10 Cool Things You Didn’t Know About Stephen Hawking

The legendary scientist is having his life brought to the big screen in new biopic ‘The Theory Of Everything’ starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. But away from the lab (and the cinema), there are many fascinating elements to Hawking. Here are ten of them…

He’s the only person to play himself in ‘Star Trek’

It’s unsurprising that Hawking provided inspiration for Gene Roddenberry’s space saga and he finally made his way onto the Enterprise in a 1993 ‘Next Generation’ episode called ‘Descent’.

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He was brought to life as a hologram to participate in a poker game with Data (Brent Spinder), Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, so the android could see how the famous thinkers interacted. Both Einstein and Newton were unavailable, but Hawking played himself. While on set, he even got to sit in the captain’s chair.

He wants to play a Bond baddie

The new script has been leaked, so maybe there’ll be a rewrite and if they do, Hawking would like to be asked to play 007’s nemesis. “I think the wheelchair and the computer voice would fit the part,” he told Wired magazine.

Hawking was born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death

The pioneering Italian astronomer and philosopher passed away on 8 January and in 1942 on that day, Stephen William was born in Oxford to parents Frank and Isobel. He also has two younger sisters called Philippa and Mary, as well as an adoptive brother called Edward. The family are all very intelligent (at one point his father was head of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research) and often spent mealtimes quietly reading books while they ate rather than talking to one another.

He was a keen member of the university rowing team

At one point, Hawking’s enthusiasm for rowing threatened to overtake his studies as an undergraduate at University College, Oxford. While too small to actually be a rower, he fitted perfectly into the role of coxswain and sometimes trained up to six times a week with the team.

He has his own rap alter ego

Well, kind of. MC Hawking is actually the brainchild of American computer programmer Ken Lawrence. Described as nerdcore hip hop, MC Hawking even released an album called ‘A Brief History Of Rhyme’ in 2004 after gaining an online following. His songs include ‘E=MC Hawking’, ‘What We Need More Of Is Science’ and ‘Big Bizang’. The real Hawking has said he is flattered by the satire, comparing it to being lampooned by ‘Spitting Image’.

He thinks the end of the world is (kinda) nigh

The idea of creating black holes which collapsed in on themselves and destroyed the universe was a regular theme of conspiracy theorists just before the Large Hadron Collider was turned on at CERN in Switzerland. That didn’t happen, but as a black hole expert, Hawking has talked about Earth being too fragile for humankind to stay on it indefinitely. “Our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past,” he told the Canadian Press. “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.” His solution? “We must continue to go into space for humanity,” he says.

He’s a big ‘Red Dwarf’ fan

When the seminal BBC sci-fi comedy celebrated its anniversary, Hawking appeared in a talking heads show discussing how much he enjoyed the show. Not only did he demonstrate his sense of humour by explaining how he liked its self-deprecation, but he also admitted enjoying its comedic use of pseudo-scientific theories.

He believes time travel is possible

But only to the future, apparently. “Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time’s current,” he wrote in The Daily Mail. “But time is like a river in another way. It flows at different speeds in different places and that is the key to travelling into the future.” While admitting that movies probably get it wrong in terms of the science, he said that what we would need to time travel is a wormhole, a really fast rocket or the Large Hadron Collider.

He likes Marilyn Monroe

He has jokingly described the actress as one of his old girlfriends and he is certainly a hardcore fan. His office contains several pictures of the pin-up, including one in which Hawking has been digitally inserted into the photo. He has also said that if he did have a time machine, “I would visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime.”

He almost spoke with a French accent

Some people are confused to find out that Hawking is English because he is so associated with his voice box which speaks in an American accent. This DECTalk DTC01 provides the scientist’s voice and was created in 1986. At one point, Hawking did consider changing the accent to French, but was worried that his wife would break up with him if he did, so decided against it. Good choice, Stephen, good choice.

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Photos: Snap Stills/Rex/PA/Focus Features/Eve/David Dettmann/BBC/MC Hawking/Paramount/NASA/JPL-Caltech