Stephen Hawking wows Geneva crowd

British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has become a celebrity over the last four decades due to his theories on the origins of the universe and black holes. Over an hour before the start of his lecture on Tuesday evening at one of the university of Geneva’s auditoria, the venue was already full.

Some 600 people including standing spectators packed into the lecture hall, one of 10 in Geneva where an additional 3,400 Hawking fans watched a transmission of the 40-minute talk, simultaneously translated into French.

As he appeared on stage, the audience seemed mesmerised by Hawking who suffers from a motor neuron disease, only able to move his cheek, which enables him to write or select sentences on a specially-designed computer screen through an arm attached to his electrically-operated wheel chair.

A computer-generated voice annunciates his words; interspersed in clusters of sentences are audible beeps, presumably the sound of his speech computer in operation.

The scientist, also a professor at Cambridge University, is known for his ability to simplify some concepts found in cosmology and quantum mechanics and has published a number of popular books such as “A Brief History of Time”. The subject of his Geneva talk, occasionally punctuated by humour, was the origins of the universe.

During the public lecture, Hawking said that humankind from early history had asked: Why are we here? And: Where did we come from?  He explained how Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the universe is expanding had helped us get closer to understanding our origins.

These theories, combined with quantum mechanics (the study of physical reality at particle level), have allowed us to make huge progress in the area of cosmology (the study of the universe in its entirety), over the past 100 years, he said.

The end of the talk was greeted with enthusiastic applause. In April, it seemed unlikely that Hawking would be able to attend the 450th anniversary celebrations of Geneva University after being rushed to hospital with a chest infection.