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Peter: I'll never forget that
first meeting with Stephen
in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn in Chicago.
A small compact car kind of pulled into the parking lot.
Someone got out, went back to the trunk
and took out this collapsible wheelchair.
Suddenly, this wheelchair kind of spun to life,
spun around literally did a 360
and took off across the parking lot.
I guess I opened my door at that point and this young man said
"Uh, Peter Guzzardi, is-- is that you?"
"Is that Peter Guzzardi?" And I said, "Yes, it's me."
And he said, "Well, that's Professor Hawking."
"And we've gotta go, we've gotta go after him."
So, I-- I start to blather a little bit.
It's like, "How are you Professor Hawking?"
"It's wonderful to meet you."
And then there was this-- this kind of silence.
Stephen Started to emit sounds
and the graduate student translated.
What-- what this young man said to me was,
"Where's the contract?"
All that came to mind was, you know, like, "Uh-oh!"
This is not gonna be easy.
The book about scientific theory
has been a top best seller.
Woman on TV: It's called "A Brief History Of Time"
and it was written by a remarkable scientist
named Stephen Hawking.
Man on TV: The man often compared to Galileo,
Einstein and Newton.
Peter: Stephen really was this strong willed man
who was singularly focused
on what he wanted to accomplish
and was gonna move Heaven and Earth to do it.
Soon it will have been in the best seller list
longer than any other book in history.
Lucy: Who knows what else he would have done.
What else would he have achieved if he hadn't had
motor neurone disease.
All the time I knew my father...
he was 24 hours off dying.
Um, the fact that it didn't happen is a miracle.
Stephen: Can you hear me?
I was 20 in October 1962.
I had moved to Cambridge to undertake my Ph.D.
It was a very cold winter and my mother persuaded me
to go skating on the lake in St. Albans.
I fell over and had great difficulty
getting up again.
My mother realised something was wrong
and took me to the doctor.
Mary: Stephen was first diagnosed
with the motor neurone disease
shortly after his 21st birthday.
Stephen ended up in St. Bartholomew's hospital
where I was...
a pre clinical student.
The prognosis he was given was a maximum of three years
with a rapid deterioration before then.
Stephen: At first I became depressed.
There didn't seem any point working on my Ph.D.
because I didn't know if I would
live long enough to finish it.
Ammar: Professor Hawking was diagnosed
in the early 1960's.
There was no treatment that could prolong survival.
That is essentially a death sentence.
The nerve cells controlling
the muscle movement die off.
Eventually, the patients lose the ability to walk,
to use their arms, to speak, to swallow or to breathe.
Most people feel very, very low.
And some people find it very difficult to come out
of that in a positive state of mind at all.
Stephen: While there is life, there is hope.
I had come to Cambridge to do Cosmology
and Cosmology I was determined to do.
Mary: Stephen was always one for puzzles.
Wanting to... work out the logic of things.
Stephen: I had a passionate interest in model trains.
I was always very interested in how things operated.
And used to take them apart
to see how they worked.
My aim was always to build working models
that I could control.
If you understand how the universe operates
you control it in a way.
Mary: All scientific laws are hypothesis.
The mathematical rules that will tell you
how other things will behave.
Stephen was always looking for the rules
that would let him win.
Stephen: I began to make progress in my work.
There was also a young woman called Jane
whom I had met at a party.
It makes me laugh even to think of him now.
Jane: I was an undergraduate
in London at the time.
I was drawn by his sense of humour and his wide smile.
And he had his beautiful grey-blue eyes.
I thought he was so clever.
He had his own particular charm...
which was very attractive.
Conversations were
always entertaining,
always funny, and Stephen
always had the last word.
He had a romantic side,
as he invited me to May Ball in Trinity Hall
soon after we met.
And that's a very romantic thing to do.
That was fun.
Mary: My family had considerable reservations.
Your son gets terminally ill
and suddenly introduces a girl that's
someone he wants to get married to.
It doesn't sound like a very good
basis for a marriage,
and does the girl know
what she's letting herself in for?
Jane: We were in love with each other
and I thought to myself,
"Well, really he may have
only two years to live."
But this was in the '60s,
"I might have only four minutes to live."
John F. Kennedy: This latest Soviet threat
must and will be met with determination.
Nobody knew when the next confrontation was going to be
which could lead to a nuclear war
and we would have four minutes warning of that.
Jane: July the 15th, 1965.
It was a very happy day and a very beautiful day.
We were married in the chapel in Trinity Hall...
where he was a post graduate student.
From the outside, Jane's decision was most unwise.
But it was Jane's decision.
Lucy: One thing that always strikes me
is the courage of both my parents.
It's quite extraordinary
when you think of what happened to those two,
probably rather naive, quite innocent 21 year olds.
Nobody could have foreseen what lay ahead of them.
We set off for New York state...
for a physics conference.
That was really our honeymoon.
It was almost as if everything had to be sacrificed
to what I call the worship of the Goddess of physics.
Roger: When I first encountered Stephen Hawking...
it was a kind of lazy journalistic cliche to say
that he was a new Einstein or the new Newton.
But certainly even right at the outset of his career...
Stephen Hawking wasn't just thinking big,
he wasn't just thinking enormous,
he was thinking cosmic,
about the whole universe.
Stephen: The big question in cosmology in the early '60s
was "Did the universe have a beginning?"
Roger: Stephen really started thinking
about the birth of the universe in mathematical form.
Stephen: I showed that the universe had to have
had a beginning...
in the singularity or Big Bang.
Roger: The Big Bang theory is a really extraordinary idea
you know, you look around the universe
look around your surroundings and the thought that you,
your house, the Earth, the solar system,
everything you can see was packed into this
unimaginably small space is an extraordinary thought.
Jane: Survival... and physics
were the prime motivators in his life.
Plus his children.
Mary: When Robert came along that was a surprise.
They hadn't been married that long.
And the normal pattern at that time
was to have your family when
you had a secure income to support them.
But Stephen obviously, didn't have time.
Robert: My father would sometimes be
deep in thought about whatever topic was on his mind,
whether that was scientific or not.
And so, sometimes it would be
hard to get his attention.
But that's I think sometimes
can be the case for most fathers.
He wanted to be involved as a father
but his disability meant that
he wasn't involved in some things that
normally as a father would be.
Jane: He very rarely spoke about his illness
but when he did, he said that the advantage of his illness
was that he was able to devote himself 100 percent
to his work.
He didn't have to change nappies,
he didn't have to make cups of tea,
he didn't have to cook meals.
But he could just get on with concentrating on physics.
He started using a wheelchair shortly after Lucy was born.
Lucy sat on Stephen's knee.
Robert trotted along beside
and I pushed from behind.
Lucy: By the time I was born,
my father had already outlived his life expectancy.
I think my father really loved being a dad
but I think my father's disability
did impinge greatly on my childhood.
This was the '70s and the '80s.
Disabled access to buildings just wasn't a thing.
There weren't even dropped pavements.
I mean, it was really hard.
Your whole day could be thrown off course
by a flight of steps.
Even just a couple of steps could just ruin
whatever it was you were trying to do.
And so it made things like holidays, it made outings,
it made all the kind of fun stuff...
unpredictable and liable to be blown off course
by circumstances completely beyond your control.
Robert: That-- that stage my father still slept upstairs
and so every night he had to make his way up the stairs.
That was quite a-- an interesting challenge.
He was very determined.
In the house, there's still handles screwed in the wall
which he used to pull himself up the stairs.
Jane: Here Stephen made a great discovery,
into the nature of black holes.
Stephen was sitting on one side of the bed,
slowly getting himself ready,
taking off his clothes, putting on his pyjamas.
I was sitting on the other side of the bed
and Stephen was, obviously, deep in thought...
then Stephen announced...
a great new idea in physics.
Those were the happiest days of our lives.
Our children were an absolute joy...
but his mind was always on physics.
It was February the 14th,
Valentine's day, 1974
I drove him over to Oxford
in pouring rain.
Stephen was giving a paper.
He was saying that Black Holes,
which previously had been assumed
not to emit
anything at all,
could actually radiate energy.
And there was a stunned silence.
Jim: Stephen was using his intuition
and his imagination.
There are these really weird objects called Black holes...
but Stephen discovered
that Black Holes are no longer black,
that they can spit out particles.
I like to call this the sizzling of space,
it's like sizzling bacon.
Stephen: I had discovered a concept
that is now named after me,
"Hawking Radiation."
My discovery was actually very controversial at the time.
Most people said, "This is rubbish, you must be joking,
of course Black Holes are black."
"They've got such incredible gravity,
nothing can escape."
"What are you talking about Hawking radiation?"
But actually now with the benefit of hindsight
uh, there's general agreement that it's right.
It's almost too beautiful and simple not to be true
and it really stands out as one of the big moments
in recent theoretical physics.
Stephen's career took off which led to his election
to The Royal Society at the age of 32.
At a party I had arranged for him,
afterwards he thanked his supervisors
he thanked his colleagues,
but not a mention of the family.
And no mention of us at all,
and I found that rather hurtful.
He wanted to go to every conference,
every summer school,
anywhere in the world.
And he expected me to go with him too.
Travels were extraordinary...
and demanding.
And we travelled and we travelled and we travelled.
Jane: We spent a whole year in California.
Stephen was a visiting Fairchild fellow
at California Institute of Technology.
And that was the most
glorious year imaginable.
We went to the desert,
we went to the ocean,
we went to the mountains.
Robert: I was 7, when we went to California.
I found it a, um
an exciting...
uh, time.
I can still remember a bit of the...
Los Angeles freeway map because...
I ended up being the, um
family navigator.
At that point he made the transition
to an electric wheelchair.
Stephen: It gave me a considerable degree
of independence
especially as in the United States
buildings and sidewalks are much more accessible
for the disabled than they are in Britain.
Robert: We stayed in some University accommodation
which they had done some adapting of it
so that there were ramps
so that he didn't need to deal with any stairs.
Jane: We had the most beautiful house.
It was an enchanting year...
for all of us.
Stephen: The excitement of our new life in California
was harshly interrupted by my motor neurone disease.
The physical symptoms took
an irreversible turn for the worse.
Motor neurone disease is a condition of moving goal posts,
so everyday the problems change.
Ammar: As Professor Hawking's nerves die off
there are some dramatic drops in ability.
When he could no longer use a pen and paper,
he couldn't write,
we had no concept
of how life changing it was going to be.
Judy: I had absolutely no idea
who he was when I first met him.
I think the advert said something like
"Disabled scientist needs secretary,"
something as simple as that.
As I walked into his office,
he sat there in his wheelchair
with the most wonderful twinkle in his eye and a lovely smile
and I knew at that moment
that we would get along just fine.
When he wanted to read a book,
I would have to turn the pages.
And then when he wanted to study something,
he would ask me to draw it on the black board for him.
He seemed to just take it in his stride.
That seems a funny word to use
but I don't recall Stephen ever complaining.
My father had independency, had autonomy, he had speed,
which he really enjoyed.
So many people have told me,
that they nearly got run over by him in Cambridge.
He did things that people didn't expect him
as a disabled person to do.
It was quite obvious that he-- he...
There was something special about him, there's no question.
Sir Roger: He was doing great work
scientifically and he just would not give up.
He did all this...
with this extraordinary physical disability
and hardly able to talk.
You'd like to reply to that one?
Yeah.
Judy: Because of his voice diminishing,
you had to study his lips and listen very carefully
to what he was saying
so that you've got it all down hopefully in one hit.
So it's really a sort of cylinder?
And the-- the answer is that its universe
is topologically S3 cross R1.
It was intriguing
that he'd got this amazing brain
that could put these, um,
calculations together
that had great meaning.
No, it just so happens, that we have the universe here.
Judy: Stephen wanted to have a conference called,
I think it was, "Super Space and Super Gravity"
or "Super Gravity and Super Space."
And these eminent scientists
were going to be coming from all around the world.
Jim: There were a group of us very young physicists
who were working on a new...
evolution of Einstein's theory called "Super Gravity."
And it was amazing to me personally that this person
that I had already looked up to as a physics hero
was coming to people like me saying,
"I wanna learn what you guys are doing."
Judy: During the course of the conference
the whole of the black board
was completely covered in this
wonderful arrangement of maths and doodles.
Someone decided to draw me as, um,
as a man with what looks like a fish bowl on his head.
It was actually my Afro.
Judy: I thought it was just too lovely
to be rubbed off.
So I went down to the basement
and asked one of the engineers
if he could possibly
take down the black board
and hide it somewhere till I could get back
and work out what we could do with it.
A few years before he died, he asked me to go and see him.
I'd never been to see the new office that he was in.
And then...
to my enormous surprise
there it was up in Stephen's new office
for everyone to see.
And I thought that was so lovely.
Roger: All the way through his life
Stephen had faith that the universe
can be described by mathematics.
He was really convinced that just out there...
tantalisingly almost within reach...
there was a theory of everything.
The two big pillars of 20th century science
were general relativity...
which is to do with the world of the very big
and Quantum mechanics,
which is the world of very small.
These were really powerful theories, but they gave you
very different pictures of the universe.
Jim: So, Stephen's quest
was to bring these things together.
That to me is another sign of Stephen's bravery.
Because here's this guy who's taking
these two different ideas that were at their borders
totally divorced from each other, and he's saying,
"No, nature demands
that we wield them together."
Sometimes we theoretical physicists do math...
in our intuition, in our dreams.
And so I believe that the stories of mathematics
resided in his mind and imagination
and he could manipulate those without writing it on paper.
To me that's a level of creativity that is beyond
what most of us have to do.
Jane: Stephen became Lucasian Professor
which was the chair held by Newton.
The impression that we gave
was one of a very successful family.
Stephen was recognised as a rising star
in the world of Astrophysics.
So what could be lacking in our lives?
But people didn't scratch beneath the surface
and a lot of people didn't show much imagination.
Sometimes I was so depressed,
I just felt like throwing myself in the river.
Either Stephen's condition would worsen dramatically
and I didn't know how we were going to manage...
or I wouldn't be able to cope
and then what would happen to my children?
Lucy: Looking back...
our family life
was really, really hard.
And my father was extremely vulnerable.
You've got to imagine, what would it be like
if you couldn't even turn your head.
Occ-- Occasionally I even helped him with feeding.
My father had issues with choking.
He would convulse and we needed to...
pat him on the back to address the issue.
We would be sitting having dinner
and then suddenly he would
go into a massive choking fit
and that would be actually quite terrifying.
Doctors had been saying to my mother,
"Why are you cutting out food and feeding it to him?
He should be on pureed food."
And he just refused.
He would be like, "Nope! Not having it!"
He just insisted on having food cut up and fed to him.
And this is my father's stubbornness, that he just
wouldn't do the obvious thing
that would've made things a lot better
for everybody else and he just wouldn't do it.
He thought that...
his needs needed to be met
when he thought they needed to be met and sometimes
that was a source of friction.
Lucy: My mother very much needed some support.
She had a huge burden.
Jane: It was as if I as a person didn't exist any longer.
In the beginning, I had been led to understand
that he had a prognosis of two years,
but as he lived on and, uh, the situation deteriorated,
I felt there were things I needed to be able to talk about,
but he steadfastly refused to discuss
his illness and the future.
Ammar: The dynamics in the family inevitably change
when somebody has a life-limiting condition.
One of the things that happens in that situation is called
the conspiracy of silence,
and that happens for both parties.
So the person who's got the diagnosis and the family member.
What it means is everyone's hiding their feelings
and everyone's pretending that everything's normal
when it isn't.
So, inevitably it's a huge task for the carer,
and it's actually not really possible
for one person to do it on their own.
Jane: I likened our situation to living on a precipice.
We turned our backs on the precipice,
but the precipice was always there.
Jonathan: It was clear to me that Jane was...
in a difficult place
and she really needed rescuing.
A good friend of mine wanted to help me out,
and so she suggested
going to the local church to sing in the choir,
and I went there, and Jonathan was the choir master.
Jonathan: I used to go on Saturday morning
to teach Lucy the piano,
and then that was when I first started playing the piano
for Jane to sing.
And so Stephen would be delighted
just to sit there and hear Jane sing.
The weekly Saturday visits built up
to being more often than once a week.
Jane: Jonathan was a heaven sent gift,
taking Stephen to the bathroom, feeding Stephen,
lifting Stephen, doing 101 things for Stephen.
Without his support, I would have gone under completely.
Jane: We became companions in adversity.
Jonathan: My wife had died in '74,
and so this helped to fill in a gap in my life.
They helped to prop me up at a time when...
I felt I needed a bit of propping.
Jane: Stephen understood that Jonathan was there to help me.
He seemed to accept it.
Stephen: She gave him a room in our apartment.
I would have objected, but I too, was expecting
an early death and felt
I needed someone to support the children after I was gone.
I was always resisting
the idea of falling in love.
And I think gradually...
I resisted a little less than I had done to start with.
It was not-- not easy.
We knew we had feelings for each other,
but we wanted to be loyal to Stephen,
so we had to suppress our feelings for a very long time.
Tim: I suppose, looking back,
I was perhaps born into a rather unconventional setup,
having my father and then having Jonathan also around,
and I suppose able to sort of provide perhaps a little bit
more... physical interaction in terms of maybe
you know playing cricket in the garden or playing tag.
You know, that was, that was great actually.
Jane: Stephen's mother asked me a very impertinent question.
She wanted to know who Tim's father was.
Was it Stephen or was it Jonathan.
And I told her that there was absolutely no way
that anybody other than Stephen could be Tim's father.
And I was very hurt.
And so I told her.
And then her reaction was, "Well, of course, Jane,
we've never liked you."
"You don't fit into our family."
Lucy: From the perspective of a child,
you're in this incredibly confusing situation,
trying to process, I suppose, why our lives
was so dramatically different to the lives of our friends.
I was aware that my mother and Jonathan were having
some form of relationship, um...
I was so young that I didn't know
what an actual relationship kind of was.
And I was just, you know, I just hadn't questioned it.
I just thought, "Well, this is-- this is normal."
I tried to be a substitute for Stephen
with things that he wasn't able to do.
But I did make a point of not trying to do the things
that Stephen did do with them.
It was a question, just of
not stepping on his toes.
Tim: My dad and I, we were able to have a relationship.
It was just based on simple things, like
going down to the ice cream van together.
This ecosystem that we were living in
seemed to sort of function.
I didn't think of it as abnormal in any way.
That's not to say that there probably wasn't a lot going
on under the water.
Sort of like a paddling duck, but
for me as a kid, it seemed to work fairly well at the time.
Jonathan and I took the car and the children
and we camped in a little place called Rothenburg.
Jonathan: That was a holiday for the children.
It was time when the children were having a bit of time...
in mucking about in tents
which, um, I think they enjoyed.
Jane: Stephen was in Geneva.
We were all going to meet up in Bayreuth
for a performance of Wagner's Ring.
Stephen was passionate about Wagner
and love to listen to it very loudly,
um, much to the consternation of anybody
who was in-- within earshot.
The only opera that existed for him was Wagner...
and Wagner, Wagner, Wagner.
We were just sitting down to dinner in a restaurant,
and I think my mum got up to use the pay phone
just to sort of see how everything was,
and then she sort of came back...
you know, looking like she'd just seen a ghost.
Tim: My father had fallen ill with pneumonia.
Mother came back and said, "Your father is really ill,
we have to go now," and we sort of all bundled
in the car and drove to Geneva.
Jonathan: Jane was understandably distraught,
and I drove 400 miles,
just wondering what we were going to find.
Tim: We went straight to the hospital.
My first experience of visiting a hospital
as a child is always quite a shock.
I remember him just being white, like being salt white,
lying on a white sheet in a white room, being white.
And it was really scary.
I mean, he was really, really ill.
Jane: Stephen lay there in a comatose state.
The doctors took me to one side and said, "Look,
if we try to bring him 'round,
he might not survive."
"There's nothing we can do for him."
"Should we turn off the life support machine?"
I flatly refused.
They brought him 'round and he came 'round.
And we had a Red Cross jet to take us back to Cambridge.
Judy: The telephone rang and it was somebody
from Gonville and Caius
telling me that this plane
was coming into Cambridge airport with Stephen on board.
I walked across to the hospital
and saw Jane in the corridor.
Jane was tired and concerned
beyond belief and overwhelmed
and there were moments, I have to say,
in the first couple of days where, um,
it was touch and go.
Stephen was at huge risk.
Stephen was certain to die.
His motor neurone disease
was beginning to paralyse the muscles
of his voice box, his larynx.
It was blocking his airway...
so he couldn't breathe.
So, the team at Cambridge made a opening
in the neck directly into his wind pipe.
We call it a tracheostomy.
And to keep that opening open,
they put in a tube, a tracheostomy tube.
That meant that Stephen could breathe directly
through that tube into his lungs.
Stephen was once again able to breathe on his own.
He'd had a tracheostomy,
and that meant
that he no longer had a voice at all.
The impact of that was devastating
because Stephen had no means of communication.
Judy: We were never going to hear his voice ever again.
How was he going to communicate?
Lucy: Most misunderstood thing about my father
is how much he suffered.
He found night times particularly
frightening because he couldn't
actually produce any sound.
It wasn't just that he couldn't speak.
He couldn't even produce
a scream or a-- or a gasp or anything like that.
Terrifying.
Ammar: In the 1980s, if you're locked in
and you have no way of communicating
with the outside world, except perhaps through blink,
you really do need 24-hour watching.
How else can you tell if Professor Hawking actually
has pain or has some need?
He was in hospital for four months,
and then they decided it was time to discharge him.
So, I had very hastily to try and find a care team.
Stephen accepted the nurses
in the house because we needed them.
He just enjoyed the attention.
Lucy: Some of them were lovely.
There were nurses then who have remained lifelong friends
of us as a family.
But there are others who have not.
I remember one nurse snatching the newspaper
out of my hand, like, "This is for your father."
And I was like, "But I always read the paper in the morning."
"And then I give it to him. That's what we do."
It felt like they had come in and they were saying,
"We run this place now."
I just remember thinking,
"I don't know that I like this."
It does upset the dynamics of a family home
when suddenly lots of other people are coming in.
I certainly felt a dramatic change
in terms of the ecosystem that we'd existed in before.
Jane: This new batch of people came into the house
and they worshipped the ground under the wheels
of his wheelchair.
And that was impossible for us to compete with
because that wasn't how we lived.
We felt pushed into a corner,
which made us feel very uncomfortable
in our own home.
Mary: When Stephen lost his voice,
it was extremely worrying and depressing.
His carers and nurses were using a letter board.
You have the letters of the alphabet,
you point to the letter,
and the individual who is trying to communicate with you
indicates yes or no,
and you build up a word like that,
guessing a lot of the time.
And if you think that is the only way
you're going to be able to communicate...
it's extremely depressing.
Lucy: It was enormously traumatic
trying to interpret what he wanted.
I can remember him just looking arghh...
you know, really frustrated.
Like, "Oh, my God. What are we going to do now?"
Judy: I had seen on a program on TV,
a device which was going to try
and enable people who had
no means of communicating with anybody
being able to do so.
So, first, I've got to line my eye up with the computer.
So, I just stare at the centre of the screen,
and there you can see the computer locking on.
Judy: The students from the department
looked into the possibilities of changing it
so that he could use his finger and thumb
to produce the characters or the words on the screen.
I think it went...
"Hello, my name is Stephen Hawking."
And everyone was like, "Woah, dad, you're American."
"That's amazing."
Hello, my name is Stephen Hawking.
Can you hear me?
For the first time in years, he was free.
Just as the electric wheelchair gave him freedom of movement,
so the voice gave him freedom of speech again.
-I will buy nine houses. - Sure, dad.
Stephen: My youngest son, who was only 6 at the time
of my tracheostomy
never could make me out before.
Now he has no difficulty.
That means a great deal to me.
-I was on New York. - Okay.
Then I got an eight right?
That was very much the dawning of a, a sort of,
you know, golden era of communication with him.
It just meant that we could actually begin a,
a sort of father-son relationship.
King's knight pawn.
This one? Two?
Tim: Of course, you might say something to him,
and then you'd have to wait sort of five minutes for him
to come back with a-- with a response,
which then was a bit awkward because you didn't know
how to be in that-- in that-- in that interim period.
My father's attitude towards
games was to win at all costs.
He was a ruthless competitor.
I, however, was, uh, was equally determined
to try and win, particularly at things like chess.
As-- as time wore on, obviously, it became very clear
that I wasn't likely to win at chess,
um, or-- or scrabble, um...
And it was on the occasion of his 70th birthday
when I had to finally admit to him that I had...
I might have cheated a few times.
Once he found a way to communicate
with the help of technology,
he was off and running and I knew
the book was a big priority for him.
Stephen: I had the idea of writing a popular book.
I wanted to explain how we might be near finding
a complete theory that would describe the universe
and everything in it.
I thought I might make a modest amount to help support
my children at school and the rising costs of my care.
I expect he thought he was onto something...
because he said he wanted it to be sold in airports.
That was his famous line, you know,
"I want this book to be sold in airports."
Peter: To be absolutely honest, the early draft,
it was pretty dull.
So, I would write in my margin notes,
"I'm losing the gist here."
"Could you give a little anecdote?"
"Could you somehow get me interested?"
Stephen: At times, I thought the process would never end.
Peter: To his credit, a lesser man
might have gotten frustrated, tired, given up,
but it was very clear what a strong-minded person he was
and that he could dig in, no question about it.
We had one mission, which is to make
this book very successful.
For seven weeks a book about scientific theory
has been a top best seller.
It's called "A Brief History of Time"
and it was written by a remarkable scientist
named Stephen Hawking.
You look to the skies and hope that lightning will strike
and every once in a rare, rare while, um
lightning does strike, and it struck here.
Man on TV: Professor Stephen William Hawking
is an intellectual icon.
Professor Stephen Hawking has been acknowledged as one of
the most brilliant scientists in the world and also
as one of its most courageous.
The man often compared to Galileo, Einstein and Newton.
You've been dubbed the new Einstein.
How do you react to that?
That is media hype.
Peter: In those days, a million copies was a huge bestseller.
This book sold 10 million copies worldwide.
So, the success was phenomenal.
Were you surprised by its success?
I'm told that soon it will have been
in the the bestseller list
for longer than any other book in history.
There's an old joke, which is there's two kinds of
popular science book.
There's "A Brief History of Time,"
and there's all the rest.
My first encounter with Stephen Hawking
wasn't really planned at all.
I found myself in the University of California,
Berkeley and I can remember the press officer said,
"There's going to be a press conference."
"Um, it's a British physicist, Stephen Hawking."
"He's going to launch his book, A Brief History of Time."
I was kind of blown away by the ballyhoo of it all.
The main auditorium was completely overloaded.
I've never seen a physicist
with a kind of rock star reception like this.
There was something extraordinary
about the idea of a mind
trapped in a near useless body that was actually ranging
across the whole universe.
But I think also it struck some collective nerve.
People felt that they were going to get tangible answers
to some of the biggest questions that had exercised theologians
and religious figures and philosophers over millennia.
Stephen Hawking himself talked about
knowing the mind of God.
And if you bought this book, you, too,
could share in these secrets.
Did I read it? Um, No.
I mean, I wouldn't have a clue what was in it.
I just didn't understand it.
Tim: I got a sense that the book was doing really well
when my father took me out to buy me
what was at the time,
the most expensive Lego set.
It was about £100, which in 1988 was actually
a lot for-- for Christmas and birthdays,
let alone just a sort of random gift.
I got a sense that things are changing.
There were some sort of great experiences
that opened up to me.
For example, I got to travel with my dad
to New York on Concord, when I was 9.
I was with my father when he met the Pope.
An interesting meeting of two very
divergent perspectives on the world.
Mary: The motif of a crippled scientist
contributed a great deal to his public image.
I've often wondered how much of an icon Stephen
would have been had he not had motor neurone disease.
Fame is a strange phenomenon.
I mean, I-- I don't think really
we understand it, what it is,
why it happens to people, um...
what the consequences are for that person and also
what the consequences are for those around them.
Judy: The post started arriving.
He had all these opportunities,
and so whatever he was presented with
if it tickled his fancy, he'd go for it.
Jane: Success of the book now gave him
a new financial freedom,
which meant he could go where he liked,
do what he liked, and he didn't have
to worry about the consequences.
Can you hear me?
Why do we remember the past, but not the future?
In other words, why does time go forwards?
Jane: He was mobbed and worshipped wherever he went.
Mary: Stephen always did love being the centre of attention.
He was a boy.
He was number one.
We went to a pantomime at Golders Green once.
He must have been about 8.
They called for a child in the audience
to come up and sing a song.
So, Stephen was out of his feet and up there
before anyone else.
And he sang
"Ye Gentlemen of England that guard our native shores."
And it's got about 20 verses.
And Stephen insisted on singing the whole lot
and they couldn't shut him up.
Lucy: He'd always been the circus ring master,
but with "Brief History Of Time,"
the circus got a whole lot bigger.
Jane: The children and I had to be on parade...
to support Stephen
because Stephen wanted to be recognised worldwide.
And that became more and more uncomfortable.
Lucy: He didn't understand the impact that he had
on other people close to him.
I don't think he understood
what it was like to be somebody else.
I don't think he had that kind
of empathetic interchange
of what would this be like for you?
Jane: I'm not a scientist.
I'm not an appendage
of Stephen as I very much feel I am
Um, when we go to some of these official gatherings.
I mean, sometimes I'm not even introduced to people.
I come along behind, and, um,
I-- I don't really know who I'm speaking to.
What gives you the greatest pleasure?
To discover something new about the universe.
Lucy: My father took to the whole fame thing
like a duck to water.
However, people just didn't understand how much effort
he had to put into every single public appearance.
He said to me, "I'm actually very lonely."
Peter: I went to a party in New York honouring Stephen
as the man of the year, and
Stephen was sitting in his wheelchair,
and people were very hesitant to kind of bridge the gap
to reach out to him to come over and say anything.
And as I approached, it was just so clear
that he was both relieved and thrilled to see me.
It was just relief, uh, that somebody here is willing
to kind of connect with me.
Judy: Fame brought with it
a lot of organisation behind the scenes.
A lot of other things had to happen.
We started to have to think about
how were we going to get him
to whichever lecture he was going to give.
Who would he need to go with him?
I saw the beginnings of
a little bit of trouble when Stephen's
nurse Elaine came on the scene.
Elaine was trying to make sure that
she was on duty when she wanted to be on duty.
Woman 1: I'm preoccupied with trying to get him...
in as good shape as I can.
Judy: She just seemed to me to be...
maybe flamboyant at first,
but Stephen seemed happy,
and that was what was important.
Mary: Elaine was very, very friendly.
I think Stephen and Elaine got on so well
because they shared the same sense of fun and humour.
Fame, vulnerability, genius.
These are all magnets.
I realised that Elaine was becoming more and more dominant.
Oh, yes, that's right.
Oh, right.
The house seemed to sort of reverberate
to the sound of her laugh.
She seemed to be around a lot.
Jane: It was obvious that there was a relationship
between Stephen and Elaine.
They didn't hide it.
By comparison,
my relationship with Jonathan was very mild
and dedicated to Stephen's care
and keeping the family going.
Stephen: I became more and more unhappy
about the increasingly close relationship
between Jane and Jonathan.
In the end, I could stand the situation no more.
Mary: I'd rather doubt whether Elaine was the cause
of the breakdown in
Stephen and Jane's relationship
because I suspect that that had broken down
a considerable time before
when Jonathan appeared on the scene.
I felt that Stephen was being neglected
in favour of Jonathan.
Jonathan appeared to be being treated
as the man of the house
and Stephen as a...
dependent lodger.
Tim: I had the sense that the fabric of our
immediate family was breaking up somewhat.
It was becoming a very claustrophobic environment,
but there was a lid on it, just about...
and it felt all a bit fragile.
Jane: Stephen was complaining that he didn't get time
to do any work in Cambridge, there were always people
knocking at his door.
So, we had bought a house in France.
And, then, Elaine Mason and her husband
and sons arrived.
And that was the beginning of the end.
I very clearly remember
the night when it all sort of blew up.
It had been festering for quite some time,
a bit like when you're waiting
for a thunderstorm to-- to happen.
It was quite late and my room was right above
the room where it was all happening so I could hear it.
And then, of course, I got out of bed,
in my pyjamas and then...
sort of went down and I was just sort of sat on the floor
outside the room where it was all happening.
I was berated on all fronts.
I was a wicked woman, I didn't look after Stephen.
You name it, it was hurled at me.
Tim: One of the things I remember my father saying
to my mother was...
that she, uh, never kissed him on the lips.
Being sort of 8 or 9 years old, I was like,
"Well, why is that a problem?"
I think you know, as you get older you realise that,
that's I suppose something that, you know, is important
within a relationship, so...
The key thing that I remember my father saying on that night was
"If Elaine goes, Jonathan goes."
And it was the most horrible time imaginable.
I don't really want to go back over it.
We all understand that people split up
and that people move on and that these things happen.
However, Christmas day.
He gave us all our presents in the morning.
And then my dad made this big thing
of going off with Elaine.
Which I thought...
still think was unnecessarily brutal.
We didn't have the resources of adults,
we didn't have the mentality of adults,
we didn't have the context or the perspective.
We were just kids.
Professor Hawking, after 25 years of marriage to Jane,
what went wrong?
I won't answer that.
You've said yourself that Jane gave you something to live for.
Why did you leave her?
I won't answer that.
Woman on TV: Stephen Hawking arrived
at the Registrar office,
well prepared for the service.
The brilliant scientist who has to use
a voice synthesiser to speak had already programmed in
all his responses for the ceremony.
You could not meet Elaine and not be struck by Elaine.
Very open and warm...
Tall and striking and this kind of mane of gold-red hair.
Stephen perked up a lot...
when he took up with Elaine.
He seemed happier.
I'm marrying the woman I love.
Her positive cheerful ebullience,
slightly wacky sense of humour et cetera all...
all seemed to benefit Stephen.
This is the most loving man I know.
And the coolest man I know.
I had seen enough of Elaine by then
to think there was no way I could be there.
Robert: I went because he was my father,
and I wanted to...
be with him when he'd invited me.
I wasn't entirely sure about the-- the marriage itself
but I wanted to have a relationship with him.
David: Stephen was always looking to the future.
His drive to live,
to progress, to do things is just...
perhaps his-- his greatest thing.
Robert: My father liked the idea that...
women maybe... might be attracted to him.
People with disabilities
can-- can have relationships
and they can have intimate relationships.
Tim: My father had a very egalitarian approach
to his own life in terms of what he felt
he was en-- entitled to.
Whether it was...
trying different foods,
going on roller coasters,
uh, or-- or having a sex life, you know, an active one.
Perhaps that was an aspect of his life
that he wanted to-- to reawaken.
Elaine and Stephen had a lot of...
fun together.
Elaine gave Stephen a ride in a hot-air balloon,
as a birthday present.
Him sort of grinning all over his face,
and enjoying himself. He...
That's the sort of thing he liked doing.
Man on TV: The professor who suffers
from motor neurone disease,
spent around an hour in the air,
before landing rather undignified but happy.
This is something I have always wanted to do.
- Cheers. - Cheers.
She enjoyed the same sort of jokes, the same sort of...
silliness.
He had a party.
And, he and Elaine were doing a conga.
You know, leading it around the room,
Stephen in a wheelchair.
And I can't see Jane doing that.
David: Stephen loved a party.
And he loved to surprise people.
At his 60th birthday,
in burst the Can-Can girls from the Folies Bergere.
He brought the whole troop over.
And we have all these ladies in their famous frilly dresses,
dancing around the tables.
I mean that was... so Stephen.
He had a very mischievous sense of humour.
Marika: Theoretical physics is a world which is,
is full of men.
Stephen had two female doctoral students.
And I think he was very supportive to both of us.
But there was a certain amount of
attitudes towards women which wouldn't be
so common these days.
He had on his wall, you know, I think it's quite well known
he had a picture of Marilyn Monroe.
He liked it when there was a beautiful woman
who was serving him in a restaurant.
He'd always like to sort of smile.
I wouldn't say qu-- quite flirt, but almost-- almost that.
He enjoyed the company of women.
This was not something that particularly bothered me,
because it-- it didn't reflect any disrespect towards women,
it didn't mean that he didn't consider
women as intellectual equals.
But it's also a fact that he didn't hire many women.
Stephen was very keen that he and I would work together
using String Theory to understand
properties of black holes.
He saw this as a way of unlocking the puzzles
that he had been trying to solve for 20 years.
Roger: He was perhaps a bit over-optimistic
about how close we were to that Theory Of Everything.
But you can see him, his whole life,
going for this horizon,
trying to come up with this mathematical picture
of how the universe works.
Many people... judge that Stephen's best work
was created before he was 30.
I'm not sure that's right.
I saw no diminution
in his quest to know...
the structure of space and time.
I think one of the enormously likeable things, um...
very sort of heart warming things,
about my father as a person,
is that he is in many ways the opposite of...
an ivory tower genius.
He-- he's a real human being
who has all these experiences,
has this brilliant mind,
works incredibly hard,
gets things wrong, picks up, carries on...
It's this never giving up quality about him.
He was more or less able to do
most of the things he wanted to do.
Although, there were some significant health collapses.
Well, I first met Stephen completely by chance
on an aeroplane coming back
from... Greece in 1998.
The nurse was feeding him some liquidised food.
But I could see this liquid food
being coughed out of the tracheostomy tube.
And this alarmed me considerably.
El-- Elaine asked me if I would visit them at home,
and-- and discuss the situation a bit more.
I could see very clearly that
his larynx was functionless.
It wasn't able to close in any fashion.
Any food that went down his gullet,
would then go into his lungs.
He would literally have drowned in any food or liquid
that he had then been given.
We had to separate his
food way and airway permanently.
David admitted that the odds of me
surviving the reconstructed throat surgery were slim.
But then we also knew that my odds of enjoying life
or surviving for much longer
were also minimal.
I decided to have the operation.
David: When you have a laryngectomy,
you breathe directly into your lungs,
so, one of the advantages was he could breathe more easily.
And as he was very fond of saying it,
it meant that he could carry on breathing on his own
for the next number of years.
Elaine was an integral part of this decision.
She understood the-- the physiology
and anatomy of the problem.
Stephen: My marriage to Elaine was passionate
and tempestuous.
We had our ups and downs.
But Elaine being a nurse saved my life on several occasions.
Lucy: Elaine definitely liked some people
and didn't like other people.
I went out to stay with my dad in California.
And I woke up in the night.
And I could hear Elaine shouting at my father saying,
"Tell her to leave, she has to go."
And, I could hear my father saying,
"Please let her stay, she is my daughter."
So, I put my trainers on, I climbed out the window.
I was on the ground floor and I went jogging around
L.A. until the sun rose.
I talked to my father many times about his relationship
with Elaine and I said to him how worried I was for him.
He just said,
"Please just put up with her for my sake."
Robert: I was aware that there were
challenges in-- in my father's relationship with Elaine.
I, um...
heard about things from other people.
It was... worrying and confusing.
Tim: I overheard Elaine when she was, uh,
feeding my-- my dad his breakfast.
She was saying...
things to him that were
uh, what I would think of as
put downs, sarcastic comments.
But I didn't understand whether this was some form of
role play between them, that-- that was accepted on both sides
and which they would snap out of.
I've never talked to anyone about that.
That was 23 years ago.
Your head's falling forward, come on.
Did you say no to me?
Man on TV: Cambridge here, police say they are talking
to a number of people about the allegations.
The professor himself is currently in hospital
recovering from an unrelated chest infection.
Lucy: The phone rang at 7 o'clock in the morning,
on the 2nd of November, uh, 1999.
And I thought it would be somebody calling
to say Happy Birthday, and it wasn't.
And it was somebody who worked for my father saying,
"Elaine has broken your father's arm."
"You have to do something about this."
I went to see him and he said, "No, no, that didn't happen."
"She didn't break my arm."
I was just appalled and very saddened
to find that Stephen's situation over all these long years
has been far worse than any of us ever imagined.
Man on TV: Police say they would also like to talk to him,
at his convenience.
I was very concerned about him.
Very concerned about him particularly
when I went to talk to him because
he had bruises all over his face.
He wouldn't tell me how he got them.
I tried to-- to communicate with him.
But it didn't... end up with
clarity which I found frustrating.
Man on TV: Physicist Stephen Hawking tonight
dismissed reports that he's been assaulted
and abused as completely false.
I really don't know what to say
about his point of view on this
because he didn't explain it to me.
He chose to tell me it wasn't happening.
And so, why?
I think she enforced his dependence on her...
as in you know without me you'll just have nobody
to look after you.
The situation regarding the allegations is very distressing.
They were thoroughly investigated.
Stephen absolutely denied them.
You're looking at a situation where with paralysis,
the bones become extremely thin and fragile.
You know, you just look at him...
and something broke.
I didn't believe the allegations...
at all.
Lucy: After the enquiry was dropped,
I just didn't know what to do.
It was absolute torture.
People were deeply suspicious of me, um...
It was a really very upsetting, damaging and difficult time.
At the same time, my son was diagnosed as severely autistic.
Uh, when I got divorced and...
my career sort of packed up and left me.
I drank too much and I needed to stop.
In the middle of all of this,
he wrote this letter.
And he wrote to me and he said, "I love you very much."
"And I've been in a dark place, too."
"And I want you to-- I want you to come back."
"And, um, it was time to try again."
It was quite a few years after the allegations,
that Stephen and Elaine broke up.
I don't know whether those allegations
had anything to do with it.
But I could see the difficulties
that were occurring.
Stephen's disability was becoming difficult to manage.
He was spending far more time in hospital.
He got extremely tired.
He was... putting his energy into his work
which didn't leave much left over for anything else.
Jonathan Wood: When he was working, he was able to...
go at this crazy pace and...
achieve all these things.
Partly I think because of the people
and the support he had around him.
I spent more time with him than I spent with my wife.
I haven't really talked about Stephen...
um, to anyone since his death.
And it just felt, um...
it still feels painful, I think.
It was a very laborious process,
getting him hoisted out of bed...
Being assisted in the bathroom,
getting ready and fed, having breakfast.
I guess nobody really saw that.
The voice synthesiser was an extension of himself
and then, because I was maintaining
that and enabling him to travel,
I was in some way an extension of him.
As I would view his care team...
it was a very personal relationship
for everybody that worked with him.
It transcended that of a colleague.
I think we were his family.
Lucy: It's really nice to be back in his life.
You know, coming back together again as a family.
We-- we really, you know started getting on,
we started talking a lot.
We started working together.
All the time he was pushing back the boundaries
of this is what I can do.
And it was completely different, you know, wow,
I was like, "Wow, this is... God, things have moved on."
Jonathan Wood: He enjoyed
the celebrity side of it, definitely.
He also saw it as a means of
communicating his physics to a wider audience.
Hello, Beijing, can you hear me?
Stephen: Our picture of the universe has changed
a great deal in the last 50 years
and I'm happy if I have made a small contribution.
Lucy: In 2009, we got the invitation from Barack Obama
to go to the White House and receive his Medal Of Freedom.
By then, you know, we were worried
his health had deteriorated quite a lot.
And he said to me, "I really want to go, what do you think?"
And I had to say, "Do you understand that if we do this,
there is quite a big chance that this trip could kill you,
that you may die in them?"
And he said,
"I don't mind dying in the White House provided,
I've met Barack and Michelle first."
Professor Stephen Hawking was a brilliant man
and a mediocre student.
When he lost his balance and tumbled down a flight of stairs,
diagnosed with a rare disease and told
he had just a few years to live,
he chose to live with new purpose.
And happily in the four decades since he has become
one of the world's leading scientists.
As time wore on, he became little bit more circumspect
in terms of what opportunities he took up.
The opening ceremony of the Paralympics
is obviously a notable
occasion where he felt like
he could take that sort of showmanship and combine it with,
with a message.
Stephen: Ever since the dawn of civilisation,
people have craved for an understanding
of the underlying order of the world.
Lucy: It was just electric.
I mean, the whole of that stadium just rose to their feet
when he came out and started speaking.
It was so beautiful.
Jonathan Wood: Delivering a message of hope,
was important to him.
However difficult life may seem,
there is always something you can do
and succeed at.
He'd had these struggles through his life
and that he wanted to know, he wanted people to know that...
they could, they could do things.
They could achieve things. They shouldn't be held back.
The games provide an opportunity
for athletes to excel
to stretch themselves and become outstanding in their field.
So, let us together celebrate excellence,
friendship and respect.
Good luck to you all.
Stephen Hawking, uh, certainly was famous for his physics
but I like to say that he's classical archetype hero.
People said, "If he can face that challenge,
then I can face my challenge."
That's what a hero is for.
When we look back on Stephen Hawking's legacy,
I think it's quite difficult to unpick
the scientist from the person because I think they're so...
combined in people's minds.
Things that had previously been easy for him,
were becoming harder and harder.
He was spending far more time in hospital.
It was just general systems...
packing up slowly.
His neurologist told him that
there really was nothing more they could do for him.
I found myself in a situation with him where I had to-- to...
basically explain to him that,
he was now going into palliative care.
And that the doctors had said he was now untreatable.
And that was probably the biggest conversation
he and I ever had about it and...
it seems ironic that-- that came so late, you know,
he was 75 by then.
Lucy: And, he said to me, "I would like to go home
to die now, please."
I-- I had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time
with my dad in the, in the final few months.
It was just more about being there
and spending time together.
Seeing him, in-- in bed,
uh, away from the chair,
sort of helped foster a bit more of a personal connection,
because all of things around him had been taken away
and it just-- just him again.
Uh, I was surprised at how badly I took it.
This was something that I had been expecting for 50 years.
And...
it still hit me.
Lucy: Those last days, weeks, it was lovely actually,
just sitting there with him.
Unexpectedly, all this snow fell
and I remember my father lying in bed with...
his curtains open, so could see the snow.
And my brother and I went out
and built a snowman in the garden.
And the snowman was looking up, we tilted his head,
so that the snowman, we made a snow astronomer.
Stephen: So, remember to look up at the stars
and not down at your feet.
Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about
what makes the universe exist.
Be curious.