Stephen Hawking Quotes
222 Stephen Hawking Quotes
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I was never very good with my hands.
Stephen Hawking
[I wanted to understand] where we came from and why we were here. I wanted to fathom the far depths of the universe.
Stephen Hawking
I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.
Stephen Hawking
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.
Stephen Hawking
I went to the seminar where pulsars were announced. The room was decorated with little green men made from paper. The first four pulsars were called ‘LGM one-through-four’. ‘LGM’ stood for ‘little green men’.
Stephen Hawking
So black holes are really not black at all. They have a temperature, an entropy and produce radiation just like any other thermodynamic body. Eventually they explode.
Stephen Hawking
During my stay in California, I received word from the Vatican in Rome that I had been chosen by the Pontifical Academy of Science to receive the Pope Pius XI Medal.
Stephen Hawking
I agree I have been very fortunate in everything except getting motor neurone disease. And even the disease has not been such a blow. With a lot of help, I have managed to get round the effects. I have the satisfaction in having succeeded in spite of it.
Stephen Hawking
I’m really much happier than I was before it began. I can’t say it has been a benefit, but I have been lucky that it has not been the disadvantage it could have been.
Stephen Hawking
Cosmology was thought of as a pseudo-science where wild speculation was unconstrained by any possible observations.
Stephen Hawking
You shouldn’t believe everything you read.
Stephen Hawking
One cannot say until it happens. One of the beauties of something undiscovered is that it is undiscovered.
Stephen Hawking
Calling these things black holes was a masterstroke by John Wheeler. The name conjures up a lot of human neuroses. There is undoubtedly a psychological connection between the naming of black holes and their popularisation.
Stephen Hawking
It is important to have a good name for a concept. It means that people’s attention will be focused on it. I suppose that the name ‘black hole’ does have a rather dramatic overtone, but it also is very descriptive. It has a strong psychological impact. It could be a good image for human fears of the universe.
Stephen Hawking
I get embarrassed when people say I have great courage.
Stephen Hawking
I did learn to read, but not until the fairly late age of eight. My sister Phillippa was taught to read by more conventional methods and could read by the age of four. But then, she was definitely brighter than me.
Stephen Hawking
If you understand how the universe operates, you control it in a way.
Stephen Hawking
I had a passionate interest in model trains. My father tried making me a wooden train, but that didn’t satisfy me, as I wanted something that worked. So my father got a secondhand clockwork train, repaired it with a soldering iron, and gave it to me for Christmas when I was nearly three.
Stephen Hawking
[My father] He bought me an American train, complete with cowcatcher and a figure-eight track. I can still remember my excitement as I opened the box.
Stephen Hawking
[On buying an electric train set that failed] I should have taken the set back and demanded that the shop or manufacturer replace it, but in those days the attitude was that it was a privilege to buy something, and it was just your bad luck if it turned out to be faulty.
Stephen Hawking
My voice used to be so slurred that I had to give lectures and seminars through another person, usually one of my research students who could understand me or who read a text I had written.
Stephen Hawking
In 1985 I had an operation that removed my powers of speech altogether. For a time I was without any means of communication. Eventually I was equipped with a computer system and a remarkably good speech synthesizer. To my surprise, I found I could be a successful public speaker, addressing large audiences.
Stephen Hawking
I enjoy explaining science and answering questions. I’m sure I have a lot to learn about how to do it better, but I hope I’m improving.
Stephen Hawking
I do not agree with the view that the universe is a mystery, something that one can have intuition about but never fully analyze or comprehend. I feel that this view does not do justice to the scientific revolution that was started almost four hundred years ago by Galileo and carried on by Newton.
Stephen Hawking
It is a measure of our success that we now have to spend billions of dollars to build giant machines to accelerate particles to such high energy that we don’t yet know what will happen when they collide.
Stephen Hawking
There is still a great deal that we don’t know or understand about the universe. But the remarkable progress that we have made, particularly in the last hundred years, should encourage us to believe that a complete understanding may not be beyond our powers.
Stephen Hawking
We may not be forever doomed to grope in the dark. We may break through to a complete theory of the universe. In that case, we would indeed be Masters of the Universe.
Stephen Hawking
It is surely better to strive for a complete understanding than to despair of the human mind.
Stephen Hawking
However, if we discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that the universe and we exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.
Stephen Hawking
[On his research on black holes, it was a bit] like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar.
Stephen Hawking
Within a few years we should know whether we can believe that we live in a universe that is completely self-contained and without beginning or end.
Stephen Hawking
A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around he center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on.’ ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’
Stephen Hawking
Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better?
Stephen Hawking
What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Can we go back in time?
Stephen Hawking
As philosopher of science Karl Popper has emphasized, a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation.
Stephen Hawking
The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.
Stephen Hawking
Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory. At least that is what is supposed to happen, but you can always question the competence of the person who carried out the observation.
Stephen Hawking
The idea is that in any population of self-reproducing organisms, there will be variations in the genetic material and upbringing that different individuals have. These differences will mean that some individuals are better able
than others to draw the right conclusions about the world around them and to act accordingly. These individuals will be more likely to survive and reproduce and so their pattern of behavior and thought will come to dominate.
Stephen Hawking
Our modern picture of the universe dates back to only 1924, when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble demonstrated that ours was not the only galaxy.
Stephen Hawking
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