Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking Meets Stephen Hawking

It's almost something out of Back to the Future, but the similarities between the world's greatest physicist and his big-screen alter ego as his younger self is pretty uncanny

Did Eddie Redmayne just cause a rupture in the space-time continuum?

The Les Misérables heartthrob, who's playing a young Stephen Hawking in the upcoming movie Theory of Everything, posed for pictures with the celebrated physicist when the latter visited the film's set in Cambridge, just outside of London on Friday.

And by the looks of things, we'd say Redmayne, sporting Hawking's signature frames and clad in a tuxedo, captures the physical likeness and spirit of the brilliant scientist in his younger years before he shot to fame thanks to his work on black holes and singularities and captured the popular imagination with his best-seller A Brief History of Time.

Thankfully, Hawking's brief encounter with his big screen doppelgänger didn't lead to any Big Bang-like explosion.

In the biopic, the 31-year-old actor plays the wheelchair-bound cosmologist and in his early years in the mid-'60s as a graduate student when he was married to Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones) before his diagnosis with motor neuron disease robbed him of his movement and speech.

Redmayne of course, played Marius in the Oscar-winning film version of Les Miz. Before that, he made a name for himself in the theater, making his stage debut at Shakespeare's Globe theatre production of Twelfth Night and winning a 2010 Tony for Best Supporting Actor for his role in John Logan's critically acclaimed play, Red.

Theory of Everything is due to hit theaters sometime in 2014.