Answer:

So, along with some 100 people, I squeezed into a room designed for

forty, to hear Stephen speak. He walked with a cane and his speech was a

bit slurred, but otherwise he showed only modest signs of the motor

neurone disease with which he had been diagnosed just two years earlier.

His mind was clearly unaffected. His lucid reasoning relied on Einstein’s

general relativity equations, and on astronomers’ observations that our

universe is EXPANDING, and on a few simple assumptions that seemed very

likely to be true, and it made use of some new mathematical techniques

that Roger Penrose had recently devised. Combining all these in ways

that were clever, POWERFUL and compelling, Stephen deduced his result:

our universe must have begun in some sort of singular STATE, roughly ten

billion years ago. (Over the next decade, Stephen and Roger, combining

forces, would go on to prove, ever more convincingly, this singular

beginning of time, and also prove ever more convincingly that the core of

every black HOLE is inhabited by a singularity where time ends.)

EXPLANATION:

So, along with some 100 people, I squeezed into a room designed for

forty, to hear Stephen speak. He walked with a cane and his speech was a

bit slurred, but otherwise he showed only modest signs of the motor

neurone disease with which he had been diagnosed just two years earlier.

His mind was clearly unaffected. His lucid reasoning relied on Einstein’s

general relativity equations, and on astronomers’ observations that our

universe is expanding, and on a few simple assumptions that seemed very

likely to be true, and it made use of some new mathematical techniques

that Roger Penrose had recently devised. Combining all these in ways

that were clever, powerful and compelling, Stephen deduced his result:

our universe must have begun in some sort of singular state, roughly ten

billion years ago. (Over the next decade, Stephen and Roger, combining

forces, would go on to prove, ever more convincingly, this singular

beginning of time, and also prove ever more convincingly that the core of

every black hole is inhabited by a singularity where time ends.)