‘Genius’ host Hawking addresses time travel, aliens, more

Stephen Hawking is always the smartest guy in the room. Few others come close.

But the renowned theoretical physicist believes that almost anyone can think like a genius.

All it takes is grasping some very challenging and esoteric scientific concepts, Hawking maintains, and having an inquisitive mind. He sets out to prove this theory — while educating TV viewers in a most entertaining way — in Genius by Stephen Hawking, a six-episode PBS series.

Genius is “a project that furthers my lifelong aim to bring science to the public,” he says.

In the premiere, airing at 8 p.m. Wednesday on KERA/Channel 13, Hawking and three non-scientist volunteers tackle the theoretical possibilities of time travel. It’s followed by another episode at 9, in which he and a different trio calculate the odds of alien life existing out there in the universe.

“It’s a fun show that tries to find out if ordinary people are smart enough to think like the greatest minds who ever lived,” Hawking said when the series was announced in January. “Being an optimist, I think they will.”

Hawking is perhaps the best-known physicist and cosmologist in the world, not only because of his work as a scientist and bestselling author, but also because of the challenges he has overcome in life (detailed in the 2014 movie The Theory of Everything).

Diagnosed as a young man with the debilitating disease of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which has progressively brought on paralysis, he has survived and thrived far longer than most ALS patients do.

He communicates today via a speech synthesizer, which he manipulates with movements of his cheek muscles — making him surely the unlikeliest narrator/host in television history.

Yet it’s never a distraction.

Like Carl Sagan, who captivated viewers with the Peabody Award-winning PBS series Cosmos in 1980, Hawking is a storyteller with a rare talent for making difficult material accessible to the masses.

Subsequent episodes address other big questions that scientists and philosophers have mused about for years: Why do we exist as a species? Where did the universe come from? And what is our place in the cosmos? Then Hawking steers his untrained assistants through a series of common-sense, pop-culture-savvy challenges that allow them — and viewers as well — to arrive at eureka moments of greater understanding.

In the time-travel episode, Hawking puts his team in a DeLorean, the time machine of the “Back to the Future” movies, for a demonstration that shows why the notion of jumping into the past is pure fantasy.

“Most people think of time travel as a sudden disappearance from one moment in time and an instantaneous arrival in another, usually involving a cleverly engineered time machine,” he tells viewers. “I hate to be a killjoy, but I doubt it will ever be possible to jump through space time in this way.”

Then he explains a form of time travel that is theoretically achievable and easily demonstrated.

The “Are We Alone?” episode about the search for extraterrestrial life, meanwhile, borrows a page from the Sagan-Cosmos playbook. Hawking finds offbeat ways to convey how many Earth-like habitats are out there (billions and billions). Then he explains why finding other life forms is like searching for a needle in a million haystacks. By the end of the episode, you’ll find yourself eagerly watching the skies.

“The series puts complex scientific concepts into easily digestible layman’s terms,” says Hamish Mykura, executive vice president of programming and development for National Geographic Channel, which is airing Genius internationally.

“My hope is that Stephen Hawking and this series encourage more minds around the globe to engage with scientific challenges of tomorrow.”

This story was originally published May 15, 2016 at 9:08 AM with the headline "‘Genius’ host Hawking addresses time travel, aliens, more."