SOURCE: "Einstein's Dream," in Black Holes and Baby Universes, and Other Essays, Bantam Books, 1993, pp. 69-83.

Hawking is an English physicist, author, and educator renowned for his significant contributions to contemporary scientific theory. In the following essay, which was originally presented as a lecture at the Paradigm Session of the NTT Data Communications Systems Corporation in Tokyo in 1991, he describes relativity and quantum mechanics and explains their implications for contemporary science and culture.

In the early years of the twentieth century, two new theories completely changed the way we think about space and time, and about reality itself. More than seventy-five years later, we are still working out their implications and trying to combine them in a unified theory that will describe everything in the universe. The two theories are the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. The general theory of relativity deals with space and time...