Celebrated physicist captivates U of T

He sits in the spotlight, barely able to move a muscle.

Crumpled and withered and silent, leaning to the left in his wheelchair as the audience waits. Seconds pass, 10 . . . 20.

Then out comes, well, the theory of everything.

With his body progressively failing him, Stephen Hawking's mind is soaring through the universe.

And last night, he took a rapt University of Toronto audience through his wanderings - his attempt to do nothing less than find a single set of equations that describe the physical laws governing everything in existence.

And while the Cambridge University astrophysicist - crippled by the late stages of Lou Gehrig's disease - admitted he has failed so far, he swears that answer would be ours within decades.

``In 1980 I said I thought there was a 50-50 chance of finding a complete unified theory in the next 20 years,'' Hawking said.

Hawking, however, said that single ``big'' explanation might well be a compilation of different theories, each of which can explain limited parts of the universe, but not its entirety.

``There may be a collection of apparently different theories, each of which work well with certain situations,'' he said.

He said this multi-theory explanation might have to supplant a hoped for single theory that has eluded scientists for most of this century.

But, he said, the amalgamation would suffice if it were the only way to bring the divergent worlds of the atom and the cosmos together.

``Now they can all be regarded as different aspects of the same theory, but there may be no simple formulation of the theory that can be applied in all situations,'' he said.

He likened this multi-theory theory to mapping a curved Earth on a flat piece of paper.

``One can accurately represent a small region of the Earth's surface as a map on a sheet of paper, but when one tries to map a larger region, one gets distortion because of the curvature of the Earth,'' he said.

``It is not possible to represent every point on the Earth's surface on a single map. Instead, what you get is a connection of maps which agree in the regions where they overlap. At the moment, theoretical physics looks as if it may be similar.''

Hawking, whose book A Brief History of Time has sold more than 10 million copies, says he sees the universe as a place with no boundaries, a circle where time and space never end, just change with the viewer's position in it.

``It can be paraphrased as the boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundaries.''

He says the unbounded universe, and the theories which support it provide ``such an elegant explantation, I'm sure God would have chosen it.''

Unable to speak, Hawking is forced to communicate by tapping one finger on a computer control button, searching for letters, words and phrases on a screen. The combinations he chooses are then translated by an electronic word synthesizer.

Hawking, who holds the same Lucasian Professor of Mathematics chair at Cambridge once occupied by Sir Isaac Newton, was brought to Toronto by a new U of T student group known as the Global Knowledge Foundation.

All 1,200 of the $69.50 tickets sold out in about 50 minutes when the lecture was announced earlier this month.