Join Dr Sarah Quinn as she explores Stephen Hawking's transformative years at Cambridge University, where a young doctoral student began his journey toward becoming one of history's most celebrated physicists. This episode examines Hawking's arrival at Cambridge in 1962, his work under supervisor Dennis Sciama, and the development of his groundbreaking doctoral thesis on singularity theorems. Discover how the Cambridge environment fostered Hawking's revolutionary approach to cosmology and general relativity, leading to his collaboration with Roger Penrose on mathematical proofs that would reshape our understanding of black holes and the Big Bang. Learn about the academic community that nurtured his early research into the fundamental nature of space and time, and how his distinctive method of combining rigorous mathematics with intuitive physics emerged during this crucial period. This episode chronicles the rise of a young physicist whose Cambridge years laid the foundation for discoveries that would challenge our most basic assumptions about the universe, establishing him as one of the most promising minds of his generation in theoretical physics and cosmology.