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

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