364:. There is a strong attraction between the two and Jane is intrigued by Stephen's talk of stars and the universe, but realises that there is something very wrong with Stephen when he suddenly finds that he is unable to stand up. A stay in hospital results in a distressing diagnosis. Stephen has motor neurone disease and doctors don't expect him to survive for more than two years. Stephen returns to Cambridge where the new term has started without him. But he cannot hide from the reality of his condition through work because he can't find a subject for his PhD. While his colleagues throw themselves into academic and college life, Stephen's life seems to have been put on hold. He rejects the help of his supervisor
405:. It is this which leads Stephen to his PhD subject. He has always had a niggling scepticism about Steady State Theory, and now he can begin to see a way of explaining the revolutionary and highly controversial idea that the universe might have had a beginning. Sciama is sceptical but supportive – glad to see his student fired up and ready to work. Meanwhile, Stephen's condition continues to decline, he writes and walks with difficulty and his speech is starting to slur. But he now has a focus for his energies and, with the support of Jane, enters a new phase. He also commits to his relationship with her, asking her to marry him and in doing so exhibiting a defiant determination to survive.
413:. At last, Stephen enters a period of feverish academic work. He applies Penrose's theorems for collapsing stars to the universe itself. Justifying Sciama's faith in him, he produces a PhD of real brilliance and profound implications. In theory, at least, the big bang could have happened. Two years after his initial diagnosis, Stephen is not only still very much alive, but has played a part in a great scientific breakthrough which revolutionises the way people think about the universe. Today, the scientific consensus is that the universe started with a big bang: billions of years ago, a cosmic explosion brought space and time into existence.
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With his mind fired up, Stephen begins to work away at the implications of
Penrose's discovery and starts to home in on the idea of a singularity. With remarkable insight – a real Eureka moment – he asks himself: what would happen if you ran Penrose's maths backwards? Instead of something collapsing
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is an approach that uses concepts of shape rather than equations to think about the nature of the universe, and this proves to be the perfect tool for
Stephen, who is starting to find it very difficult to write. Penrose's great passion is the fate of dying stars. When a star comes to the end of its
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A secondary, interwoven storyline follows a different but connected scientific quest. Unbeknownst to
Hawking, just as he was being diagnosed in 1963, two American scientists were embarking on their own scientific mission. Their research was to produce hard evidence to support Hawking's theoretical
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lecture. He works through the calculations, identifies a mistake, and publicly confronts Hoyle after he has finished speaking. The row causes a stir in the department but, more importantly, it seems to give
Stephen the confidence to get started on his own work. At almost the same time Stephen is
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life, it begins to collapse in on itself. His calculations suggest something extraordinary. The collapse of the dying star appears to continue indefinitely, until the star is infinitely dense, forming a
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into nothingness, what if nothingness exploded into something? And what if you applied this not to a star but to the whole universe? Answer: the universe really could have originated in a
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403:singularity
314:. Starring
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