World-famous physicist gets rock-star welcome
BERKELEY: More than 2,000 fans turn out to hear scientist's take on deep, dark mysteries of the universe
By Betsy Mason


CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Physicist Stephen Hawking held a sold-out crowd rapt Tuesday night with a brief history of man's quest to understand the universe.

As the crowd waited for Hawking to appear, Zellerbach Hall was tense with the kind of excitement and anticipation usually reserved for rock stars. It felt as though the likes of Mick Jagger was about to strut out onto the stage at any moment, rather than a scientist.

But when Hawking, who uses a wheelchair, rolled onto the stage, more than 2,000 people broke into enthusiastic, long-lasting applause that finally gave way to a reverent silence.

An additional 760 watched from a packed Wheeler Auditorium, where the talk was simulcast.

Star-struck students, scientists and locals, who paid as much as $25 to be there, were on the edge of their seats for several minutes, waiting for the world-famous physicist to shine a light on the deep, dark mysteries of the universe.

Hawking, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, broke the silence by asking, "Can you hear me?" using a speech synthesizer.

The surreal quality of the computerized voice added to Hawking's larger-than-life persona as he gently led the audience from early ideas about the beginning of the universe, through the debate about whether the universe had a beginning or has always existed, to modern scientific understanding of the big-bang theory, the expansion of the universe and the formation of stars and galaxies.

"We are getting close to answering the age-old questions: Why are we here? Where did we come from?" he said.

Hawking, who is best known for his research on black holes and his popular science books "A Brief History of Time," "The Universe in a Nutshell" and "A Briefer History of Time," was instrumental as a young graduate student in the 1960s in determining that the universe did in fact have a beginning by disproving the idea that the universe had contracted before it began expanding 15 billion years ago.

He explained to the crowd how the laws of science have shown that the universe began as a tiny, incomprehensibly dense spot, a billion-trillion-trillionth of a centimeter and exploded through a period of rapid expansion or inflation, and how slight wrinkles in the microwave radiation emitted by the big bang gave birth to the stars.

"The irregularities in the early universe will mean that some regions will have slightly higher density than others. The gravitational attraction of the extra density will slow the expansion of the region, and can eventually cause the region to collapse to form galaxies and stars," he said. "We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe. God really does play dice."

The auditorium rang with laughter at times as Hawking cracked jokes about how creationists have put the beginning of the universe at 9 a.m. on Oct. 27, 4004 B.C., and how earlier in his career he managed to escape the Pope's notice at a cosmology conference in the Vatican.

"I was glad he didn't realize I had presented a paper at the conference, suggesting how the universe began," he said. "I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition, like Galileo."

Though he doesn't yet have all the answers to the big questions about the universe, Hawking is optimistic that someday scientists will get there.

"In time we can hope to understand it completely," he said. "We have long enough as the universe should last forever."

Betsy Mason covers science and the national laboratories. Reach her at 925-847-2158 or bmason@cctimes.com.