Audience members filed out of Sanders Theatre shaking their heads after yesterday's third and last lecture by renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

"I got completely lost," said Rabbi Benjamin E. Scolnic who had traveled from Connecticut to hear the lecture.

Scolnic, along with his nine-year-old son and roughly 700 others, had just heard Hawking present his theories on cosmology and the shape of the universe.

After his first lecture, which was meant for the general public, Hawking concentrated on the more specific, targeting a knowledgeable audience in the second and third lectures.

Hawking first articulated the conundrum of cosmology, explaining that it is merely a "pseudo-science" because it has no predictive power. Based on current observations, cosmology uses equations to extrapolate back into the past.

Essentially, said Hawking, "It is as it is now because it was as it was then," leaving the past ungrounded in fact.

In response, Hawking utilized complex concepts, such as M-theory, eleven-dimensional gravity, boundary conditions and the Anthropic Principle to set up his understanding of the universe's shape.

Hawking proposed that the no-boundary principle--which states that the universe has no boundaries--works symbiotically with the Anthropic Principle to solve cosmological questions.