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THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release March 3, 1998

                 PRESIDENT AND MRS. CLINTON TO WELCOME
       STEPHEN HAWKING FOR MILLENNIUM EVENING AT THE WHITE HOUSE

The President and Mrs. Clinton have announced that Cambridge University Physicist Stephen Hawking will be the guest lecturer at the second Millennium Evening at the White House, Friday, March 6, at 7:30 pm. Millennium Evenings at the White House are a series of gatherings with scholars, scientists, and creative individuals from many fields whose ideas will help us honor our past and imagine our future as we approach this milestone in human history.

The Millennium Evening will be held in the East Room of the White House. Professor Hawking will discuss, "Imagination and Change: Science in the Next Millennium." His best-selling book about the evolution of the universe, A Brief History of Time, has been translated into 33 languages and has sold 9 million copies. Professor Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton. He is also the head of the General Relativity and Gravity Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

The National Endowment for the Humanities is co-sponsoring the Millennium Evening with support from Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The Millennium Evening will be broadcast via satellite and cybercast over the internet, allowing for live video and audio formats. The President and First Lady encourage Americans to participate in the evening's discussion by sending questions to Professor Hawking via email either before or during the cybercast. Questions may be sent via the White House web site (http://www.whitehouse.gov). That web site will also post the satellite coordinates (on C and KU bands) and serve as a link to the cybercast. The cybercast is also available via the web page of Sun Microsystems (http://www.sun.com).

The first Millennium Evening was held on February 11, 1998, with Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn. Professor Bailyn lectured on the core American ideas which must be preserved as we move into the next millennium.

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