As the power of his mind grows, he explores the future of an expanding universe, searching for the meaning and resolution inherent in endings. Against this random universe, Hawking places what his mother calls his 'very intense' belief in 'the infinite possibility of the human mind.' As his body degenerates, he explores time in reverse, searching for origins, for explanations and the meaning inherent in beginnings. Dismissing Einstein's claim that 'God does not play dice,' Hawking counters in his book A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988) that quantum mechanics has introduced 'an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science' or, as he puts it more strongly elsewhere, 'all the evidence indicates that God is an inveterate gambler and that He throws the dice on every possible occasion' ( Black Holes and Baby Universes, and Other Essays, 1993). Diagnosed with ALS at twenty-one and given only two and a half years to live, Hawking is a child of luck and chance who has eluded time for more than thirty-five years.

Director Errol Morris and Stephen Hawking on the set of A Brief History of Time (1992)In Errol Morris's 1992 film, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking's mother Isobel says that her son's disease 'concentrated his energies' and she describes him as 'lucky,' partly because he 'came back from a disaster' and partly because he'd always had the ability to 'live in his head,' a fact which has rendered the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis significantly less disabling for him than it might have been for someone less cerebral.

Stephen hawking a brief history