His speech was slow, his voice computerized--and there was not an empty seat in Sanders Theatre.
Stephen W. Hawking, a physicist compared in stature to Isaac Newton, spoke last night about the "shape of time" 84 years after Albert Einstein advanced his theory of general relativity.
But many attendees said Hawking's sheer presence left more of an impression than the scientific intricacies he described.
For two minutes, during sustained applause, an elevator inched Hawking, seated in a wheelchair, to the level of the stage.
The theater then went dark, except for a small spotlight focused on Hawking's slight frame.
Stars, the subject of Hawking's life work, appeared on a screen behind him.
The Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University then launched into an hour-long lecture, touching on the nature of time, "p-dimensional superstrings," and the search for a unified "theory of everything."
Hawking noted how physicists have realized that time is not as constant and once believed, but is instead highly variable, with eddies that can move forward, backward, and even repeat themselves.
The physics of the speech eluded some listeners at times.
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