A Brief History of Time: Stephen Hawking talk, Southbank Centre

In 1963, aged 21, Hawking contracted motor neurone disease and was given two years to live. This year, on the eve of his 75th birthday, is an unmissable chance to see the world's most famous physicist speak – forgive our morbidity – before it's too late.

In spite of being wheelchair bound and dependent on a computerised voice system for communication, Hawking is widely regarded as the greatest theoretician since Einstein. He brought the theory of the Big Bang into the main stream, describing it as the reverse process of a black hole, amongst many other earth shattering discoveries about the basic laws which govern our universe.

But this talk is not just for physics nerds and Hawking has an awesome life story. Tracing his development as a thinker in his autobiography, he explains how the prospect of an early death urged him onward through stunning intellectual breakthroughs, and talks about the genesis of his masterpiece A Brief History of Time - one of the iconic books of the twentieth century. He still hopes to make it into space one day.

Hawking will be in conversation about some of his proudest accomplishments as a physicist, and showing his new landmark app, Stephen Hawking's Pocket Universe, which allows audiences to rediscover A Brief History of Time in an entirely new way.

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