Hawking

At Stephen Hawking's 21st birthday party, he meets Jane Wilde and there is an immediate attraction. They connect over conversations about stars and the universe. Jane soon realises something is wrong when he suddenly cannot stand up.

A stay in hospital reveals that Stephen Hawking has motor neurone disease. Doctors provide a distressing prognosis, suggesting he might not live beyond two years. The news anchors his future to a long, difficult fight.

Back in Cambridge, the new term starts but Stephen cannot find a subject for his PhD and drifts away from his supervisor, Dennis Sciama. He sinks into depression as his condition worsens and his academic life stalls. Friends and colleagues remain engaged with their own work, leaving Stephen feeling isolated.

Jane's visits and faith in his abilities help Stephen hold on during the toughest days. He leans on their relationship as a source of hope and purpose. This support begins to pull him back from the edge of withdrawal.

Hawking gets an early glimpse of a paper by Fred Hoyle to be presented at a Royal Society lecture. He works through the calculations, spots a mistake, and publicly confronts Hoyle after the talk. The clash sparks interest in his own independent research.

Around the same time, Roger Penrose introduces Hawking to topology, a way of thinking about the universe through shapes rather than equations. The new approach gives Stephen a practical method to cope with writing and to frame his ideas.

Penrose explains how the collapse of dying stars suggests singularities at their cores, a concept that excites Stephen's imagination about the origins of the universe. He begins to see a path toward a cosmology that could include a beginning.

Stephen asks what would happen if Penrose's math were applied backwards to the universe as a whole. The answer hints that nothingness could explode into something, implying the universe could have originated with a Big Bang.

With renewed energy, Hawking dives into his research and produces a PhD that combines Penrose's theorems with cosmological questions. The results are brilliant and have profound implications for cosmology.

Despite his deteriorating health, Stephen commits to Jane, asking her to marry him. Their engagement becomes a source of resolve and a personal victory in his fight to survive.

Two years after the initial diagnosis, Hawking is still alive and has helped spark a major scientific breakthrough that reshapes how people view the universe. He demonstrates that ambition and intellect can persist beyond a grim prognosis.

Unbeknownst to Hawking, two American scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, are interviewed in Stockholm in 1978 on the eve of receiving the Nobel Prize. They recount how they discovered a faint signal from space that would become evidence for the Big Bang.

They describe scanning the skies from a radio telescope in the hills above New Jersey, where they detected the leftover heat of the first explosion. This signal would later be recognized as physical proof of the Big Bang.

By the film's end, the cosmological consensus is that the universe started with a Big Bang, marking a fundamental shift in how humanity understands space and time.