At 21, Stephen Hawking was told he had at most two years to live. He lived another 55, progressively paralyzed, and from a motionless chair charted the beginning of time and the fate of black holes. This episode follows his life from an eccentric Oxford household with a converted London taxi and silent reading at dinner, through learning to read at eight, building a computer from clock parts and telephone switchboards, and coasting through an Oxford physics degree on roughly a thousand hours of study before bluffing his examiners into a first.

The ALS diagnosis at Cambridge in 1963 brought depression, then an unexpected cure for lifelong boredom, and marriage to Jane Wilde in 1965. Unable to hold a pen, he translated algebra into geometry and topology he could manipulate in his head. That produced a 1966 thesis applying Roger Penrose's sing ...