A young physicist is given two years to live and spends the next fifty-five asking where time begins. The science is real — and one of his greatest ideas has still never been seen.
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Work through the four short activities. Each word sits in a situation that gives its meaning away — you don't need to know the film yet. Say your answer out loud first, then reveal.
James Marsh's The Theory of Everything (2014). Read each part, try the quick check from memory, then discuss. (There are spoilers ahead — that's the point; we're here to talk about it.)
Stephen is a research student in cosmology at Cambridge: quick, untidy, funny, and famously without a thesis topic. At a party he meets Jane Wilde, who is studying medieval Spanish poetry. They are almost comically mismatched — she goes to church, he says the universe needs no God — and they fall in love anyway. Meanwhile his supervisor takes him to a lecture on collapsing stars, and something clicks: if a dying star can crush itself down to a single point, then perhaps the whole universe began at one.
But his hands have started to disobey him. He drops chalk. His feet catch on the stones. After a bad fall he is taken to hospital, and the tests give an answer he was not expecting: a motor neurone disease, progressive, incurable. The doctors tell him his muscles will shut down one by one, that his mind will be untouched, and that he has roughly two years.
He shuts the door on everyone, Jane included. She refuses to accept it. She tells him she knows exactly what the years ahead will look like and that she wants them anyway. They marry. It is a decision the rest of the film will quietly examine from every angle.
1. What idea does Stephen take from the lecture on collapsing stars?
2. What are the two halves of the diagnosis he is given?
1. That if a dying star can collapse to a single point, the same mathematics run backwards might show that the universe itself began at one.
2. His body will progressively fail and he has about two years to live — but his thinking will be entirely unaffected.
The two years pass, and then many more. Stephen finishes a doctorate arguing that time itself had a beginning, and his reputation grows fast. Children arrive: Robert, then Lucy, then Timothy. So do walking sticks, then a wheelchair, then round-the-clock care. Jane's own doctorate is set aside, then picked up in exhausted fragments at the kitchen table.
Stephen's science moves on from beginnings to endings. He works out that black holes should not be perfectly black at all: they should leak a faint radiation and, over unimaginable spans of time, disappear. The world of physics is delighted. The world of the house is quietly running out of hands. At her mother's suggestion Jane joins a church choir, and meets Jonathan, a widowed musician who becomes a friend to the whole family — teaching the children, lifting the wheelchair, staying for supper. The affection between him and Jane is obvious to everyone, and acted on by no one, and the film lets that tension sit there for years without resolving it.
Then, on a trip abroad, Stephen collapses with pneumonia. Doctors offer Jane a choice: let him go, or authorise an operation that will save his life and permanently remove his voice. She chooses the operation. He comes home unable to speak a word, spelling out sentences letter by letter on a card, until a computer gives him a flat electronic American voice that will become the most recognisable in science.
1. What does Stephen work out about black holes in this stretch of the film?
2. What is the choice Jane has to make when he falls ill abroad, and what follows from it?
1. That black holes are not completely black — they should give off a faint radiation and eventually disappear.
2. Whether to let him die or agree to an operation that saves him but takes away his speech. She agrees; he learns to communicate first by spelling board and then by computer voice.
With his new voice Stephen writes a book explaining the universe to people who have never opened a physics textbook. It sells in numbers nobody in publishing predicted, and he becomes something no theoretical physicist had ever been: globally famous. Invitations, cameras, lecture halls. A nurse, Elaine, joins the household and takes over much of his daily care, and Stephen — funny, flirtatious, increasingly living on the road — grows closer to her.
Jane has spent twenty-five years holding a family, a career and an illness together at once. Something has to give. When Stephen tells her he is going to America and taking Elaine, both of them understand what is being said. The film gives them a restrained, almost gentle conversation in a garden: no shouting, no blame, an acknowledgement that they did something remarkable and that it is finished. He goes to Elaine; Jane, eventually, to Jonathan.
At the end Stephen is invited to the Palace, and asks Jane to come with him. They sit in the garden afterwards watching their three grown children, and he types a few words to her about what the two of them made. Then the film runs backwards — the wheelchair, the walking stick, the chalk, the party — all the way to the moment before he knew anything at all, and stops on a young man looking across a room at a girl. It is a film about a physicist who spent his life trying to run time in reverse, doing exactly that in its final minute.
1. What changes Stephen's public life completely in this part?
2. How does the film choose to end, and why does that ending suit its subject?
1. His popular book about the universe becomes a huge bestseller and makes him world-famous — which pulls him away from the family and towards Elaine.
2. It rewinds through his life to the night he first saw Jane. It fits because his whole scientific career was about running the universe backwards to find its beginning.
This is a film about time, illness, faith and the beginning of the universe — and those four phrases already contain the whole problem. English makes you decide, before almost every noun, whether you mean the idea in general or one particular piece of it. That decision is the article system, and abstract nouns are where it bites hardest.
Complete each gap. If no article is needed, write X.
1. He was still young man when the first symptoms appeared.
2. Near a very dense object, gravity is far stronger than it is here.
3. She spent years studying poetry of medieval Spain.
4. Physicists are still hunting for single theory that explains all four forces.
5. In 1979 he was given chair once held by Isaac Newton.
1. a (one of a class, first mention)
2. X (abstract / uncountable noun used generally)
3. the (pinned down by the phrase "of medieval Spain")
4. a (one such theory — not yet identified)
5. the (unique — there is only one)
Read the note in brackets and complete the sentence. Write X if no article is needed.
1a. illness is part of a great many lives, and it does not end them. (the idea in general)
1b. illness he lived with for fifty-five years progressed unusually slowly. (we know which one)
2a. time behaves strangely wherever gravity is strong. (the idea in general)
2b. He wanted to know what happened at very start of time. (one particular moment)
3a. He set out to write book that ordinary readers could actually finish. (first mention)
3b. book made him famous all over the world. (we have just mentioned it)
1a. X · 1b. The (the relative clause identifies it)
2a. X · 2b. the ("of time" pins it down)
3a. a · 3b. The (second mention — now we both know which book)
Fill each gap with a, an, the — or X for no article. Read it aloud when you're done.
In 1963 doctor told a twenty-one-year-old student that he had illness for which there was no cure. At the time he was working on nature of space and time. Ten years later he predicted that black holes are not completely black, and that radiation they give off would slowly destroy them. He never received Nobel Prize, because that radiation has never been detected.
a · an · the · X · the · the
Notice the pattern: a/an introduces one of a class; the appears the moment something is unique, already known, or pinned down by an of-phrase or relative clause; zero carries the plural or abstract noun used in general.
Carry this into the Speak tab. Watch yourself with the abstract nouns — time, illness, faith, fame, hope — and hear whether you mean the idea, or one particular piece of it.
Unusually for a biopic, the physics in this film is not decoration. Two real pieces of work sit underneath it, and one of them is still, half a century later, waiting to be seen.
In 1965 Roger Penrose published a proof that, if general relativity holds and matter behaves reasonably, a collapsing star cannot stop: it must form a singularity, a point where the equations stop giving sensible answers. Hawking's insight was to run the argument the other way. His 1966 Cambridge doctoral thesis, Properties of Expanding Universes, applied that reasoning backwards in time to the expanding universe as a whole. In 1970 the two men published jointly — The singularities of gravitational collapse and cosmology, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A — concluding that, under those assumptions, the universe itself must have begun in a singularity. Penrose received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for this line of work. Hawking had died two years earlier, and the Nobel is not awarded posthumously.
In 1974 Hawking published a short paper in Nature with a question mark in its title: Black hole explosions? Quantum effects at the edge of a black hole, he argued, mean it is not perfectly black. It should glow — very faintly, like a warm body — and radiating means losing mass. Given long enough, a black hole should shrink and finally evaporate. That is Hawking radiation, and it broke a rule everyone thought was safe: black holes were supposed to be permanent.
The catch is the size of the effect. The smaller the black hole, the hotter and faster it evaporates; the bigger it is, the colder and slower. A black hole the mass of our Sun would be colder than the 2.7-kelvin background glow left over from the Big Bang, so in practice it would absorb more than it emits, and it would need something in the order of 1067 years to evaporate — against a universe currently about 13.8 billion years old. Hawking radiation has never been observed. It is many orders of magnitude below what any telescope can detect, and searches for the final gamma-ray flash of a small primordial black hole — NASA's Fermi telescope among them — have found nothing. That, bluntly, is why Hawking never won a Nobel Prize: the prize follows observation, and the observation never came.
One related Hawking result has been checked. His 1971 area theorem — that the surface area of a black hole's horizon can never decrease — was confirmed observationally for the first time in 2021, when physicists analysed LIGO's first gravitational-wave signal from 2015 and showed the merged black hole's horizon was larger than the two that made it. Different result, real evidence.
Hawking was diagnosed in 1963, aged 21, with a motor neurone disease, and was told he had roughly two years. He lived another fifty-five, and died on 14 March 2018, aged 76. Average survival after such a diagnosis is around two to three years; a small percentage of people progress far more slowly, and neurologists are candid that they do not fully understand why his did. He was not cured and he was not exceptional in willpower alone — his breathing and swallowing muscles were largely spared, which is the difference between years and decades, and he had care that most patients never get.
He kept working throughout. Doctorate 1966; Fellow of the Royal Society at 32, in 1974; Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009, the chair Newton once held. In 1985 he caught pneumonia while visiting CERN in Geneva; a tracheotomy saved his life and took his speech permanently, and from then on he spoke through a synthesiser, selecting words with a hand switch and later a cheek muscle. The film moves that crisis from Geneva to a holiday in Bordeaux — a small change, but a real one.
This is the fact that reframes everything: the film is adapted from Jane Hawking's memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen (2007), itself a gentler revision of her earlier Music to Move the Stars (1999). The screenplay is by Anthony McCarten; Eddie Redmayne won the Academy Award for Best Actor. So the camera sits with Jane, not with Stephen: the science is glimpsed from the doorway, and the emotional centre is a marriage. It is a domestic film wearing a cosmological title.
Where it leaves the record: the diagnosis is placed after the courtship for dramatic shape — in reality the two had met before he was diagnosed, but were not yet a couple — and it was his family pressing him to see a doctor about his slurred speech, not a single cinematic fall on a Cambridge path, that led to the tests. The couple did not stay put in Cambridge as the film implies; Hawking spent 1974–75 at Caltech in California. Jane's relationship with Jonathan Hellyer Jones is compressed and its timing shifted; she has always maintained it stayed platonic while the marriage lasted. The separation is the biggest softening of all: the Hawkings separated in 1990 and divorced in 1995, and the memoir describes something far messier than the film's calm, forgiving conversation in a garden. Jane later took her own doctorate — in medieval Spanish poetry, awarded 1981 — and married Hellyer Jones in 1997.
And the famous wagers, which no single scene can really hold: Hawking's real bets are documented and comic. In 1974 he bet Kip Thorne that Cygnus X-1 was not a black hole — an insurance policy, as he put it, against his own life's work being wrong — and eventually conceded, paying with a magazine subscription. In 1997 he and Thorne bet John Preskill that information falling into a black hole is destroyed for ever; Hawking conceded in 2004 and handed over a baseball encyclopedia, on the grounds that information can be retrieved from it at will. Thorne has still not conceded.
One last thing people love to repeat, and it happens to check out: Hawking was born on 8 January 1942, three hundred years to the day after Galileo died, and died on 14 March 2018, Einstein's birthday. Both men lived to 76. It means nothing. It is still a very good story.
This is the heart of the lesson — do it all out loud. The timer keeps you going; fill the time with detail.
Tell the story of The Theory of Everything in your own words, as if to someone who has never seen it. Move through the arc: Cambridge and the party → the lecture on collapsing stars → the diagnosis and the two-year prognosis → the marriage, the children and the wheelchair → black holes that are not black → the lost voice and the computer → the book, the fame, the separation → the rewind.
Work in at least five key words (prognosis, debilitating, tenacity, elusive, speculative, candid, concede, reconcile, unwavering, accolade), and control your articles as you go: "he wanted to find a theory of everything", "he asked what happened at the beginning of time", "illness took his body but not his mind".
The film is built on Jane Hawking's memoir, so a story about the origin of the universe is told as the story of a marriage — and it softens the ending of that marriage considerably. Build an argument: when a film is made about living people, does the person who lived through it earn the right to shape it, or does an audience have a right to the messier, less flattering version? Bring in other biopics or documentaries you know.
Hawking radiation is one of the most admired ideas in modern physics and has never once been observed. Is an unproved idea still knowledge? Make your case.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: