and a button at the bottom of the screen if you'd like to ask a question. if someone has asked a question you would like to know the answer to, please ask the particular question by clicking the thumbs up button. most importantly, please consider supporting by purchasing a copy of the new book. a link to purchase the books will be shared in the chat in a couple of minutes. leonard, rob, it is a pleasure to welcome you both. thank you for joining us. >> great pleasure. thank you.

>> well said. as an armchair physicist who somehow makes his living doing what got me in trouble in high school i can tell you that this is a marvelous book so thank you very much, leonard, for letting me lower your standards with respect to speakers. thanks for having me on board. >> thanks for doing this, rob. >> my pleasure. by the way -- >> [inaudible] >> full disclosure, your fabulous, really handsome child helps me with my own social media marketing and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, my friend, he is a delightful, smart, bright young man and i'm delightful to have him in my life, so thank you. well done. just in case the folks who are watching who are transfixed by all of the stuff surrounding us but may not be as aware of stephen hawking as others, what

-- could you briefly explain to us what stephen hawking's place is in physics and history of physics? >> well, he went to school in the 60s, he went to oxford first and then graduate school at cambridge and that's where he really fell ill at the end of his graduate school. he had a revelation after that when he fell ill. due to his illness he had a meaning in his life and decided he wanted to dedicate his last years to answering some fundamental questions basically why are we here, how do we get here, how did the universe get here and why is it the way it is. those are not questions people were asking very much in the

1960s. [inaudible] the areas that he chose to study to address those questions is obvious and the other was a little bit less obvious but not many people were interested in those areas either back then because people felt you couldn't observe them. it was experimental science. people thought you can't look back at the beginning of the universe and we are never going to find the black hole so why not study them theoretically. now it turns out a footnote with technology we can study those things and there's famous pictures from just a few years ago, the black hole but it doesn't seem like we would ever get there so there were some people who were working on it

but the icon is to physicist description said they made his blood boil because they were so frustrated with the quality of the research so it's those kind of areas and with his yearning to answer the existential questions he started studying it in the 1960s and made progress in understanding the early universe through einstein's general theory of relativity so einstein's theory of gravity and he made great progress in understanding the early universe and black holes. later in the 1970s, he started to apply quantum theory and made exciting advances doing that. he realized that you can't

ignore quantum theory in those areas as a people have been doing and he found the result, so the sum total of all of the work after that is he took this field of cosmology and the study of the early universe and he took it from the backlog and made it one of the hottest fields in the physics and he was a pioneer looking for what is the holy grail of physics which is uniting the theory with the quantum theory so by doing that he was a pioneer that made great steps in showing how we can think about that but still haven't done it. he listed the study to make it not only respectful but very popular. >> we now know that he had a terrific movie made about him in

which i think he won an oscar for the performance. but my suspicion having grown up that physicist when i grew up was most like albert einstein. you have a feeling that was the essentially thought of as like the next physicist rock star, another einstein? >> he was not another einstein. he would smile when people said that because who wants the power to live up to. it's a pretty high bar. even einstein through most of his career most of his major discoveries in the first ten, 15 years of his career was a leader

one of the best of his generation and i don't think we should be trying to quantify that but that is a good solid description of him and one that he would agree with. >> and if i'm not mistaken, einstein came up with his energy equals mass times the speed of light theory at 25. >> yeah, 1905. it's interesting people misunderstand how physics works. you don't sit there and get a brilliant idea and tell other people and they say that makes sense. he developed a theory on special relativity and that was based on certain principles that particularly the speed of light is constant because that is something that was an implied from the 1860s and then building a theory adjusting

newton's laws to take into account the theory of special relativity and one of the consequences of one of the things he discovered as he was growing up that theory it equals mc squared. >> and it became its own sort of a metaphor for all the cool stuff. i still remember we are the same age and the opening to the twilight zone had that mc squared, and it became -- >> back in the 1920s, wasn't it? [laughter] >> people don't know this, but i was the entertainer at the last supper. [laughter] anyway,. >> that's all i have to say. >> you are the busboy. [laughter] we have to get at this space time continuum. how did you first meet? >> he read my first two books.

one was about fate and what it really means and how over the centuries the idea developed was used in physics and that was an important topic then he read my second book which was simon's rainbow, search for beauty and physics and a memoir of the relationship while i was at caltech in my 20s. ..

>> do have an excellent sense of humor and it comes across beautifully in the book. it truly does. you mentioned how the dryness of physics but clearly mr. hawking had a wicked sense of humor and you can translate that for the reader. in fact in a you began working with stephen when he was in as he had lose gary's disease but was surprised to? was or anything that made you say this is remarkable in addition he is doing what he was doing in his physical state? >> it is fascinating but when

is the algebraic equations and the other is geometrically most of the work that most people do with these equations deviant he obviously couldn't do that he had an amazing memory just like grand master with those people blindfolded but so he did have that

ability for those who could write down the equation but what really surprised me he learned a new way of doing physics and with that geometric approach and he worked out his own language of geometry for those problems he was treating so he can solve problems and get ideas and analyze situations that interested him. then he's analyzing how they look and how they react using geometric relationships and they said that was his superpower because by doing

that not only was he avoiding his handicap but he had a new angle to look at things that other physicist didn't have to have other insights because they didn't have that approach. >> that's interesting because in the book you cite people who are sightless who find a way to enhance their sense of hearing or smell or taste so do you feel ultimately or maybe even stephen suggested this but ultimately the debilitating illness ended up being something that helped him in his discipline? >> he told me that it did for that which was driving him you

have to put in long hours california is burning right now but so was oregon you want to see her family and friends but 12 hours a day for months so the first thing it did was give him the drive so if you have the meaning and the focus to eliminate the distractions from him that was a big advantage.

>> and if he didn't have the visibility. >> that's interesting especially being a celebrated and prolific author. do physicist you have a writers block? if you are working on a theory or postulating the own premise premises, do you find you can go through writers block at the points of which you say i'm stuck? >> not just for physics but i like the policy and wrote the book to expose how we do physics and yet.

>> then we would all be physicist and coming up with great theories but it is very difficult. so to have very long periods because in those times he was still teaching those courses and he was waiting for an idea to come so those in between problems okay may be ten pavers i have a lot of ideas but i ran out of ideas on that

topic so sometimes something is in the back of your head that you are curious about so sitting there and then you say okay i need to answer the question. so this is a good one to figure out and you pop your head against the wall. >> and we know what you want to show you the idea you want to go with it.

and hitting that wall it was like a supermodel so everybody in the house day after day after day just to get past that. >> the part of the mission is to humanize stephen are making a relatable. certainly things that no one would know but to utterly d hollywood and someone who became your friend often is there a point at which that

even though he was wheelchair-bound and nonverbal the stephen has a different shirt on today that it wasn't an issue and you got use to it? >> that's a good question. the answer is yes when i first got there to work with him the answer is yes when i first got there to work with him bad but but then there would be a bead of sweat going down his forehead to wipe away. >> that was one of the moments of the book that we can all relate to immediately.

you tip your hand and go like this the way that you describe your empathy, oh my god that is driving me nuts if my nose is a chain. for the guy on the street the things we all take for granted as a central focus of the world-class physicist that was remarkable and empathic. >> and i can understand so i felt sorry for him a lot. that actually how he handled

those to change the way he thought was like the chore bedtime his a story for them to turn them with those obstacles with that experience he will not to replicate them but not to let them bother him. and the true happiness not from the things that you accomplish all of that can be taken away with that self-satisfaction and how you

feel about yourself and then to realize that is going on and that is a personal handicap and then interacted. >> you do describe his utter humanity and you touch on something quite important with respects to stephen that i also experienced to live in the moment and really understand this is a pretty tenuous fragile line on which we walk and it doesn't have to be lou gehrig's disease but to

jumpstart your humanity now we know it's important that was the embodiment of that to literally make lemonade every damn day. it was remarkable. >>. >> how would you describe hitler - - describe his personality and general? >> because he could do that and would not be beaten down of physical issues and optimistic person with a great sense of humor and then do some tourist stuff.

>> it described that. >> it is more tipping over and is said all vote. and with that platform and they will tell you and then they said sure come along. and then to be turned a certain way the wheelchair had to be down so with the rough ride and had to be carried down 20 or 30 times and then

he is detached from his machine he cannot communicate with his wheelchair or his computer so then they climb in and easily could've slipped if he goes into the river he obviously will just drown. i must be scaring him. meanwhile he's laughing at me. and then he would turn his head to look at but with all

those difficulties he loved it and it every day things like that. >> and as i recall just like everybody else planting and want to have strawberries and champagne to have some pretty dude. >> but that's okay. >> i feel like $100 million. >> and i thought to myself. >>. >> and with the size of mickey

rooney i don't know if that's the road you want to go down. but i don't blame you. is there any particular without giving too much away, is there a particular moment or two that you feel that has encapsulated the whole experience of that's possible? >> there are so many stories and there. in different directions but i had a near-death experience

but then i get back to cambridge the next time having dinner after dinner and then to start talking about it. >> numerous. one of the problems with the disease he had difficulty breathing eventually and because of that he was subject to lung infections so that may have exacerbated it so he would end up in the hospital with a long infection and several times with his family was worried he may not pull

through so we were commiserating a little bit and said yeah that's tough but that's physics and then my son who we mentioned earlier said basketball is life and i said that then he starts typing and says that it was fitting for the most famous physicist in the world he is a person who loves other people. >> and when i was reading the book we discussed i told you how much that impacted me to

write it is love and it really was. it was profound in many instances like that where you stop and reread it and in the context of who they are talking about it is impactful. so in that light, was stephen and atheist or the agnostic. >> he was an atheist he was very sensitive and did not want to insult anybody or argue against god sometimes people interpret his books as an argument against god will be say that god was a necessary to create those for god with the supernatural

thing but stephen's theory shows to start from nothing and that is the essence of the book with you say no doubt but that we saw evidence against god and he is a very spiritual person for what illustrates that and also they went to church with lorraine who was a religious woman. [inaudible]

>> in fact you cite in the book touching on her briefly the heat that you took when the grand design was released and you got a phone call from his secretary who said you have to help us you have written a book and you do that housekeeping. >> yes. i knew the book was coming out that day taking my daughter to school was 8:00 o'clock in the morning. have you read the times? she said yes i read that every day now i mean the london

times. [laughter] so there is three of them who read the london times? i don't read the london times. it is an explosion everybody is calling us. go read it and let's talk and ended up doing 97 interviews by the way and the headline i guess they pick the shorter of the two names god did not create the universe. that is what they say that we said and a lot of people were very upset and then from all

different quarters and countrie countries. on the other hand because it was very provocative, but it was a very compelling and interesting book. so yes that was a very stressful time in the and on cnn that fox news wants to interview you some of them are attacking you i said this is a physics book. [laughter]

>> what could be so upsetting in a physics book? >> to find out i could kiss off god. >> espn talking about the book i don't know. i don't know what that was abou about. >> you expanded your readership. why not? >> we did. it was based on the misconstrued rule. >> what did your work with stephen teach you about yourself? that is pretty much the questio question. gaining perspective so many

times since then look at what he had to go through and you smash your car or complain about a headache. on a scale from one up at i cannot even move pleased to say this is a nine. you kidding my new car got smashed up. and now i can still walk away from it. so i take things too seriously and i shouldn't but i also learned to make it not matter to you but to take charge of your own thoughts and have that not matter even more. >> it truly is a marvelous book and doing cartoon voices

it was federally readable and a total joy and there are aspects in the book we can apply to ourselves. you have done good it is one hell of a book is already 20 minutes before 6:00 o'clock. can we do that now? >> is that okay with you? >> let's go to q&a. >> anonymous says were you ever intimidated by mr. hawking? i guess when you get the phone

call then did you say oh my god then oh my god? >> i first met him even in the early meeting he walks in and is an icon and so brilliant and i am not. [laughter] >> we will be the judge of that. >> so that goes without saying. >>. >> where you concerned in that vein that when you started working with him you would say something he would perceive as stupid or silly? he called you and i get it but you think don't screw this up?

>> the times after i would ask something i would be kicking myself that he would find stupi stupid. because we were looking at his current work that was complicated and then to say maybe i shouldn't. >> so we word work together and then to write that section and then we were supposed to read them but once he was on

the faculty so to go back and forth with each other so writing this passage i just don't get so who does that work for uc santa barbara and try to explain to me what they were doing with this element. w.

>> we changed our mind. >> the resource he was doing was a work in progress. an e-mail would have been nice, but it's upside down. >> in the book what i love about your relationship is you are unafraid to discuss in the book your frustration with the most famous physicist of my time as a layperson you talk about your frustration if you are going to do this let's do it. i'm paraphrasing. you were writing together and essentially he dropped the ball and you called him on it.

>> i was pretty frustrated. i don't want to give anything away. i don't want to tell the whole story but i was pretty frustrated that way and even little things where there are many frustrations how people would just walk into his office and you could be in the middle of something and they would say oh yeah this will just take a minute. at first i was naïve. then they said do you mind and if i said i did, they would just ignore that. i don't know how i got anything done. he would sometimes ignore them so like if i didn't want to be

interrupted that they woul theyn and say do you mind, i don't know, we are kind of busy but whatever i would say they would just keep coming and step right in front and start asking their question and he would just not answer, he would ignore them and keep talking to me. his eyes wouldn't go to the person, he would look at me, the guy would just be standing there with his sentences floating in the air, he would get tired and walk out. >> if it works for that guy. this is a great question. my friend i believe a chemistry student i'm not sure, cecelia, forgive me, but she said did you ever collaborate on any physics problems together, did he inspire you to write about certain areas of physics?

>> there was one i was interested in why we remembered. i will give you a little preamble. the equations of physics are reversible so you could study and take data on the current state of the system, but everything is and how it's moving, a snapshot and then the laws of physics tell you how that develops and how to go forward or backward. and so now obviously if you see a film, you can tell a difference and i'm not just talking about somebody walking backwards and then going out the door. i mean, things like smoke, someone walking backward, someone could do that if they

want to, it's not inherently backward in time. if you see a burning thing and smoke spreads, you will never see that concentrates into something. that's a explanation for that. that is where the arrow of time comes from, from a statistical thing where even though the laws are reversible, if the state has put things in its very special like a very ordered state with a bunch of dominoes and they are each spinning on a table just right and someone moves the table they might fall this way or that way. there's a million ways they could fall but there's only one way they could stand up just right. they are not going to pop up to

the configuration with a zillion other configurations, so that is kind of the arrow of time but i was wondering psychologically how does that work why is it that we remember given that they are reversible why is it that we remember the past and we don't remember the future. somehow you would think that might be connected. i asked about that and he told me we had a couple of interactions he says i wrote a paper on that in 1985 or something so i dig up that paper and he was confusing having said something with having proved it so i go back to look at that

paper and he indeed says something about that but he doesn't really give any details or show how it works so i go back to square one and a friend of mine that i do a lot of physics on explaining that i think it's called why we remember the past and not to the future. anyway, that was a time i talked about that problem but i didn't work on it directly with him. >> it sounds like a title cover. here's an interesting question where she says what you just said we changed our mind is what physics feels out of reach for so many. how difficult is it to take a

evolving theory and translate it into something for interested nonexperts? >> i think first of all there's a lot of physics that is pretty subtle that people can read about that's exciting. you don't always have to be reading about what people are working on at the time. so in fact i would say most popular science books are about relativity, quantum theory, aspects of the evolution of the universe that are pretty well agreed upon and not necessarily cutting edge. it's like a different genre. now to explain those to the general audience it isn't that much different than explaining something that's already settled as long as the state isn't

changing why you are writing. when that happens, it gets difficult and you have to do your best to keep up with how it's changing and make it clear in the book. but we do at the end of the book talk about how this might be confirmed or verified and what part of it is a subtle theory. >> it's also one of the things that was helpful as a layperson apart from being readable and human you have very appropriate and nicely placed footnotes that explain what you read in a way that is understandable for

someone like myself and helpful which is actually i tell you what, you asking questions, are you sure you didn't cue this up in advance? catherine comes up with a lovely follow-up question. i just finished the book and enjoyed the physics as well as the human story, i rest my case. i graduated from cornell in 1965 and spent my working career. you indicated not everything you wrote was completely verified. here we go. had there been any major changes since it was published in 2010. i presume you are talking about with that have been a grand design? >> there've been some people that carried it out further but the technology the difficulty finding support for that or differentiating it from other ideas is that we need better technology in particular the

background radiation, the afterglow, the big bang. the idea is that in studying the minute details and supporting evidence for the ideas it just hasn't gotten there yet. maybe another ten years and sometimes we have to wait a long time. people thought we are never going to see one and then there's a candidate through the early 90s so sometimes these things take a long time. >> in fact if i am not mistaken i don't know the specifics, but einstein's theory of general relativity was essentially proven only a few years ago. >> since we are talking about

the specific context the first evidence for that, the first observation that confirmed the production that it was different from newton's theory was about four years after this was completed in 1915 and it was a 1919 observation that showed that it was confirmed although there are those that question those observations but that is what happened. the system everybody uses it's interesting a theory that applies generally to a theory that you need to use.

it's very concentrated actually there is it affects our lives because the gps systems would be wildly inaccurate. it's very important to the gps systems that get us all around. so just the fact when you type and i want to go to starbucks but if you are driving, the fact that you get there [inaudible] >> i have to tell you that is the sort of stuff what you do in your discipline. my grandfather was a physicist and an electrical engineer. speaking of jpl, i remember standing with my first

generation ipad a few years ago watching as it landed because they had already dropped a camera to watch the landing. and if my genius grandfather came back and saw me standing there with the device thi a devk that didn't heat up with no cords, no tube, no plug and i said i'm watching the surface of mars, this is a really authentic man who would say that's witchcraft and so i love being aware of i'm holding this device in my hand. i can find a starbucks in mongolia. i love that you pointed that out. i know we've almost done it again. thank you for this opportunity. there was something you wrote in the book that i loved so much, and obviously it's i presume based on other writings, but you said it turns out isaac newton

was an ass and i loved that. i thought oh my god. how do we know that. >> we know a lot about newton. a lot of people have written it. we have papers and books. he was actually a hoarder. he could have been on one of those reality shows. he kept grocery lists, every grocery list he ever wrote. there's boxes and boxes of his work, his writing. we know a lot about newton. >> that's one of the things that made me laugh out loud because you wrote newton is an ass. i just love that. we'll go back. people want opposite reaction, blah blah blah. but i know that we are pretty much -- >> i think you should take us out with a song.

these are the countries that have come up since the first song was written. montana may grow, bosnia the soviet union is gone south africa georgia belarus azerbaijan, is pakistan call 6102 sickest tan, curtis ten armenia, lithuania serbia kosovo u.s. the balkans, crimea ukraine and estonia here's macedonia new caledonia ivory, coast, dubai. goodbye. ♪ >> goodbye everybody. thank you so much all for joining us. please be sure to pick up a copy of leonard's book, and we hope to see you again very soon.