A Mind Over Matter : The Universe of Stephen Hawking

“Stephen’s appeal has to do with the fact that he’s otherworldly, but at the same time He’s an everyman,” says director Errol Morris of Stephen Hawking, the severely disabled theoretical physicist who is the subject of Morris’ documentary film “A Brief History of Time,” which opens Friday.

“When you look at things with the scale of the cosmos in mind, his situation isn’t much different from everyone else’s. At a recent screening someone came up to me after the film and asked, ‘Is Stephen going to die?’ I replied, ‘Yes, and so are you and so am I.’ ”

Theoretical physicists are people who, after years of diligent study, make intuitive leaps of the imagination about how the universe works. In the late 20th Century, no one has made leaps of greater agility and brilliance than Stephen Hawking. Heir to the throne vacated by Albert Einstein, Hawking is widely acknowledged as the most gifted scientist of his and several other generations, and he’s also the most ambitious.

Hawking, you see, is in pursuit of nothing less than a unifying theory (also known as “the theory of everything”) that will reconcile the seemingly contradictory general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics; in other words, it will reconcile the study of cosmology (the very large) with the study of particle physics (the very small) and thus explain everything. To arrive at such a theory, says Hawking, “would be the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we would know the mind of God.”

The fact that Hawking has been disabled for almost 30 years with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurological disorder that’s deprived him of the use of his body, hasn’t led him to scale down his goals. Known in America as Lou Gehrig’s disease, the illness didn’t stop him from marrying and fathering three children, nor did it deter him from writing a book he hoped would familiarize the public with theoretical physics--which incredibly enough, his phenomenally successful book “A Brief History of Time” has done.

Published in 1988, the book has been translated into 37 languages, has sold 5.5 million copies worldwide, and is the longest running bestseller in British history. Though some critics have dismissed it as a book everybody buys but nobody reads or understands, Hawking says, “I don’t think this is true. Wherever I go all over the world, people come up to me and tell me how much they enjoyed it. They may not understand everything in it, but at least they can feel they’re in touch with the big questions.”

Nor has Hawking’s disability discouraged him from making his debut as the star of “A Brief History of Time,” which interweaves his biography with ingeniously illustrated explanations of his most important theories. Hawking came to Los Angeles last weekend to attend the film’s Friday premiere at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences--a trip that was but a brief episode in an endlessly hectic schedule that would exhaust anyone, much less a man of 50 with a serious illness.

After spending several days in Aspen where he attended a physics conference, Hawking arrived in L.A. on Friday afternoon and hurried to a cocktail party held in his honor by Shirley MacLaine. Then it was on to the premiere, where the post-screening schmoozing stretched until midnight. On Saturday, Hawking spent several hours giving interviews, then rushed off to Caltech for a reception in his honor where he delivered a brief talk. Sunday morning he caught a plane to Japan where he’s scheduled to lecture, then it’s on to Paris where he’ll meet up with his companion of the past two years, Elaine Mason, and his three children, for a short holiday. Then it’s back to work at the University of Cambridge in England, where he holds the academic chair occupied 300 years ago by Isaac Newton. “I seem to be pretty tough,” Hawking comments with a grin, when one inquires about the state of his health.

Hawking’s activities seem doubly taxing in light of the fact that he’s been unable to speak since 1985, and that everywhere he goes he’s the center of attention. Hawking is able to communicate slowly and with a good deal of effort through a computer into which he programs what he wants to say with a clicking device operated by his left hand (one of the few parts of his body that still has any mobility). He scans through a computerized dictionary programmed with 2,750 words, picks out the appropriate words one by one, and feeds them into a voice synthesizer that, he’s commented with dismay, gives him an American accent. If the word Hawking needs isn’t in his computer dictionary he spells it out letter by letter. He’s able to communicate in this manner at a rate of about 15 words a minute.

One would imagine it must frustrate him terribly that his mind works so much faster than his ability to convey his thoughts, but as Elaine Mason said in an interview with The Times in 1988, “he’s too intelligent to get cross because he knows it won’t change things.”

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The endless procession of fans who approached Hawking at Friday’s premiere to pay their respects probably weren’t aware of the effort it took for him to respond to their pleasantries because he shows no sign of irritation at the endless demands placed on him. A man of seemingly boundless patience and optimism, he has the reputation of being something of a party animal and he appeared to be having a great time. Despite his inability to move or speak, Hawking has a remarkable capacity to telegraph his personality, and one gets a strong sense of his intelligence and humor through his highly expressive eyes.

Although Hawking admits to having a few reservations about the film--he’d hoped his biography would be omitted in favor of a straight science lecture--he seems satisfied with the compromise arrived at with director Errol Morris, also in town for the premiere from his home in Cambridge, Mass., (which Hawking refers to as “pseudo-Cambridge”).

“My original idea was for a film that was entirely science and I signed a contract for what I thought would be a mainly scientific film,” said Hawking during an interview on Saturday at a Beverly Hills hotel. “But when they started shooting I realized it would be half biography and now I think that may have been a good thing.

“There are one or two biographical things in the film that make me squirm--some comments made by a colleague about my behavior at a party and a bit about me being run over by a taxi--but I think the biographical element will help attract a larger audience than a straight science film would have, and what I want is a large audience for the science. Science and technology have made major changes in the way we live in the past 50 years and they’ll make even greater changes in the next 50, so it’s vital that the public have a general understanding of science so they can make the decisions that need to be made.”

Hawking’s research is so advanced and abstract that the practical applications of his work are as yet unknown. At this point, his most important contribution is widely regarded to be his theory of black hole radiation, which has subsequently been dubbed Hawking Radiation--”a term that I can’t use,” he says.

One of the most provocative aspects of Hawking’s research into a unified theory is that a “theory of everything” can be seen as being in direct competition with God in terms of who is responsible for the existence of the universe. Though Hawking’s estranged wife, Jane Wilde, is devoutly religious, Hawking himself has no religious practice; nonetheless, complex questions of philosophy and theology are central to his work.

Asked why man needs God and has continued to search for him for centuries, Hawking comments, “Everyone has some set of beliefs, some basis on which they act. We’re limited in what we can do and are comparatively short-lived, and we have to believe in something outside ourselves. We may call this set of beliefs God, Marxism, Leninism or scientific rationalism, but that’s largely a matter of words. They all serve the same need, of providing a framework with which to understand and interpret the world we find ourselves in.”

Reflection on the big questions of life has been central to all the movies of Errol Morris. Best known for his film of 1988, “The Thin Blue Line,” a documentary that led to a Texas murder case being reopened and an innocent man being freed from Death Row (an innocent man who subsequently sued the director who saved his life when he got out of prison), Morris is a maverick filmmaker whose work usually revolves around bizarre true stories. His debut film of 1978, “Gates of Heaven,” chronicled the fate of two pet cemeteries, and his second film, “Vernon, Florida,” released in 1981, was a series of portraits of the highly eccentric residents of a small Southern town. At a glance, Morris’ work comes across as wildly quirky and he seems an unlikely candidate to handle the Hawking story. In fact, his movies are deeply philosophical and Hawking considered him well suited to the job.

“Though no one knew it at the time I was offered the film, I was a graduate student at Princeton and Berkeley in the history and philosophy of science, so I have more than a passing interest in the material,” said Morris. “And, from my first meeting with Stephen I was fascinated by the parallels between his life and his work. He gets sick and is told he’s gradually going to lose control of his body and will ultimately be buried alive inside himself. What becomes the central object of his investigations? Stars collapsing in on themselves and imploding, forming regions called Black Holes from which no traveler ever emerges.

“Both his book and the film are a peculiar mix of fantastic optimism and deep pessimism,” Morris continues. “Stephen talks about knowing the mind of God and having complete understanding of the cosmos, and in the next breath says he doesn’t expect to be around 15 million years from now when the universe goes down the tubes. Stephen once said one of the pessimistic things I’ve ever heard when someone asked him why we haven’t heard intelligent signals from outer space. He replied that though we consider ourselves an advanced civilization, we’re the same as we were in the jungle--our DNA hasn’t changed at all in thousands of years. The only thing that’s changed is our destructive ability, which has increased millions and millions fold. He concluded that perhaps we haven’t heard those signals because when a civilization has reached the point ours has reached, it destroys itself.”

Several articles on Morris’ film have taken it to task for its failure to address the upheaval that took place in Hawking’s personal life in January of 1990, when he left his wife of nearly 25 years (and the woman he’s credited with giving him the will to continue with his life and work when he was diagnosed with ALS at the age of 21), for his nurse Elaine Mason, whose husband, David Mason, adapted the computer with which Hawking communicates. Neither woman consented to be in the film, nor would Hawking discuss the issue for the camera.

“Whenever you make a movie about the real world, you’re inevitably involved in a lot of complicated issues,” says Morris. “If I’d had those interviews I would have used them, but they declined to be interviewed. Stephen’s marriage and the role his wife played in his career are alluded to in the film, but in making nonfiction films choices are often made for you as to what will be emphasized and what will be downplayed. I don’t think the film suffers terribly because of their absence because this is not a biography of Stephen, nor is it a science lecture. It has elements of both and shouldn’t become one or the other.”

Others have taken issue with the fact that rather than shoot Hawking’s family and colleagues in their own homes and offices, Morris created sets and interviewed them on a soundstage. He finds this criticism ridiculous.

“I refuse to accept the idea that documentaries have to conform to the familiar nonfiction structure and have a news-footage look to them,” he says. “I believe the look of a film can underscore the ideas it presents and I used sets because I wanted to create a world around Stephen that had a unified look, and wanted to convey the feeling of being suspended in time. Instead of using dissolves, soft cuts or jump cuts, I edited in passages where the screen goes black to convey the feeling of information being parceled out in bits and pieces, as they are with Stephen’s computer. I don’t see any of this as a violation of the documentary form--I’m simply trying to find new methods of storytelling.”

Stylistic embellishments that he brought to the narrative aside, Morris is well aware that Hawking’s life and his work are so much larger than life that they require little underscoring in order to have tremendous impact.

“Here’s a man who can hardly move and yet he has in no way given in to that limitation,” says Morris. “He’s produced an extraordinary number of scientific papers and books, he lectures regularly and he’s funny--I hope the movie captures some of Stephen’s humor because he’s a very witty man. And, the profound philosophical component of his work is intensely compelling in that he’s asking the big questions; did the universe have a beginning, and what does it mean if it did?

“Much of Stephen’s work is so advanced that it may strike some people as verging on pure fiction, but it’s important to remember that science isn’t just witchcraft,” he concludes. “Science is our most spectacular attempt to try and understand the world around us and it’s had spectacular successes over the ages. And as this century winds to a close, Stephen’s pushing science into an entirely new frontier.”