“I saw her today at the reception/ a glass of wine in her hand”

One of the things Hawking did not expect attending a physics conference in Moscow is how many bootleg cassettes of the rolling stones people listened to. One thing he did correctly anticipate was that he’d have time off to enjoy the city's culture .

Dogs and cats were able to enjoy Moscow, So Hawking was not about to allow the fact he was also a Quadruped with his two legs and two crutches prevent him from enjoying the city's muesuems.

Admission to St.Basil’s cathedral was included with his Tickets to the Russian state history Museum, so it was one of the sites he visited while playing tourist in between physics conferences. 

In the church of Saint Nicolai the Wonderworker he met a man in orthodox monastic robes.

“Ты исторический реконструктор”? Hawking asked him.

“Ohhh you’re american!” he replied in only slightly accented english

“Actually British”

“Is there a difference”

“From your point of view… I guess not. Are you a historical re-enacter ?”

“According to the communist party yes. I am an eccentric factory worker who re-enacts historical rituals. According to me I am the legitimate priest of St Basil's. According to god, I am an ordained priest and this is a consecrated church. According to the orthodox church… not much, too much of the hierarchy failed to find any sort of loophole they could fit through, so they don’t know much of what’s going on anymore.”

“And you don’t fear telling me this”

“Ahhh you listen to too much western propaganda! I told you I am a factory worker and it is no crime for a factory worker to indulge in old superstitions! Tell me, why are you in Russia, Are you here to seek healing from one of our holy sites?”

“I do regularly promise to become a pious christian if god takes away my illness. He has not done so. If you have some holy oil or something you’d like to sprinkle on me to help him with that I wouldn’t mind” 

“I miss the days when I had those kinds of things. I don’t know if they helped god at all. But they smelled nice and made people so happy! But if that’s not why you’re in Russia what is?”

“I’m here for the physics conference”

“Ahh yes I try to understand modern physics sometimes! God said let their be light and the big bang happened”

“Hehe that is one way to look at it. But it took far more than 7 days to go from that to man”

“Moses was a poet, who wanted to make his story sound good. No offense to you, it’s possible you are a brilliant writer, but your colleagues produce texts that are torture to read in their quest to get every detail right”

“... maybe I’ll try to make a well written physics book someday”

“I have a questions I’ve been wanting to ask a physicist. In the big bang God's creative power spread equally in all spatial dimensions infinitely equally right?”

“That is the general consensus.”

“And Einstein said time was just another dimension right ?” 

“That’s how we read the math”

“So it should seem to follow from the infinite nature of god that the creation that happened at the big bang would continue after… and maybe somehow continue backwards in time to before the big bang?”

“Well we have no way of knowing what went on before the big bang so maybe stuff was being created then… Would need to spend half an hour doing math to confirm this… but my intuition says then the creation at the big bang was connected to densely packed lines of comovement and that it becomes impossible as lines of co-movemnt are more spread out.”

“Maybe my English isn’t good enough…”

“Сотворение при Большом взрыве было связано с плотно расположенными линиями совместного движения, и это становится невозможным, поскольку линии совместного движения становятся все более разбросанными.” Hawking practically choked out dealing with the difficult russian sounds.

“Maybe my russian isn’t good enough either”

“The nature of space changes as it gets bigger, so space isn’t the same as it was at the big bang”

“So if there was somewhere space got smaller we could see god’s creative power in it’s furious brilliance!? That my brother would be wondrous!” the priest declared.

During the next days physics conference, as people argued over black holes Hawking realized that a black hole could be considered and area where space was was collapsing together faster than light and thought back to his conversation, if “creation” was going on around black holes that would give them temperature which fits with their insanely high entropy. After a bit of math work Hawking had a paper to publish and a form of radiation was (theoretically at least) identified which would bear his name.

“You can’t always get what you want…” was playing on someones boombox at the airport when Hawking left Russia.

Among the christian set, miraculous healings were considered the gold standard in proof for the existence of God. And so Hawking was quite open minded in his willingness to pray for one daily. But that sort of proof of God had not come to him.

Among the scientific set the gold standard of proof is if a hypothesis could be used to make accurate predictions. And the key idea behind Hawking radiation came from the Musings of a christian priest…

But if God was real why not cure him?

What if… He was on a course to enjoy wealth and power surrounded by loved ones as the world's greatest celebrity scientist, but still have a degenerative neural disease?

“But you get what you need” In what was a weird blasphemy against rock and roll, the stones were included in background Muzak that played at at airport when he landed