[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 11 (Monday, March 16, 1998)]
[Pages 389-390]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the White House Millennium Lecture With Stephen Hawking

March 6, 1998

    The President. Thank you very much. And Dr. Hawking, you'll have to 
forgive me, I'm a little hoarse. I hope for some genetic improvement 
sometime in the next year or so. [Laughter]
    Ladies and gentlemen, this was a stunning event for me and, I hope, 
for all of you. Yesterday Stephen and Elaine came by the White House to 
see Hillary and me and, as you can imagine, like Hillary, I had reread 
``A Brief History of Time,'' and I was utterly terrified--[laughter]--
that he would say something like, you know, ``I went to University 
College Oxford, too,'' and then he would ask me some incredible 
comparative academic question about our experiences there. Instead, he 
said, ``Was the food just as bad when you were there?''--[laughter]--
which was a wonderful relief. [Laughter]
    Albert Einstein once said, because politics is for the present, but 
an equation is something for eternity, equations were more important 
than politics. I don't know about the politics part, but Professor 
Hawking's insights into equations have altered our notions of time and 
the very nature of eternity itself. Tonight he's given us a lot to think 
about, even the ability to imagine a future in which we as humans will 
have finally captured the ``Holy Grail of physics,'' reconciling the 
infinitesimal with the infinite, presenting the world with the ultimate 
theory of everything. Now, when a physicist does that, he can totally 
ignore politics and buy a newspaper. [Laughter]
    The one thing I liked most about thinking about the future in 
Professor Hawking's term is that even when we reach the era of ``Star 
Trek,'' which will make a lot of our children very happy, it won't be so 
static. It will still be human and dynamic. And according to the visuals 
accompanying the lecture, it will still matter whether you can bluff at 
poker, which is encouraging. [Laughter]
    I want to get on with the questions now. And again, I want to thank 
Professor Hawking for the extraordinary clarity and vigor of his 
presentation and for sharing his time with us tonight, and for placing 
this particular moment in the larger spectrum of time--which I think if 
we all could do more and more clearly every day, we would live happier, 
more productive lives.
    Thank you, Professor.
    Ellen, would you like to take over and bring in the questions?

[At this point, the question-and-answer part of the lecture proceeded.]

    The President. Dr. Hawking, our position is we have repealed that 
law. [Laughter]
    Let me say, first of all, in defense of my Vice President, you will 
all understand that he would love to be here, but there is a peculiar 
gravitational force in New Hampshire that manifests itself with a 
remarkable regularity. [Laughter] Let me also say that in the visual 
presentation accompanying Dr. Hawking's lecture, there was that 
remarkable project stamped ``canceled'' on it. This administration 
opposed the cancellation of it, I'm proud to say. [Laughter] But we hope 
that the Swiss project will take up the slack.
    There's so many questions I know you would all like to ask. We have 
hundreds of questions coming in, and one of the questions I wish there 
were time to explore is, if we do, in fact, acquire a general 
understanding that time and space are more multidimensional than we had 
imagined, and computers become ever more sophisticated, even if people 
will never be able to travel at the speed of light, will we be able to 
communicate some day in some ways that destroy our common notions of 
time?
    I've thought about it a lot, and I'm not smart enough to know what 
the answer is,

[[Page 390]]

but I'd love to--that's one of the reasons I enjoyed re-reading the 
book.
    Let me also say one other thing to close--since our Nobel laureate 
talked about his faith about how the world began--the First Lady started 
tonight by talking about the marvels of technology which enable this 
astonishing man to communicate with us. And it is true that he is here, 
and we did this because of the marvels of technology. It is also true, 
in my mind, that he is a genuine living miracle because of the power of 
the heart and the spirit. And we can only hope that all the advances 
that he has foreseen for us tonight in human knowledge will serve to 
amplify the heart and the spirit that we have humbly witnessed this 
evening.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 8:17 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Elaine Hawking, wife of Stephen W. 
Hawking, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, who 
gave the second lecture in the Millennium series; Ellen Lovell, 
Director, White House Millennium Council; and William D. Phillips, 1997 
Nobel laureate in physics. The President also referred to the canceled 
superconducting super collider project. Professor Hawking, who suffers 
from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, 
spoke with the aid of a computerized voice synthesizer. This item was 
not received in time for publication in the appropriate issue.