The Thrust of His Thought

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

DIRECTOR: ERROL MORRIS

THE BOTTOM LINE: The real world and the theoretical universe of a physicist are explored with simplicity and elegance.

The theory. when massive stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, they collapse in on themselves, finally reaching a point of infinite density that physicists call a singularity. At that moment, time stops and the gravitational field is so strong that no light can escape from this mass. What we have all come to know as a black hole is created.

THE THEORIST. Stephen Hawking is one of the physicists who made important contributions to this theory. In 1988 he published A Brief History of Time, a worldwide best seller that attempted to explain this idea in layman's language and show how it might describe both the origins and the end of the universe. His millions of readers may not have fully comprehended his ideas, but all of us did come to understand Hawking as a brave and inspiring figure. Stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), he is completely immobilized, uses a wheelchair and can speak only by punching letters and words into a voice-synthesizing computer. His achievements in the face of this handicap have greatly enhanced his appeal and his celebrity, even among those who haven't tried to read his book.

THEORIZING THE THEORIST. Watching Errol Morris' brilliant film, one begins to perceive a powerful analogy between Hawkings condition and the thrust of % his thought. His disease seems to have affected him much as loss of energy affects a failing star. The bright and unfocused young man described in the film by witnesses to his early days has in effect collapsed in upon himself, his spirit concentrating on the one small area of his body that continues to function perfectly -- his brain. His thought has achieved a remarkable density, and he has become a singularity almost as unimaginable as the astrophysical world he so easily imagines.

Consider too his theory of how the universe, believed to be expanding from the Big Bang with which it all began, will eventually end. Hawking posits a reversal of this process, a "Big Crunch," in which the universe contracts to a point where it will achieve the infinite density of a doomed star, in effect concluding as a gigantic black hole. This is a process that, in his own way, Hawking has been experiencing for decades. As his mother says in the film, you can hardly call him lucky to be afflicted as he is, but neither can you deny the possibility that he might not have achieved what he has if he had not been ill.

THEORIZING THE MOVIE. Morris does not force any of these conclusions on the viewer. He believes that one of the great spectacles the movies have to offer is people sitting around and talking. The visual material he employs to illustrate physical theory is deliberately user-friendly. It does not compete with his splendid talking heads. All of Hawking's friends, relatives and colleagues are located in rooms that look real but are in fact stage settings. There is practical reason for this: controlled lighting. But there is a metaphorical reason too. Each setting is a cosmos, familiar looking as the stars at night, but reimagined, just as mathematicians and astronomers reimagine the universe with their equations. By forcing us to see the space around them, Morris also makes us imagine them moving freely through it.

Hawking, though, is seen mainly in tight close-up, often reflected in the TV monitor essential to his life and work. This, combined with the sound of Hawking's voice synthesizer, reinforces our sense of his isolation and immobility and the idea that we are in the presence of pure, disembodied thought, a little like that which George Bernard Shaw imagined as the end of evolution in his play Man and Superman. That the metaphorical richness of this hypnotic movie has been accomplished by such simple means is a mark of its excellence.