Stuff You Should Know - Some Interesting Things You Didn't Know About Stephen Hawking

Episode Date: November 12, 2013

Everybody knows that cosmologist Stephen Hawking has an enormous brain, but did you also know he has an equal wit? Learn about some of the lesser-known details about the celebrated physicist in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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from HowStuffWorks.com. ["HowStuffWorks.com"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and with us today is our friend and rotating guest producer, Matt. That's right. Stuff they don't want you to know.

Yeah, Matt Frederick. He wins some in charming Matt Frederick. Yeah, he wins some. He drunk texts me. Oh, my God. Can't tell people that. Sure, again. Oh, that's not very nice.

He sober texts me, too. So we're Matt. No, no, he's all right. He's a great dude. Sure. And we're glad you're here, Matt. Can you see us? There you go.

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C-O-E-D-U-C dot org. That's right. All right, so Chuck. Yes. We're talking about a guy, very special guy. He's special. His name is Stephen Hawking with a Ph. That's right.

With a Ph.D. You like that? Brilliant physicist, brilliant mind. If you haven't seen the Errol Morris documentary. Oh, I didn't know there was one on. Yeah, he did a brief history of time, which is... Neat.

About Stephen Hawking, not really about the book. I think there's a movie version of the book. I think I have heard that too, but I haven't seen that. I haven't either. But that was his bestseller, basically explaining, making, kind of doing what we do, explaining things in a more accessible way that are complex. But he does it way better than I do.

That's why he's like a darling of the media and of everybody, basically, because he's really, really good, typically at explaining really complex stuff in a way that the average Joe can kind of understand. Which is, that is, I mean, what we strive to do. They're making a movie about him now, actually. Oh yeah, played by Jared Leto.

No, good guess. Played by Eddie Redmayne, who... He sounds like a World War I ace pilot or something. Kind of looks like one, does he? Yeah, have you seen the Les Mis movie? No. Have you seen My Week with Marilyn? No.

Okay, he was in those. Anything else? He was in other stuff, but those are the two most notable things. It's called The Theory of Everything is the new one, and it's really about the love story between he and his first wife. And I saw pictures of him, and he looks just like him.

They did a really good job. Oh, really? Yeah, I think they gave him some different teeth and put on the glasses and messed up his hair and put him in the wheelchair and it was him. Yeah, you're now Stephen Hawking. But I think they're shooting that, like, literally right now. So I'm looking forward to that one.

And he really stayed on that? No, I have no idea. 2015, I think. Okay. Which seems like a long time for a post for a movie like that. They're really putting their heart and soul into it. I guess so.

So there's plenty of stuff that, I mean, everybody's heard of Stephen Hawking, but there's some pretty interesting little tidbits about the man, the myth, his life. Yeah. That I didn't know about until we read this article that I think is worth sharing, frankly. Because if we don't share it, what are we doing here?

That's right. So one of the things, just to start off, is that he never won the Nobel Prize. As smart as this dude is. Yeah, it has not yet won the Nobel Prize. Okay. He's still got time. Oh, yeah, for sure.

I think I said has never. Yeah. I hope I did. It sounded like there was some finality to this. Like there's just never gonna happen. Try all you want. But this pillar of the physics and mathematics community has never won a Nobel Prize.

Yeah. That was surprising. Yeah. It is surprising. We're gonna rely on puns for this one, okay? He was born on January 8th, 1942, which was also the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death. Right.

Which is just mere coincidence, but it's a nice tidbit. Says who? And he is obviously was diagnosed with ALS at the age of 21, Lou Gehrig's disease, and given just a few years to live, and that was a long time ago. It was. He was born in 1942, so he's what, 71 now.

Yeah. No, he'll be 74 very soon, in about a month or so. Anyway, when he was just before his 21st birthday, he started noticing he was in grad school at Oxford. And he started noticing that he was getting clumsier, running into stuff, tripping, that kind of thing. And it was apparently pronounced enough that his family said, you're going to the doctor

while you're home visiting for Christmas break. And so he went into the hospital for a battery of tests for two weeks. That's an awful experience in and of itself. I'm sure. But then to top it off, they said, oh, well, we found out what's wrong with you. You have ALS.

Right. And it stands for immunotrophic lateral sclerosis. Yeah. Or Lou Gehrig's disease, because Lou Gehrig most famously had it. That's right. And it's just a neurological condition where your voluntary muscle control is lost, right?

Yeah, and typically you will die a few years after contracting it from a couple of things. Well, after symptoms show up, but what? Motor neurons running your breathing muscles start to fail or deterioration of your swallowing muscles. That's a big one too. So basically. So what, you like drowned?

Yeah, like it ends up being respiratory is how you usually go. But there's a lot of forms of it and he doesn't have either one of those conditions. So he's good to go basically or has been for a long time. Especially with his talking box. Yeah, he controls that with his cheek now. That's pretty amazing. I have no idea how that works though.

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That's right. But he hasn't really let it slow him down. Prior to that, he wasn't exactly like a real athletic type anyway. But he was on the rowing team at Oxford, which was a huge deal. Rowing team at Oxford equals. Football team at Georgia?

Sure, maybe even more. What's more than that? Football team at Ohio State even. Oh, that's more? Lately, did you see the Vanderbilt game? Yeah, I don't want to talk about that either. So he was the coxswain on the rowing team. He's the guy who goes, stroke, stroke, stroke.

And I didn't know this until I read this article. The coxswain doesn't just set the rhythm for rowing. They also steer. Oh, you didn't know that? No, I had no idea. I thought it was strictly being basically like a human metronome, you know? But this little pipsqueaky guy was on the rowing team

as the coxswain and like really became popular. So much so that while he was at Oxford, he kind of threw himself into the rowing team or crew, as we call it in America. Yeah, to the detriment of his studies even for a while. Yeah. And speaking of studies, getting into Oxford wasn't a foregone conclusion for this guy

because he wasn't a great student in grade school. And I wasn't so surprised by that, that he was averaged to poor in grade school because I think a lot of these super geniuses, it's like it's not even beneath them, but they're so beyond that they might have a hard time in just in regular classroom settings, you know? Oh, yeah.

So it wasn't- Yeah, you're probably not gonna do very well in school. So those of you who are bored in school and don't have good grades, don't give up hope. You may be a genius. Yeah. Yeah. But even at the time, there was something about him.

Like he was obviously a smart kid. Yeah. Even though he wasn't getting good grades because his classmates named him, nicknamed him Einstein, which is about as prescient as you can get. And it wasn't because of his fluffy white mustache he had in fourth grade. Yeah.

But his parents both went to Oxford and they wanted him to go there. And he was a great test taker and he aced his exams. Yeah, almost got a perfect score on the physics exam, unsurprisingly. For fatally. But rather than going into physics, his father, Frank, I believe his name is,

said, no, I want you to be a doctor. You're gonna serve the world by being a doctor. And so little Steven goes and tries to take some biology classes and says, this is not science. This is imprecise. It's descriptive. It's subjective. Like I can't be, no, I don't want to do this.

Yeah, he was not into biology. And I wasn't either, but he was way into physics, whereas I was not. And when he went to Oxford, they were like, well, we got a couple of programs. We have the traditional particle physics where you study subatomic particles. That's old school.

We have this newish kind of thing called cosmology, which isn't even a real field yet. Like we're trying it out here. Yeah, and he was like, I am all over that because I want to learn about bigger things, not smaller things. Yeah, because they're basically the two different approaches to the same thing, like particle studies,

the very small parts that make up the universe and cosmology is the sum of those parts and how they interact. Yeah, of course he would get into both eventually. Yeah, well, I think you kind of have to have an understanding of both or else you're just, although if you're a particle physicist, you can just kind of be in your lab running tests

and setting out data and the cosmologists use that as well. I don't know if it goes back. I'm sure it's gonna go back and forth. I bet cosmology, I bet they study particle physics more than particle physics people study cosmology. Prove us wrong people, prove us wrong. That was the nerdiest like exchange we've ever had, I think. It's up there for sure, man.

So out of the study of cosmology, his probably his biggest contribution to date, to science, to cosmology, popular culture would be a brief history of time. But his biggest contribution to his field is something that the author of this article calls the boundless universe theory, which I couldn't really find anywhere else.

Oh really? Everywhere else on the internet, if you type in boundless universe theory, it just brings up this article and people copying and pasting this article in the blog post, yeah. Did this guy invent this, yeah, title? And I don't, yeah, I guess so. Because there is something out there that describes this,

but nobody else calls it boundless universe theory. Really? Yeah, but this is the big contribution and here it's about the time that your brain will start to melt. Yes, he worked with a guy named Jim Hartle and came up with a theory in 1983 that the universe is limitless yet, why is that funny?

I could actually hear the hyphen in there. Yeah. It is a contained thing yet it has no boundaries. Right, so like I said, your mind melts, but wait, this is why Stephen Hawking is awesome. How can that be, Josh? Well, he says visualize the earth, the surface of the earth.

It's contained, but it's also boundless, like if you travel across the edge of the earth, you never reach the edge. True. So he says just visualize the surface of the earth, but surface of the earth is two dimensional, this is four dimensional. See, that's where my mind is already blown.

Yeah, I didn't even try to follow that thread. Yeah, four dimensions. But what they're saying is, and the larger implication of this is that what Hartle and Hawking did was they took Richard Feynman's quantum theory of the universe and married it to Einstein's theory of relativity to come up with this idea that the universe

didn't emerge from a black hole. Right. Instead, it came out of the Big Bang and as a result, space time, which is exactly what it sounds like, travels, if you're looking at it like the earth, the Big Bang takes place of the North Pole. So as you're traveling southward toward the equator,

these lines of latitude get bigger, right? And those represent space time. So it's kind of like time doesn't exist, and I don't think that's true, so don't email me, I'm just saying my own interpretation of this. Right. At the Big Bang, Big Bang happens, time and space start to exist,

they go outward, expanding, and then once you hit the equator, that's the apex, that's the peak, and then they start to come back in, and the upshot of this is that eventually, by Hawking's reckoning in about 20 billion years, space time will collapse in on itself again. Meaning our entire universe will collapse upon itself?

Yeah, it's finite, but it's boundless. Mind blown. Right, and like Chuck, what we just did, like isn't even, it's probably the most rickety, terrible interpretation of that ever, but I think that's generally, it's an interpretation. Yes, it is. Hey, I got one for you, if we're listing Hawking things,

and I just found this out today, did you know that he had a really bad situation with his second wife? No. He married his first wife Jane, and credits her with giving him reasons to live, like right after he was diagnosed. Like he met her the week he was diagnosed,

or the week after, right there. And that's what they're making this love story about. And they were married for quite a long time until the mid-90s, and they divorced, and he married one of his nurses, Elaine Mason, and reportedly she was an awful, awful person. Reportedly? Reportedly, allegedly.

Like basically everybody who knew her, he was sort of estranged from his family for a long time because of her. Controlling, manipulative, bullying, and rumors and investigations into the fact that she may have physically abused him. Oh, that's awful. Yeah, his wife and nurse.

Wow. Fractured his wrist by slamming it onto a wheelchair, and this is all allegedly, because he denied it. But people close to him said he would never admit that, because that would admit that he really screwed up. Oh, good. By making this decision. Yeah.

And let him pee himself by like not giving him his, you know, the means to do so. Geez. Submerged him in a bathtub, like letting his tracheotomy tube fill up with water. Oh my God. And left him out in the sun, and like the hottest days of the year,

he had heat stroke and severe sunburn. And he denied that they investigated it, and basically the cops were like, there's nothing we can do. He's saying this stuff didn't happen. Yet he would show up like bruises and cuts and things, and say, yeah, like I've ran into a door again today. They're like, you're in a wheelchair,

you can't really do that. I guess you can. And they divorced in 2006. When did they get married? 1995. Oh, wow. So, yeah. It's awful.

There's a Vanity Fair article about it, it was like really disturbing. Yeah, if any of that's true, that's awful, let alone all of it combined together. Yeah. Geez. So there's that. That was uplifting Chuck.

Yeah. I've got one for you. All right. He, a couple of years back, HuffPo reported that he was a frequent visitor to a California sex club. Oh, yeah. Free to makers.

And like somebody who went there said that like they'd seen him there more than a handful of times. Interesting. Like basically getting lap dances. He's a pretty unmistakable guy. Yeah. I doubt if you would confuse him. But Oxford, I believe it was Oxford,

came out and said that is BS. Oh, yeah. He did go to this place once basically like as a joke as the guest of a friend or something like that. But he's certainly not a member. He's certainly not a frequent visitor. And like this person who's saying this is a liar. Wow.

They got dropped after that. But he does have a great wit. That's another thing he's known for. Being a charmer. Yeah. And he was asked, I think the guardian asked him like if there's anything that he didn't understand or that baffled him in the universe.

And his answer was women. Oh, yeah. He said there a total mystery to me. So there is at least one thing. But black holes, not the case. Yeah. He lost a bet on black holes and was man enough to admit it in 2004.

In 1997, he made a bet with a fellow scientist named John Preskill. Yeah. And they, well, let's talk about black holes for a second here, I guess. Stars are these big, huge things that burn tons of energy. Yeah, the sun's a star.

The sun is a star. Ooh, you should go back and revisit our sun podcast. That's a great one. And they have a ton of mass and a ton of gravity, which is great as long as they're burning and doing fine. Because they're nuclear explosions pushing outward. Yeah, just like. Gravity's pulling it inwards

so they find this happy balance. Massive amounts of mass and gravity. When they die though, something bad happens and the gravity says, I am, what's that funny? Something bad happens, that's hilarious. Well, if you're a star. I guess. Unless like that's the apex of being a star.

Oh, maybe so. Oh man, I get to be a black hole. To burn out? Yeah. Well, that was the spoiler. They become black holes because gravity wins out and becomes stronger and it collapses on itself and that is what a black hole is.

Right, it's all the matter in the star combining this little dense ball that's so dense and has such an amount of mass clustered into one little part that it actually bends the fabric of space and time. Crazy. And so that's your black hole. It's really a black well in the fabric of space and time.

And so that's a black hole. And supposedly no, not even light can escape once it passes an event horizon. And who did he have the bet with? Preskill. So Preskill and Hawking disagreed about whether or not anything called information, which would be light.

Sure. Particles, anything. Anything at all. Escaping black holes. Hawking said no, Preskill said yes, and then later on Hawking figured out that Preskill was right. That if you did go into a black hole,

you would get all jumbled up and distorted, but you information about you, particles, whatever, could escape, and therefore there's no such thing as a true event horizon. There's a pseudo event horizon because if you have a genuine event horizon, nothing could ever come back out. I wonder what the bet was. They don't say.

I found out. It was a, because it was information escaping a black hole. Is it like a happy meal? They bet, they bet, they bet an encyclopedia of the winner's choice, an encyclopedia being a place from which information is easily retrieved. And I think Preskill wanted a baseball encyclopedia

because you know smart guys, if they're into sports, they're into baseball. Yeah, that's true. It's the thinking man's game. I thought it might have been a trip back to the gentleman's club. Freedomakers? Yeah, you're buying.

All right, here's one that I didn't realize. He's written children's books with his daughter Lucy, and they have a trilogy and the first one in 2007 was called George's Secret Key to the Universe. And it's about a little boy named George who has these Luddite parents that he can't stand. Yeah, so he kills them. He doesn't kill them.

He uses technology to kill them. No, but he has a neighbor who he really cottons to because he's a physicist and has a computer. It just happens to have the most powerful computer in the world at his house. That's right, and that computer offers portals that they can see into outer space. So George is super stoked about this.

Right, so there's George's Secret Key to the Universe. They followed that up with George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt. And then in 2011, they had George in the Big Bang. Yeah, and that was their children's book trilogy. And I think when they interviewed Lucy and him, people were like, we shouldn't be surprised because this is sort of just another extension of what he's tried to do his whole life,

which is explain things. And that's what the book does for children. It's not just a fantastical story. It kind of introduces them to things like physics and black holes or black wells. Right. Are you going to coin that? I think it's somebody else already has.

Okay. All right, well Chuck, before we keep going, we got some more stuff up our sleeve. Possibly the most surprising things you can think of that about Hawking coming up after this message break. Stuff you should know. 2023 is already well underway, everybody. So don't wait any longer to level up your small business.

And the way you can do that is by joining up with Stamps.com. That's right, because with Stamps.com, you're going to be able to print your own postage and shipping labels right there from your home or office or home office. And you know, it's ready to go in minutes. You can get back to running your business sooner than later. Yep, Stamps.com is like the post office elevated.

They have rates you literally can't find anywhere else, which comes in handy because postage rates just increased again, like up to 84% off of USPS and UPS. Plus, Stamps.com automatically tells you your cheapest and fastest shipping options. So use Stamps.com to print postage wherever you do business. All you need is that computer and printer. Set your business up for success.

When you get started with Stamps.com today, just use our promo code stuff for a special offer that's going to include a four week trial plus free postage and that free digital scale, no long term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the page, and enter our code stuff. This message is brought to you by Discover.

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See terms and learn more at discover.com slash online privacy protection. All right, so you're about to blow my doors with some surprises. OK, I think you know all this. You read the same article I did. I'm Binkoy. Oh, OK.

Hawking has said publicly that he believes in the possibility of alien life and not just primitive alien life, which he suggests is possibly common. He's actually a proponent of panspermia, which is basically like, say, a meteor bringing the basics of life from Mars to Earth. But also possibly intelligent life, although he says it's probably few and far between.

Yeah, but the fact that he is on record for this is pretty surprising. Sure, he said it to NASA. He came out as an alien life supporter to NASA. I wonder if he went home and told his wife. He was like, hey, get this. I told NASA. I thought there might be intelligent life out there.

Here's where my mind was blown a little bit. He says we might need to be wary of them, though, if they come, because they probably won't be DNA based, which you just can't even wrap your head around. Well, yeah. I remember having my mind blown as a younger person. I think it was Michael Creighton in one of his books. He just was mentioning offhandedly

how aliens might be intelligent crystals or something like that. We wouldn't recognize at all, which is, I think, probably the likelier case. Like he's saying DNA is not essential to life. It can be a lot of other things. As long as you have some sort of replicating basis of life, there you go.

That's sort of old school, like Lovecraft and all those early sci-fi horror writers remember. Their common method was always to be like, it cannot even be described. That was always their cop out. Be unnameable. Yeah. But the way he describes aliens and potentially smart

aliens is sort of just like you would see in the movies, like, hey, they may be nomads who ran out of resources and they're coming to Earth for hours. And that's straight out of a sci-fi movie. Or are we the aliens? Ooh. Does Hawking say that? No, I'm just saying, we're at the very cusp of that as well.

Yeah, remember when in elementary school, when at some point the first mind blow was probably like, we could be just a speck on the fingernail of some giant in some other world? Yeah. Wasn't that neat that they ended the Grinch like that? The movie? Yeah.

I don't remember. Yeah, that's how it ends. What do you mean? Like, Ron Howard starts panning out and out and out from Whoville. Pulling out, yeah. So pan is only going in. Now panning is left and right.

Oh, OK. And the way you push in or pull out. OK, well, he's pulling out and out and out now. And you finally realize that Whoville is part of an atom that makes up a snowflake. Oh, I don't remember that. Yeah, that was a great way to end it. Pretty brilliant.

Also, Stephen Hawking believes in time travel. He's been on the record about that. Remember in our time travel episode that we did at Comic-Con? Yeah. He theorized this huge machine that you could use to travel forward in time. Yeah, but not back when that has thinking.

Yeah. Do you have anything else? Any surprising Hawking? Hawkfax? He held a chair for 30 years, which is basically like a position at Cambridge. The Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge in this chair, this position at this university,

dates back to 1663. He held it for 30 years. The guy who held it, the second position, the second person to hold that was Isaac Newton. Yeah, that's not bad. That's pretty cool. So his nickname was Einstein. He had the same job literally as Isaac Newton.

He's doing pretty good for himself. Yeah, presidential medal of freedom here. And commander of the British Empire, which is what non-Brit's get, I think, instead of being knighted, but still. James Bond is the commander. Oh, yeah? Yeah. But still, no Nobel Prize.

No, for Bond or Hawking. Yeah. Well, I mean, Breaking Bad won it on their last season. That's funny. Didn't they win the Nobel? I don't think so. I don't think they did. They won it to me.

If you want to learn more about the British Empire, if you want to learn more about Stephen Hawking, you can type that into the search bar, Stephen, with the pH, remember, at HowStuffWorks.com. And since I said search bar, friends, it is time for listener mail. I'm going to call this last call for alcohol. And this guy, Dan, describes something

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But you can try my new method, peak oil. Nothing will clear room of helpless, hapless drunks, philanderers, and miscreants like a thorough, thoughtful, and well-meaning discussion of the ins and outs of peak oil. From the middle of the show, and without warning or context, this tactic is subtle, it is funny, and it is amazingly effective. I cannot begin to describe the joy I experienced watching

the Dilly Dallyers suddenly gain self-awareness and scurry for the exits for Klimt, but one can only hope a better informed. But in all seriousness, guys, you're doing the world an excellent service. Information is rarely conveyed with such grace and wit. For that, I thank you. And if you find yourselves in need of a libation in New York,

seek me out. Oh, we will. Dan Morton at ABV in East Harlem. Awesome. We'll go do peak oil live at Glatz Hall. That is really cool. Yeah. What a great use for that one.

Sure. Man. Thanks a lot, Dan. Thanks for the invite, too. And anybody hanging out in New York, go check out Dan and ABV. And you can get a little free Stuff You Should Know action going on there at closing time.

That's right. Yeah. So if you have figured out a new use for Stuff You Should Know, we always want to hear about stuff like that. You can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.discovery.com.

And as always, you can join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. You're ready to travel in 2023. And since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less.

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