The BBC has postponed this year’s prestigious Reith Lectures because the speaker, Professor Stephen Hawking, is not well enough to deliver the talks.
The 73-year-old Cambridge cosmologist and theoretical physicist was due to record the lectures at the Royal Institution on Thursday evening, during which he planned to describe the nature of black holes and answer questions submitted by Radio 4 listeners.
But in a statement on Tuesday, the BBC said: “Unfortunately Thursday’s recording of the BBC Reith Lectures with Professor Stephen Hawking is no longer going ahead as he is unwell. We are postponing the broadcast of the lectures on Radio 4 and are liaising with Professor Hawking and his team about the next steps once he is better.”
A spokesman for Cambridge University confirmed that Hawking was not well enough to take part, but said the university could not release further details of the scientist’s condition.
The lectures, which coincide with a series of events the BBC had arranged to mark the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, are a centrepiece of the network’s autumn schedule. They were due to be broadcast from Tuesday 24 November.
Hawking was announced as the Reith lecturer in June and said he was “delighted” and looking forward to conveying the thrill of science to millions of listeners around the world.
Hawking, who rose to fame in 1988 with the publication of the bestseller, A Brief History of Time, was given only two years to live when he was diagnosed with incurable motor neurone disease at Oxford University in the 1960s. Though his disease robbed him of movement, and an operation to save his life destroyed his ability to speak naturally, his disease progressed more slowly than doctors first expected.
He has worked at the university’s department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics for more than 30 years, and in 2009 stood down as the Lucasian professor of mathematics, a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton.
The same year, the grandfather and father-of-three contracted a chest infection and had to pull out of a headline appearance at a science meeting in Arizona. Weeks later, he fell seriously ill and was taken to Addenbrooke’s hospital by ambulance.
Last year, he told delegates at the UK launch of the Global Tracheostomy Collaborative that he had spent the past three years on full-time ventilation but that it had not prevented him from leading a full and active life.
