This is my father, Stephen Hawking. And it's a very nice photograph of him. He's a very brilliant man. He's a theoretical physicist and that means that he looks for ways to understand the universe around us using the laws of physics. And so he's a very brilliant man and he's the Lucasian professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. So that's a very long way to say. It's the same job of the great scientist Isaac Newton once held. And he's won many awards and been given many honorary degrees. And so you would think that this would have been obvious right from the beginning. Well, this is the part of the talk where we do some time travel.
We're going to go back and take a look. So here he is. This is my father as a small boy with his two sisters. And when my father was a young boy and he was at school his teachers didn't think that much of him. This is a line from one of his school reports: "This boy will never amount to anything." However, his classmates must have noticed something about him. Because they nicknamed him Einstein and he did go on to become a scholar. And this just shows that kids are so much cleverer than adults. Because he became a scholar and he went to Oxford University and he left with a first in honours in Physics and he came to Cambridge to begin his research.
Now around this time he also found out that he was suffering from a disease. And it's a disease called ALS and what it does is it slowly takes away your ability to move your muscles and in later years it's also taken away his natural speaking voice. And so at the end of the talk when you hear him talking to you, it will sound like a computer is speaking to you. but it isn't. It's a real man who's using a computer to give himself back the voice that his disease has taken away from him.
But fortunately some good things also happened to my father in this time. He met my mother and he got engaged and he got married. And he started work on his thesis and his thesis was called 'Properties of Expanding Universes' and as part of his thesis he managed to prove that the Universe must have had a definite beginning. So that's not bad for a bit of post-graduate work actually. And now a few years on and here we are. This is 1970 in Cambridge and that baby is me. And my parents called me Lucy because the name 'Lucy' comes from the Latin word for light and light is one of the major studies of astrophysicists like my father and so it's a very good name for the daughter of a physicist and the reason I'm showing you this photo from 1970.
1970 was an important year for my father. He had a Eureka moment and he worked out a very elegant mathematical proof of what happens when two black holes collide. He worked out that when two black holes collide they join to form a larger black hole but that they can't split to form two black holes. So as you can tell, I was a very inspirational thought-provoking baby there.
And here we are. This is a few years later and we have moved to CalTech. We're now living in California in Pasadena and Caltech is a great centre for scientists on the West Coast of America. And this is 1974 which was another very important year for my father because he's working on his realisations about what happens when a star implodes to form a black hole. So we saw the supernova, the great explosion at the end of a star's life a few minutes ago and what happens if it was a big enough star it throws the outer layers off and the inner core can collapse on itself to form a black hole. And that's what my father's working on at this point.
Now after this we go back to England and my father takes up his professorship at Cambridge and many many many things happen over the intervening years. I grew up, become a teenager. My school reports were really not so great either: "Charm is no substitute for hard work". And my father also has a very very busy time. He writes his best-selling work a Brief History of Time. Now this is a book that has sold all over the world and yet some people claim that not so many people have actually managed to finish it. So that's one of the reasons why we set to work on our children's books. We set to work to try and add some extra explanation.
Now at that time my father also had some some fun things going on in his life. He went on the Simpsons. He really loved being on the Simpsons the way they gave him helicopter blades for his wheelchair but he did say that he's really glad that in real-life he's not bright yellow. He also did this. He was on Star Trek Paramount studios one day because he was working at Caltech and they asked him if he'd like a part. And here he is on the enterprise with the two greatest scientists of all time in my mind, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.
And a few more adventures. Here he is floating in zero gravity. And this is a really lovely picture because if you look at the size of his smile and you think this is a man whose mind has been free to travel across the whole universe but his body has been confined to a wheelchair for decades by this point and here he is free and he is floating.
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