Plot Summary

The Theory of Everything is the story of the most brilliant and celebrated physicist of our time, Stephen Hawking, and Jane Wilde, the arts student he fell in love with while studying at Cambridge in the 1960s. Little was expected from Hawking, a bright but shiftless student of cosmology, after he was given just two years to live following the diagnosis of a fatal illness (ALS) at 21 years of age. He became galvanized, however, by the love Jane Wilde, and went on to be called the "successor to Einstein," as well as a husband and father to their three children. Over the course of their marriage, however, as Stephen's body collapsed and his academic renown soared, fault lines were exposed that tested the resolve of their relationship and dramatically altered the course of both of their lives.—The Times