Stephen Hawking Quotes
222 Stephen Hawking Quotes
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The discovery that the universe is expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century. With hindsight, it is easy wonder why no one had thought of it before.
Stephen Hawking
Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.
Stephen Hawking
We have seen … how, in less than half a century, man’s view of the universe formed over millennia has been transformed. Hubble’s discovery that the universe was expanding, and the realization of the insignificance of our own planet in the vastness of the universe, were just the starting point.
Stephen Hawking
There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you meet your antiself, don’t shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash
of light.
Stephen Hawking
Even for objects the size of stars, the attractive force of gravity can win over all the other forces and cause the star to collapse.
Stephen Hawking
The term black hole is of very recent origin. It was coined in 1969 by the American scientist John Wheeler as a graphic description of an idea that goes back at least two hundred years, to a time when there were two theories about light: one, which Newton favored, was that it was composed of particles; the other was that it was made of waves.
Stephen Hawking
Black holes are not really black after all: they glow like a hot body, and the smaller
they are, the more they glow. So, paradoxically, smaller black holes might actually turn out to be easier to detect than
large ones!
Stephen Hawking
The event horizon, is formed by the light rays that just fail to escape from the black hole, hovering forever just on the edge. It is a bit like running away from the police and just managing to keep one step ahead but not being able to get clear away!
Stephen Hawking
I was so excited with my discovery that I did not get much sleep that night.
Stephen Hawking
How is it possible that a black hole appears to emit particles when we know that nothing can escape from within its event horizon?
Stephen Hawking
The talk I had just given at the conference – the possibility that space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation.
Stephen Hawking
I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!
Stephen Hawking
We see the universe the way it is because we exist.
Stephen Hawking
The idea of inflation could also explain why there is so much matter in the universe.
Stephen Hawking
As Guth has remarked, “It is said that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch.”
Stephen Hawking
The day after I got back from Moscow I set out for Philadelphia, where I was due to receive a medal from the Franklin Institute. My secretary, Judy Fella, had used her not inconsiderable charm to persuade British Airways to give herself and me free seats on a Concorde as a publicity venture.
Stephen Hawking
In order to predict how the universe should have started off, one needs laws that hold at the beginning of time.
Stephen Hawking
The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off.
Stephen Hawking
So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
Stephen Hawking
You would see broken cups gathering themselves together and jumping back onto the table. However, any human beings who were observing the cups would be living in a universe in which disorder decreased with time. I shall argue that such beings would have a psychological arrow of time that was backward. That is, they would remember events in the future, and not remember events in their past. When the cup was broken, they would remember it being on the table, but when it was on the table, they would not remember it being on the floor.
Stephen Hawking
I think it is reasonable to assume that the arrow for computers is the same as that for humans. If it were not, one could make a killing on the stock exchange by having a computer that would remember tomorrow’s prices!
Stephen Hawking
The direction of time in which a computer remembers the past is the same as that in which disorder increases.
Stephen Hawking
It might seem a bit academic to worry about what will happen when the universe collapses again, as it will not start to contract for at least another ten thousand million years. But there is a quicker way to find out what will happen: jump into a black hole. The collapse of a star to form a black hole is rather like the later stages of the collapse of the whole universe.
Stephen Hawking
People in the contracting phase would live their lives backward: they would die before they were born and get younger as the universe contracted.
Stephen Hawking
The progress of the human race in understanding the universe has established a small corner of order in an increasingly disordered universe. If you remember every word in this book [A brief history of time], your memory will have recorded about two million pieces of information: the order in your brain will have increased by about two million units.
Stephen Hawking
Energy is a bit like money: if you have a positive balance, you can distribute it in various ways, but according to the classical laws that were believed at the beginning of the century, you weren’t allowed to be overdrawn.
Stephen Hawking
A possible way to explain the absence of visitors from the future would be to say that the past is fixed because we have observed it and seen that it does not have the kind of warping needed to allow travel back from the future. On the other hand, the future is unknown and open, so it might well have the curvature required. This would mean that any time travel would be confined to the future. There would be no chance of Captain Kirk and the Starship Enterprise turning up at the present time. This might explain why we have not yet been overrun by tourists from the future, but it would not avoid the problems that would arise if one were able to go back and change history.
Stephen Hawking
The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can’t predict what they will do.
Stephen Hawking
If the human then goes off in a rocket ship and comes back before he or she set off, we will be able to predict what he or she will do because it will be part of recorded history. Thus, in that situation, the time traveler would have no free will.
Stephen Hawking
I’m not going to bet on it. My opponent might have the unfair advantage of knowing the future.
Stephen Hawking
Two space dimensions do not seem to be enough to allow for the development of complicated beings like us. For example, two-dimensional animals living on a one-dimensional earth would have to climb over each other in order to get past each other.
Stephen Hawking
Can God make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it?
Stephen Hawking
Time is a property only of the universe that God created. Presumably, he knew what he intended when he set it up!
Stephen Hawking
Our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence.
Stephen Hawking
What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?
Stephen Hawking
Einstein once asked the question: “How much choice did God have in constructing the universe?” If the no boundary proposal is correct, he had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions. He would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the laws that the universe obeyed. This, however, may not really have been all that much of a choice; there may well be only one, or a small number, of complete unified theories, such as the heterotic string theory, that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the universe and ask about the nature of God.
Stephen Hawking
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 we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.
Stephen Hawking
There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.
Stephen Hawking
To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
Stephen Hawking
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That make us something very special.
Stephen Hawking
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