Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
A theoretical physicist recognized as one of the greatest since Einstein, best known as the author of A Brief History of Time.
On the island
Eight records
I first heard it this summer in As Penn, Colorado. In the summer they have physics meetings. Next door to the Physics Center, it's an enormous tent where they hold a music festival. As you said working out what happens when black holes evaporate, you can hear the rehearsals. It is ideal, it combines my two main pleasures, physics and music.
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77
This was the first LP I bought. It was 1957, and 33 RPM records had recently appeared in Britain. When I first heard this record in the shop, I thought it sounded rather strange, and I was not sure I liked it. But I felt I had to say I did. However, over the years it has come to mean a great deal to me.
String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132 (third movement)
If I knew that a tidal wave was on the way, to overwhelm my desert island, I would play the third movement of this quartet.
Lotte Lehmann and Lauritz Melchior
The Valkyrie made a tremendous impression on me.
For me, and many others, the Beatles came as a welcome breath of fresh air.
Requiem in D minor, K. 626Favourite
One of the greatest is the requiem.
Plácido Domingo and Katia Ricciarelli
Taranda is by far his greatest opera, but again he died before he finished it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
5:06Can you tell me what happened when you lost your voice?
I was in Geneva, at CERN, the big particle accelerator, in the summer of 1985, I caught pneumonia, and was rushed to hospital. The hospital in Geneva suggested to my wife that it was not worth keeping on the life support machine. But she was not having any of that. I was flown back to Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge, where a surgeon called Roger Gray, carried out a tracheostomy. That operation saved my life, but took away my voice.
Presenter asks
20:54Did that death sentence wake you up and make you concentrate on life?
Its first effect was to depress me. I seem to be getting worse fairly rapidly. There didn't seem any point in doing anything, or working on my PhD, because I didn't know I would live long enough to finish it. But then things started to improve, the condition developed more slowly, and I began to make progress in my work, particularly in showing that the universe must have had a beginning, in a Big Bang.
Presenter asks
22:23Would you go as far as to say that you mightn't have achieved all you have had you not had motor neurone disease, or is that just too simplistic?
No. I don't think motor neuron disease can be an advantage to anyone. But it was less of a disadvantage to me, than to other people, because it didn't stop me doing what I wanted, which was to try and understand how the universe operates.
The keepsakes
The book
George Eliot
I think someone, maybe it was Virginia Woolf, said it was a book for adults. I'm not sure I'm grown up yet, but I will give it a try.
Presenter asks
22:51How much of your success, would you say, do you owe to her, to Jane?
I certainly wouldn't have managed it without her. Being engaged to her, lifted me out of the slow of despond I was in. Jane looked after me single-handed, as my condition got worse. At that stage, no one was offering to help us, and we certainly couldn't afford to pay for help.
Presenter asks
32:49Does that mean that there was no act of creation and therefore there's no place for God?
Yes, you have oversimplified. I still believe the universe has a beginning in real time, at a big bang. But there's another kind of time, imaginary time, at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end. This would mean that the way the universe began, would be determined by the laws of physics. One wouldn't have to say that God chose to set the universe going, in some arbitrary way that we couldn't understand. It says nothing about whether or not God exists. Just that he is not arbitrary.
Presenter asks
37:34What else are you planning to do before you quit this planet?
All that has been possible, only because I've been fortunate enough to receive a great deal of help. I'm pleased with what I have managed to achieve, but there's a great deal more I would like to do, before I pass on. I won't talk about my private life, but scientifically, I would like to know how one should unify gravity with quantum mechanics, and the other forces of nature. In particular, I want to know what happens to a black hole when it evaporates.
“I don't regard myself as cut off from normal life, and I don't think people around me would say I was.”
“I couldn't carry on with my life, if I only had physics.”
“If I hadn't been thoroughly determined, I wouldn't be here now.”
“But the prospect of an early death made me realize life was really worth living.”
“But what is much more interesting, is that black holes aren't completely black.”