Is cosmology really ‘a kind of religion for intelligent atheists’?
This is what Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) claims in the recent film The Theory of Everything. The Oscar-tipped flick is based on the memoir of Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde. It tells of their marriage and the period during which Stephen develops motor neurone disease.
Time
The Stephen we meet at the beginning of the film is a carefree student who, after much deliberating, finally chooses a subject for his physics PhD: time. His girlfriend – and, later, his wife – Jane (Felicity Jones) shares his fascination with ‘time travel’, but whereas she dives into the past through medieval poetry, he does so by studying the stars. As a physicist, Stephen becomes fascinated by the beginning and end of time, the ways in which it might be manipulated in space and the possibility that in some situations it might stop altogether. ‘What happens if I reverse time’, he asks, ‘to see what happened at the beginning of time itself?’.
