In Culture
Genius by Stephen Hawking (2016): the PBS Series
A guide to Genius by Stephen Hawking, the 2016 PBS / National Geographic series in which Hawking set ordinary volunteers experimental challenges to think their way to scientific breakthroughs. His final major TV project. Where to watch.
Last reviewed 30 May 2026 · How we research
Genius by Stephen Hawking, broadcast in 2016 on PBS in the United States and on National Geographic internationally, was Hawking's final major television project before his death in March 2018. It is also one of his most unusual: rather than narrate cosmology, he set groups of ordinary volunteers a series of extravagant practical experiments and asked whether they could think their way to the answers themselves.
What's in it
The series ran across six hour-long episodes, each built around one big question. Can We Time Travel? uses cars, clocks and a giant model of a black hole to walk volunteers through what relativity actually permits; see Hawking on time travel and the chronology protection conjecture. Are We Alone? tackles the search for extraterrestrial life. The remaining episodes ask Why Are We Here?, Where Did the Universe Come From?, What Are We?, and Where Are We?, each with the same format: experimental setups, large-scale stunts, and the volunteers building up to a conclusion under Hawking's prompting.
What makes it distinctive
The conceit, that anyone with patience can think their way to ideas as profound as those of Newton or Einstein, is a quietly democratic one, and very Hawking. By 2016 he had become not only a famous theoretical physicist but a famous communicator with a long-running interest in making physics accessible to the widest possible audience. The series sits as a kind of late-career manifesto for that interest: science as a way of thinking, available to anyone willing to be careful and curious.
The production combines large-scale experiments and stunts (helicopters, lasers, smashed glasses, racing cars) with computer-generated visualisations of the ideas being tested, and brief framing pieces from Hawking himself, who appears throughout.
Where it sits in his work
Genius aired in May and June 2016, less than two years before Hawking died on 14 March 2018. The series therefore takes on, in retrospect, the quality of a parting gesture: a public statement that the questions Hawking spent his career on are the questions anyone can engage with, given the right framing. His final scientific paper, "A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?", with Thomas Hertog, was completed in the same period. For Hawking's other screen work see the media library, and for the watcher's guide where to watch Stephen Hawking on film.