What is it like to attend a lecture by Stephen Hawking?

I was a graduate student in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in the period 2001-06. read more

Like any other seminar speaker, Hawking had prepared some slides with equations and diagrams, and he had something to say about each. Of course, he did this more slowly than speakers who don’t depend on a computer (controlled at that point, as I recall, by a sensor on his cheek) to do the talking. read more

"In this lecture, I would like to discuss whether time itself has a beginning, and whether it will have an end. All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago. This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology. Yet it is now taken for granted. read more