When Stephen Hawking died in March 2018.
We all knew we had
lost a great and brilliant scientist.
People had compared him to
Isaac Newton and Einstein.
Today I have with me
Professor Richard Bell who's
>>going to look at Stephen Hawking in
a slightly different context and compare him
to a different person.
He wants to examine the links
between Wagner, and scientists. Richard,
>>I can make all the links
between Stephen Hawking and
physicists and
cosmologists but not with Wagner.
Ok I mean perhaps I can first of all
say is actually striking
how many scientists are actually attracted to
the music and the drama of Richard Wagner.
It's really quite aside from just
giving you some examples.
There's Marcus du Sautoy,
Richard Dawkins, Martin Rees
then Samuel Izacke these are all
contemporary scientists that actually love Wagner
and perhaps the most famous scientist
Wagnerian was Stephen Hawking.
>> Oh right... Oh yeah yeah.
It's very very interesting
that I think he got to know
Wagner in his teens.
Now when he was diagnosed with
Motor Neuron disease one of the ways he
actually coped with
this devastating news was to
listen to lots and lots
of Wagner very high volume as well.
>> OK One of his favourites was actually
The Valkyrie which is
the second opera in the Ring Cycle.
And many people know that because
the Ride of the Valkyries but he
was a serious Wagnerian.
And he [Hawking] said that
on his last day on this earth he would
listen to Wagner and drink
champagne. So he was actually very committed.
Now as I say many scientists are actually attracted
to Wagner, and I've often
wondered why is? It's also
the case that many politicians are attracted.
Many lawyers are attracted
many people have stressful jobs.
They're attractive because I think they
come home and they just want
to this is some sort of therapy I think.
But why is it that scientists are
subtracted and Wagner he said
that in his Ring Cycle he was
concerned to
investigate the essence of the world.
Itself. He is very very interested in nature.
In fact he read avidly, he would read
Hegel, Goethe, Schopenhauer Kant and so on.
And he was very very interested in
the in the very essence of the world itself.
And this may be one reason why
Stephen Hawking was
attracted but the something.
In Stephen Hawking's cosmology which
has remarkable resonance with
the passage in Parsifal. Now
Parsifal is Wagner's last stage work.
And in Act One there's this
amazing line where Gurnemanz
says to Parsifal as
they approach the counsel of the Krill.
"Here time becomes space."
Many people have actually written about
this whether it's anticipating
Einstein, it's probably not
really anticipating Einstein
but what is very very interesting.
Let's now look at Hawkins cosmology.
Now obviously is working a lot on
things like the Big Bang.
And I want us to imagine that
we're going back in time.
So the cameras running backwards
to the beginning of the universe.
And you could actually imagine sort of
a cone, an inverted cone,
and you've got a point at the Big Bang,
people often talk about a singularity.
We've got the time dimension here.
and we've got a cone so we're imagining
here two-dimensions in space
and one of time.
The way many people imagine it
is the Big Bang
started with this point at
the tip of this cone and then everything
expanded out from that,
that's a very very simple way of doing it.
Now what Hawking did
he worked with someone called Jim Hartle and he
talked about the the wave function
for the whole universe.
So it's bringing in quantum theory
here into cosmology.
And what he said is
that we don't actually have a cone
which goes to a single point,
but rather the cone comes down,
and it sort of rounds off and you never
actually reach the point of t equals 0.
And the way he put it is that as you go
back towards what we think is the Big Bang.
Time takes on spatial qualities
but it does this gradually
so you end up with
all dimensions of space and time seems to
sort of gets cut
out and say if you take these words
of Gurnemanz; "Here time becomes space."
You get an exact correspondence.
Now I don't know if Stephen Hawking
was actually aware of
this correspondence but I actually think this is,
quite this is really quite striking.
And so what we find therefore with Wagner
is that he especially in the Ring Cycle
he's very much concerned with
the with nature with
the essence of the world.
And this may be one reason why
his music and his drama appeals
to people such as Stephen Hawking
>> Richard Thank you very much for exploring
this very unusual aspect of
Stephen Hawking's likes and also giving
us a possible new way
of looking at both Wagner
and at the whole question
of the Big Bang. Thank you. >> Thank you Tom.