Stephen Hawking's name is everywhere, but the man behind the synthesized voice and the TV cameos was more rebellious, stubborn, and human than the legend suggests. In this episode we go beyond the pop-culture caricature to explore the life and physics of Stephen Hawking, from his unremarkable childhood in St. Albans (he was no Mozart-style prodigy) to his coxswain days steering boats off course at Oxford and his audacious oral exam gamble that forced the examiners' hand.

We unpack the science that rewrote physics: Hawking radiation, the 1974 result that proved black holes aren't truly black; the no-boundary proposal, which reframes the question of what came before the Big Bang as meaningless ("like asking what's north of the North Pole"); and the staggering drive that produced these ideas after his ALS diagnosis at 21.

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