Women... the greatest mystery of the Universe...

Professor Stephen Hawking's theory on women is very interesting, given his fame and standing, not only in the scientific world, but in the 'normal' world itself. One or two comments on the Net had me laughing: "Couldn't we put two women in a Hadron Collider?" and "God is a woman. No wonder Hawking can't understand the nature of God!" The arguments raged in the comments sections over the apparent sexist nature of Prof Hawking's pronouncements.
But it was one of Prof Hawking's other theories that caught my eye the most, as revealed in his interview. His biggest blunder concerned the theory of Black Holes: he originally believed that Black Holes destroyed all information when something entered, or was dragged, into them.
Now, here's something: Prof Hawking says he revised his thoughts during a theory correspondence discussion. I have no reason to doubt that. I do wonder, though, if I also had something to do with his change of mind. You see, I wrote a short story as part of my training as a writer. It was viewed on both the Critters website and Litopia website after I had sent it to Professor Hawking in the early 2000's for his approval. He wished me luck!
The words have changed a bit, knowing his revised thoughts on Black Holes, but the sentiment and idea I had was still the same when I sent it to him.
Here is the latter part of my short story, entitled A Brief History Of Tim, based on Prof Hawking's best-seller A Brief History Of Time:
Just so you know, Professor Tim Hawke had just entered a time Machine - and, for you Trekkies, it was called an Energiser...

                                       Chapter X

Searing light. Fear. No time to move. As if he could. Time to die. In a box. Eyes shut. Flinching. Then - wow, the rush! Head - thoughts - spinning. Faster. Falling, falling in, into the light. Curling up, like a ball. Spinning. Spinning faster.

Moving now. Like the light. But quicker. Quicker? That's not possible. Whoa - out of the box. Free - free - no, more than that. Like light. Thoughts. Like light.

 Millions of thoughts - no! No, not thoughts: whispers. Someone's whispering. They're all around me. Over there - I-I'm there, too! Holy shit! I think and I am there!

Mars - Jesus! Venus - Christ! Saturn - Hell's teeth! I don't believe this! And there's life. LIFE, do you hear me? LIFE! All of them - FULL of life! Own life. Not dust. Not volcanoes. Not just gas and rocks. Life! Can't you see it? They're alike, they're all alike. Own life. Own time. But different. Just different. Of course, you can't just wander along and expect to be a part of it, to belong. Speed, space-time - they change you, change everything.

Hey, no time now. Have to go. Someone's calling. But - but where? Where from? Wait a minute, what am I saying "someone's calling"? Who on earth-

"Not on earth, Tim Hawke," said a voice.

Tim at once slowed down. The voice - he thought he knew it, recognised it, somehow.

"Not on earth," repeated the voice. "But the Universe. Welcome to the Universe, Tim."

"Thank you," said Tim. "For a second there I was beginning to feel a little lost."

"You were not lost," said the voice. "Just disorientated. It takes a while to get used to your new state. We were watching over you."

"Ah," replied Tim. "You know, I had the feeling I was not alone. But - how did I get here exactly? I can remember where I was, on the planet Earth, and where I am now. It's just the bit in between I’m having difficulty remembering."

"That is understandable," answered the voice. "For the manner in which you came here would have scrambled the greatest of thoughts. Your contraption (the Energiser, as you termed it) created a black hole. This lasted for the duration of the power you allowed it. When the power ceased, the black hole reversed itself and threw up what it had drawn inside it - in another form, of course. A Big Bang in miniature, you might say."

"I remember now," said Tim. "The wood, the stone. They were altered, as though burned to a cinder. But the mouse - it disappeared without trace. What happened there?"

"Simple," said the voice. "Black holes, as violent as they appear, are not there to destroy. This is not a destructive universe. Nature creates. Yes, there is disaster, decay, death. But they do serve a purpose. Always from these comes something else. The beginning of anything can be found at any point. Black holes, Tim, are there to find this beginning. What enters naturally, intentionally, has to enter. It enters because it is done with. In its present form it has no future - its apparent uselessness, however, is far outweighed by its future usefulness. So life begins anew: from a black hole. But dead wood and stone do not have life. More important: they have no thought. Thought is the most powerful force in the universe. Thoughts do not enter into black holes and become something less. Only the physical can be broken down. Thought has no master. Thought is the true light of the world. We are the light of the world. For you, Tim, are now one of us."

"Light," thought Tim. "Of course. No wonder."

He did wonder, though. And Tim considered his journey across the Universe, across Space. The speed, the ease, with which he had travelled so far. No wonder? Great wonder. Great wonder, indeed!

"How, then, did I travel faster than light? I came here in next to no time."

"The speed of light," said the voice. "The speed of light as you knew it on Earth is such that you can measure it (to a point, I know, as the Uncertainty Principle dictates an element of probability, here). But this is not purely energy; lifeless, aimless energy. It has a purpose. Look how it spins from one star to another; from one planet to another. Linking all things. Why is Space so dark and Light so light? So that you can see it. So that you can follow it, walk upon it. Light is the highway of the World, and the stars are the streetlamps of the Universe. Thought is their Master, and thought travels swifter than any highway, any streetlamp."

Well, without putting too fine a point on it, Tim was struggling here. As brilliant as he was on earth, up here things were totally different: A horse of a different colour, as someone once so famously said, and in circumstances not too far removed from those here, either. Tim felt like the scarecrow without a brain, talking to the disembodied voice behind a curtain. But there was no curtain here.  

"Here!" thought Tim. "The word's popping up every five seconds. What's here?  I know how I got here. Though it was all a bit of an accident, really - a planned accident, maybe, but an accident all the same. The end result was totally beyond prediction - at least, it seemed that way from where I was standing. Of course, I had to try. Someone always has to take the jump, the final leap. How else was I supposed to have got here. I mean, how could anyone else get here? In fact, how did the voice get here?"

"In much the same way as you did," came the enigmatic reply.

Silence.

If you thought Tim was struggling before, then you can imagine the mother of all struggles he was having by now. His mind was wrapped in a blizzard of thoughts, half-believing, half-denying what he had just been told.

Then his head exploded.

WHAAAT!!!

SOMEBODY ELSE HAS CREATED AN ENERGISER?

SOMEBODY ELSE HAS CREATED AN ENERGISER !

MY  ENERGISER!

WORSE: SOMEBODY ELSE HAS CREATED AN ENERGISER BEFORE ME!

All that he had thought, all that he had hoped, all that he had done, had come down to this: somebody had got there before him. Talk about being brought down to earth - if you could say that kind of thing about Tim any more.

Still silence.

Whatever had happened to Tim, whatever he had become, had not removed the human feelings (or at least 'human' as far as he could remember them) he was experiencing at that moment. Resentment. Anger - that someone had got there before him. The waste. The waste of time, of energy. Suspicion. Had he been shadowed, copied? Had he been manipulated? Could someone have directed his movements somehow? Nothing, nothing particularly came to mind. Nothing he could see, nothing he could tell. But it had happened. It had actually happened. And he had to accept it. Someone had got there before him. History had repeated itself, as it usually did. Oh yeah, Tim Hawke had made history all right. Only he wouldn't go down as the initiator. Tim Hawke was only a copycat. For good or bad, right or wrong, he had only done what someone else had done before him.

More silence.

A jolt. Like a kick in the groin. The obvious had escaped him.

How? How? he thought. Where in history? Who? Who had done this? There was no record of this happening. It's a lie! At best a joke - a bad joke. The voice was making fun of him. But why, for what reason?

Tim imagined the figure behind the voice leaning nonchalantly against a 'cosmic streetlamp', absent-mindedly checking his fingernails in some kind of mental abstraction whilst waiting for Tim to say something. But Tim would not speak. He was unwilling to speak until he had something intelligent to say, to reveal, to impress upon the voice that he, too, was intelligent, capable of intelligent thoughts, words, arguments.

Still Tim wondered who else may have created an energiser. All kinds of famous, celebrated people had disappeared over the centuries, and others not so famous, too. It could have been any one of them - even a few of them. But no contraptions had ever been left behind, discovered. He knew that. After all, no one had had better access to that kind of information than he.

And what about Rack? No, it couldn't have been Rack. Definitely not. But wait a minute, wait a minute: maybe not Rack. But maybe there was one other. Someone he knew who had been there before him. Ha! Now he got it; now he understood! In the same manner, the voice had said. Of course. Tim may not have been the first, but he had been the cause of it.

"You were the mouse!" he cried, almost shouting at the voice. "You were  Einstein, Einstein the mouse!"

"You have much to learn," said the voice. "And calmer thoughts would serve you better, Tim. You are as close as you are far from the answer. Think on it: how else could you be here with me now? One cannot break human flesh down to the smallest particle and expect to survive, to come out breathing, to live in another time. For that was your belief, was it not? The movement of the glass plate, the sound of something falling, and all your imaginations run wild. The droid Scott could have told you, if you had asked him. Still, you have not failed. You have left behind a message, a legacy. Someone else will take up your baton and run with it for a while to a newer, further point. Your achievement is there for all to see, Tim. The black hole, the wormhole; both, at least, did exist in your time, by your hand. Although your treatment of Jonathan Rack could have been a little less severe, I think."

Tim was not at all startled to hear the voice speak of the Einstein experiment. He was actually replaying it to himself in vivid colour right before his eyes. Sure enough, there it was: a small charred object spat out of the black hole at the exact moment the laser beam was switched off. This time, the sound of it falling to the floor after brushing against the glass was a more realistic click: the click of an identity tag. Tim had forgotten about the tag. He'd left it on the mouse. He'd forgotten about Scotty, too. Hiding things from Rack had become an obsession with Tim. And Scotty's programming had reflected that obsession pretty well.

Ah, Rack, thought Tim. Poor Jonathan Rack. He was all alone. In a small, sparsely-furnished room. The room had a small window and the light was bright and shadeless. There was a toilet of sorts in the corner and the door looked heavy, with no handle on the inside - a jail-room door.

How was Rack to know that Tim had re-rigged the power source to the energiser. And that this re-rigging had involved connecting the Energiser to the self-same grid which powered the systems housing the computer database of the Inland Revenue Service. A surge of energy at around the time Tim Hawke disappeared from the face of the earth and generations of financial details, along with their security backups, disappeared likewise. This, of course, was not as bad as the hospital 'deaths' which had purportedly occurred during the Einstein experiment. Tim knew that Rack had leaked them to the press. Rack had 'protected' him, blaming a droid failure. But he'd held it over Tim's head like the proverbial Sword of Damocles. Now Tim had got his own back. 

"But you stated that you had come to be here in much the same way as I had," Tim said, drawing his thoughts away from the flawed experiment.  "What did you mean?"

"The answer to that," replied the voice. "Is simply thus: you entered the Energiser and you died. I, too, lived as you did upon Earth. Then I died. That is our link - death. Simple death, that is all. Only our thoughts live on. Until there are no people left to hear them."

Tim gasped: his vision of the whole universe was suddenly changing right before his very eyes. His whole perception, his whole Theory of Everything, was being blown away like so many frail cobwebs on a stiff, cosmic breeze; made ragged by the words of this invisible entity standing (or not) before him. But who was it? Who was this speaking to him? He had to know. He just had to know.

"Tell me," said Tim, his voice sharp, eager, impatient. "Tell me who you were. Who were you on Earth?"

"Well, Tim," said the voice. "I did not say that I was not Einstein the mouse, as you first guessed. For my name once was Einstein. But understand me now, Tim Hawke, when I tell you that not only was I Einstein the mouse, but I was also Einstein the man. And before him I was Mozart, too, and yet Beethoven after him. I was also Churchill, and before him Abraham Lincoln. I was Boadicea, and Joan of Arc. Once I was Millheim, inventor of the skatejet that carried you so effortlessly around the floors of the Zenith laboratories, and Llavand, developer of the very laser you used in the Energiser that brought you here. Ha! And once I was the dreaming Dorothy and her Aunty Em, and the little dog Toto who tried to get away - and yes, even the scarecrow who didn't have a brain.

I am the writer of every book, and the actor in every scene; the old man who sits at every street corner and the old woman who rests by every stream. I am every child who plays by day and flies upon imaginary clouds at night. Every thought that has ever been and every thought that ever will be; every dream that is ever dreamed, every wish that is ever whispered. I am all of these. And you, Tim Hawke. You. I was also you. For I am Thought. Thought. All thought. Thought is the true light of the World, Tim Hawke. In death are you now released. For you are thought now, Tim. Pure thought. Welcome to the Universe. The whole World now belongs to you."