It was the moment in space-time Hong Kong had been waiting for, when king of physics Stephen Hawking would take the people on a cosmological roller-coaster ride from the big bang through the present to the future of the universe.
There was an air of expectation as academics, politicians, assorted professionals, students, members of the public and representatives of the disabled - given pride of place at the front of the hall - waited for the great man to arrive on stage at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's sports hall.
The 1,800-strong audience waited for Professor Hawking's traditional opening, 'Hello, can you hear me?' Not that they had not heard him already. Interviews and clips of his star appearances in The Simpsons, Star Trek and other television shows had been shown in a half-hour warm-up.
HKUST president Paul Chu Ching-wu introduced the star speaker as a 'miracle of the human mind and triumph of the human spirit'. And then there he was, wheeled on to rapturous applause to deliver the inaugural lecture for HKUST's Institute of Advanced Study on the theme 'The Origin of the Universe'.
The 64-year-old Briton, who speaks with a voice synthesiser and has been paralysed since developing motor neurone disease when studying at Cambridge University, began by saying he had dedicated his life to answering the big questions: 'Where do we come from, why are we here.'
He contrasted various hotchpotch ideas on man's beginnings with scientific reasoning, saying 17th century bishop James Usher had calculated the date of 'creation' as October 27, 4004BC. Greek philosophers, by contrast, thought the universe had existed forever. Scientists believed in absolute time until Einstein came up with a new geometric model of space-time in the general theory of relativity in 1915.
Professor Hawking said advanced astronomy had revealed the universe was expanding, a discovery he described as 'one of the most important of the 20th or any other century'.