A Brief History of Time Page #3

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And Stephen took it

very seriously.

But then he liked dancing,

you see?

There were

four physicists in my year...

Gordon Berry...

Richard Bryan...

Stephen...

myself.

I first remember Stephen...

on an occasion when Gordon and I

went up after dinner to his room...

to try to find him.

And Stephen was up there...

with a crate of beer...

slowly drinking

his way through it.

He was only 17.

He couldn't legally go into a pub.

He'd gone up to Oxford

ridiculously early.

We used to have

what we called a gathering net.

We used to organize a beer party

and various things like that...

to gather all these... collar

as many freshman as we could get...

to get them to join

the Boat Club.

And that's how

we collected him, you see?

But the question always

with Stephen was...

"Should we make him

the cox of the first eight...

or the second eight?"

Well, coxes can be

adventurous...

and some coxes can be

very steady people.

He was rather

an adventurous type.

You never knew quite

what he was going to do...

when he went out with the crew.

I think he used to bring his work

with him into the boat sometimes.

His sort of thinking gear

was going...

on different levels.

We were asked

to read chapter 10...

in a book called

Electricity and Magnetism...

by Bleaney and Bleaney,

an unlikely combination...

a husband-and-wife team...

and at the end of that chapter,

there were 13 questions...

all of them

final honors questions.

I discovered very rapidly

that I couldn't do any of them.

Richard and I worked together

for the week...

and we managed to do

11/2 questions...

which we felt very proud of.

Gordon refused all assistance...

and managed to do one

all by himself.

Stephen, as always,

hadn't even started...

but the next morning,

he went up to his rooms at 9:00...

and we came back about 12:00,

maybe five past 12:00...

and down came Stephen, and we were

in the college gateway, the lodge.

"Ah, Hawking," I said, "how many

have you managed to do, then?"

"Well," he said, "I've only had time

to do the first ten."

I think at that point we realized that

it's not just we weren't in the same street.

We weren't on the same planet.

I once calculated...

that I did

about 1,000 hours' work...

in the three years

I was at Oxford...

an average of an hour a day.

I am not proud

of this lack of work.

I am just describing

my attitude at the time...

an attitude that nothing

was worth making an effort for.

He used to produce his work

every week for tutorial...

and, as he never

kept any notes...

or papers

or that sort of thing...

on leaving my room, he would normally

throw it in my wastepaper basket.

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