Physicist Hawking Lectures on Future at White House

British physicist Stephen Hawking, widely considered the greatest scientific thinker since Albert Einstein, gave a lecture at the White House Friday to expound on the mysteries of the universe.

Earlier in the day, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters: “Based on my short meeting with professor Hawking yesterday, he will predict tonight that within 20 years science will understand the basic laws governing the universe.”

His lecture, the second in a series of White House think-sessions entitled “Millennium Evenings,” was broadcast over the Internet and people were invited to submit questions.

Hawking, a Cambridge University math professor, has fought through a crippling disease to become a celebrated scientist and best-selling author of “A Brief History of Time,” a book about the evolution of the universe that has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 9 million copies.

Hawking planned to give President Clinton and his wife a vision of a future in which, as mysteries of the universe are solved, complexities of life multiply.

In a summary of his lecture distributed by the White House, Hawking, 56, said that although science is closing in on its understanding of the laws of the universe, it will use those laws in increasingly sophisticated ways.

“There is no limit to the complexity of the application we make of these laws,” he said. “It is in this complexity that I expect the major developments of the next millennium. I foresee biological complexity increasing with genetic engineering and the development of self-designing computers with artificial intelligence. The future certainly won’t be static.”

Hillary Clinton said that not only Hawking’s subject but also his manner of speaking highlight the theme of the White House’s Millennium Evenings, which aim to commemorate the turning of the century by “honoring the past and imagining the future.”

Hawking was stricken with the muscle-wasting Lou Gehrig’s disease in his 20s and was expected by doctors to die long ago. His motion is limited to the thumb and forefinger, and he speaks with aid of a computer-operated speech synthesizer.

“The only trouble is that it gives me an American accent,” Hawking wrote of the synthesizer on his Internet home page.

Hawking is the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, holding an academic chair once occupied by Isaac Newton.