Television

The BBC filmed the whole Stephen Hawking 60th Birthday Symposium and the lectures will be broadcast very shortly:

THE HAWKING LECTURES
BBC4-TV (Digital), 8:30pm on 5th to 8th August 2002.

This will include the lectures by Martin Rees, Jim Hartle, Roger Penrose, Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking himself. Further information will be available at the BBC4 website nearer the broadcast.

The BBC also webcast Professor Hawking's lecture live on the 11th January, and this can be viewed in Realplayer in its entirety at the following link:

Professor Hawking's Lecture.
(Note this link is to the BBC's site.)

Other Realplayer video and audio from the preceding four-day technical meeting can be viewed at the Workshop website. Speakers include David Gross, Alan Guth, Gary Horowitz, Werner Israel, Andrei Linde, Joe Polchinski, Andy Strominger, Leonard Susskind, Gerard 't Hooft, Alex Vilenkin and Edward Witten.

Other media reports

For further media reports and a scientific summary of the meeting please follow this link:

Conference Reports

Stephen Hawking Festschrift volume (Cambridge University Press)

The proceedings from the symposium and workshop will be published by CUP in early 2003 under the title: The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Proceedings of the Stephen Hawking 60th Birthday Conference (editors, G.W. Gibbons, E.P.S. Shellard and S.J. Rankin). The book catalogue summary will be along the following lines:

"This Cambridge conference, marking the sixtieth birthday of Stephen Hawking, was a singular celebration of the many remarkable scientific contributions made by the world's best known physicist. The meeting attracted a host of internationally renowned theoretical physicists and this volume is a unique compendium of their perspectives. In addition to a critical evaluation of the subject areas in which Professor Hawking has contributed with such distinction, it provides an important assessment of prospects for the future of both fundamental physics and cosmology.

The birthday celebrations ended appropriately with a public symposium featuring some of the most successful scientific popularisers of the age, including Roger Penrose, Kip Thorne, James Hartle, Martin Rees and Stephen Hawking himself. These lectures (included at the beginning of the book) formed the basis of a series of four BBC4 TV programmes (broadcast from the 5th to 8th August 2002). They brought to life for a wide audience both Hawking's work and other exciting recent developments in physics.

Subsequent sections include articles on: Cosmological singularities, Black holes, Hawking radiation and information loss, Global issues in quantum gravity, M-theory and beyond, Quantum cosmology and Cosmology. These articles should be accessible to particle physicists, relativists, cosmologists and other physicists, and will be of particular interest to students who are considering entering the field."

The volume should be fairly accessible to others as well. Beyond the intentionally popular contributions, scientifically-informed readers should be able to gain significant insights from many of the other articles.