and it's a very nice photograph of him

he's a very brilliant man

he's a theoretical phisicist

and that means that he looks for ways

to understand the universe around us

using the laws of physics.

And so he's a very brilliant man and he's the Lucasian professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University

so that's a very long way to say it's the same job of the great scientist Isaac Newton once held

And he's won many awards and been given many honorary degrees

And so you would think that this would have been obvious

right from the beginning

Well this is the part of the talk where we do some time travel

We're going to go back and take a look

So here he is

This is my father as a small boy with his two sisters

And when my father was a young boy

and he was at school his teachers didn't think that much of him

This is a line from one of his school reports

This boy will never amount to anything

However his classmates must have noticed something about him

Because they nicknamed him Einstein

and he did go on to become a scholar

And this just shows that kids are so much cleverer than adults

Because he became a scholar and he went to Oxford University

and he left with a first in honours in Physics

and he came to Cambridge to begin his research

Now around this time he also found out that he was suffering from a disease

And it's a disease called ALS

and what it does is it slowly takes

away your ability to move your muscles

and in later years it's also

taken away his natural speaking voice.

And so at the end of the talk when you here him talking to you

it will sound like a computer is speaking

to you but it isn't it's a real man

who's using a computer to give himself back the voice that his disease has taken away from him

but fortunately some good things also happened to my father in this time

he met my mother and he got engaged and he got married

and he started work on his thesis

and his thesis was called 'Properties of Expanding Universes'

and as part of his thesis he managed to prove

that the Universe must have had a definite beginning

so that's not bad for a bit of post-graduate work actually

and now a few years on and here we are

this is 1970 in Cambridge

and that baby is me

and my parent's called me

Lucy because the name 'Lucy' comes from the Latin

word for light

and light is one of the major studies of astrophysicists

like my father and so

it's a very good name

for the daughter of a physcist

and the reason I'm showing you this photo from 1970

1970 was an important year for my father

he had a Eureka moment

and he worked out a very elegant mathematical proof

of what happens when two black holes collide

he worked out that when two black holes collide they join to form a larger black hole

but that they can't split

to form two black holes

so as you can tell I was a very inspirational

thought-provoking baby there

* laugh *

And here we are this is a few years later

and we have moved to CalTech

we're now living in California in Pasadena

and Caltech is a great centre for scientists

on the West Coast of America. And this is

1974 which was another very important year for my father

because he's working on his realisations

about what happens when a star implodes to form a

black hole.

So we saw the supernova the great explosion

at the end of a star's life a few

minutes ago and what happens if it

was a big enough star it throws the outer layers off

and the inner core can collapse on itself

to form a black hole

And that's what my father's working on

at this point

now after this we go back to England and my father

takes up his professorship at Cambridge

and many many many things happen over

the intervening years I grew up

become a teenager

my school reports were really not so great either

* laugh *

And my father also has a very

very busy time he writes his

best-selling work a Brief History of Time

now this is a book that has sold all over the world

and yet some people claim that not so many people

have actually managed to finish it.

So that's one of the reasons why we set to work on our

children's books we set to work to try and add some extra

explanation

Now at that time my father also had some some

fun things going on in his life. He went on the Simpsons

* laugh *

He really loved being on the Simpsons

the way they gave him helicopter blades for his wheelchair

but he did say that he's really glad that in real-life

he's not bright yellow

*laugh*

He also did this he was on Star Trek

Paramount studios one day because he was working at Caltech

and they asked him if he'd like a part

and here he is on the enterprise with the two greatest scientist of all time.

in my mind Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein

and a few more adventures here he is floating in

zero gravity. And this is a really lovely picture

because if you look at the size of his smile

and you think this is a man who's

mind has been free to travel across

the whole universe but his body has been and here he is he's free and he's floating.

confined to a wheelchair for decades by this point

and here he is he's free and he's floating.