Stephen Hawking’s physics tutor, Robert Berman, later said in the New York Times Magazine :

2. Stephen Hawking’s physics tutor, Robert Berman, later said in the New York Times Magazine: “It was only necessary for him to know that something could be done, and he could do it without looking to see how other people did it. ... He didn’t have very many books, and he didn’t take notes. Of course, his mind was completely different from all of his contemporaries.” Hawking’s unimpressive study habits gave him a final examination score on the borderline between first and second class honours, making an "oral examination" necessary. Berman said of the oral examination: “And of course the examiners then were intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far more clever than most of themselves.”

3. Hawking describes himself as “lucky" despite his disease. Its slow progression has allowed him time to make influential discoveries and it has not hindered him from having, in his own words, "a very attractive family". When Jane was asked why she decided to marry a man with a 3-year life expectancy, she responded: “Those were the days of atomic gloom and doom, so we all had a rather short life expectancy."

4. Jane Hawking, Hawking’s first wife, with whom he had three children, cared for him until 1991 when the couple separated, reportedly due to the pressures of fame and his increasing disability. Hawking married his nurse, Elaine Mason (who was also the previous wife of David Mason, designer of the first version of Hawking’s talking computer), in 1995. In October 2006, Hawking filed for divorce from his second wife.

6. University College (in full, the The Master and Fellows of the College of the Great Hall of the University of Oxford), is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. It is a contender for being the oldest of the colleges of the university, and is amongst the largest in terms of population.

7. A degree may be awarded with or without honours, with the class of an honours degree based on the average mark of the assessed work a candidate has completed. Below is a list of the possible classifications with common abbreviations. • First-Class Honours (First or 1st) • Upper Second-Class Honours (2:1) • Lower Second-Class Honours (2:2) • Third-Class Honours (Third or 3rd) • Ordinary degree (Pass) • Fail (no degree is awarded) Until the 1970s, Oxford awarded Fourth-class Honours degrees.

8. provided   • conjunction on the condition or understanding that.

9. The Big Bang is the cosmological model of the universe that is best supported by all lines of scientific evidence and observation. As used by scientists, the term Big Bang generally refers to the idea that the universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some finite time in the past, and continues to expand to this day.

10. A black hole is a theoretical region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. visible light), can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon. The term derives from the fact that the absorption of visible light renders the hole's interior invisible, and indistinguishable from the black space around it.

11. Despite its interior being invisible, a black hole may reveal its presence through an interaction with matter that lies in orbit outside its event horizon. For example, a black hole may be perceived by tracking the movement of a group of stars that orbit its center. Alternatively, one may observe gas (from a nearby star, for instance) that has been drawn into the black hole. The gas spirals inward, heating up to very high temperatures and emitting large amounts of radiation that can be detected from earthbound and earth-orbiting telescopes.Such observations have resulted in the general scientific consensus that—barring a breakdown in our understanding of nature—black holes do exist in our universe.