I settle into my seat and watch an usher argue with three students. “You can’t stand in the aisle,” she insists.
“Give me a break,” one student replies.
Yeah, give her a break; one of the greatest living scientists is about to come through those doors, and you’re telling her she’s a fire hazard?
I shift in my seat. This lecture is open only to physics students and faculty, and here I am, an interloper from the biology department. I arrived 45 minutes early, before the ushers, so they couldn’t screen me out. Fifteen minutes before lecture time, both this auditorium in the new Science and Engineering Quad and an adjoining overflow room were full. Now, ushers are turning students and professors away.
Finally, the side doors open. A small figure in a motorized wheelchair glides across the floor. He stops and turns to face the audience. There’s a beat, a moment when we can’t quite believe that we are actually in the same room as Stephen Hawking, Cambridge astrophysicist and author of A Brief History of Time. Then it hits us, and a wave of applause rolls through the auditorium.
Hawking’s first words startle me with their synthesized, metallic timbre. “Can you hear me?” comes the computer-generated voice. We answer with a loud, unanimous “Yes!” Hundreds of physics students -- and a few stowaways like me from other disciplines -- lean forward to hear Hawking speak about “cosmic inflation,” a theory that modifies the Big Bang explanation of the creation of the universe.
Hawking has Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative neurological condition that has left him nearly paralyzed. He can speak only with the help of a computer that he operates with minute finger motions. At first, the sound is jarring, but after a while, I stop hearing the mechanical tone of his voice. Instead, I begin to notice his precise, distilled language. Because each thought must be translated into speech through the computer, no word is wasted. He does not have the luxury of “ums” or digressions.
Hearing Hawking speak is like drinking black coffee. His words are energized, undiluted by milk or sugar. I can feel them traveling straight to my head like high-voltage caffeine. It is the purest form of communication: mind to mind, one thinker inspiring another.
But even in a giant lecture hall overflowing with hundreds of people, I realize that there is more to Hawking than just his brain. He smiles and speaks in a language I can understand. He jokes about students cheating on tests. He kids around with Andrei Linde, a Stanford physicist and friend who disagrees with some of his ideas about cosmic inflation. The good-natured tension between the two drives Hawking’s humanity home. He doesn’t claim to know the absolute truth. Like other scientists, he collaborates with his peers to try to answer questions that seem to defy human intelligence.
As the lecture ends, Hawking asks for questions from the audience. We are timid at first. When one man finally speaks up, Hawking is silent for 10 minutes while he composes his answer. We watch and wait, as if witnessing the very formation of thought. This is what makes Hawking so fascinating. He is living proof of the power of the human mind. Yet he also shares the basic human desire to spread his knowledge. And as long as he keeps talking to us, we’ll stand in the aisles to listen.
