Stephen Hawking

Quotes

• “We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one crea...”
• “The universe would have expanded in a smooth way from a single point. As it expanded, it would have borrowed energy from...”
• “When I gave a lecture in Japan, I was asked not to mention the possible re-collapse of the universe, because it might af...”
• “If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life...”
• “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fir...”
• “Heard in person by this contributor when Hawking showed-up in a Caltech physics class taught by Robert Christy in 1980 o...”
• “I regard it as almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth...”
• “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to ...”
• “The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge ...”
• “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer subu...”
• “[on the possibility of contact with an alien civilization]: I think it would be a disaster. The extraterrestrials would ...”
• “If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately. No government agency ...”
• “Open question, posted to the Internet, as quoted in The Guardian, and "Watching the World" in Awake! magazine (June 2007...”
• “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is th...”
• “I don't believe that the ultimate theory will come by steady work along existing lines. We need something new. We can't ...”
• “Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any eq...”
• “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. We cannot quite know what will ha...”
• “What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. ...”
• “We shouldn't be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the unive...”
• “Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of ther...”
• “Thus it seems that even God is bound by the uncertainty principle, and can not know both the position, and the speed, of...”
• “Black holes ain't as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get ...”
• “If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God that you would meet and put quest...”
• “Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest ...”
• “Maybe that is our mistake: maybe there are no particle positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try ...”
• “Planck] said instead [of possibility that amount of radiation could have just any value] that radiation came only in pac...”
• “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Nat...”
• “Sometimes attributed to Hawking without a source, but originally from historian Daniel J. Boorstin. It appears in differ...”
• “If a superior alien civilisation sent us a text message saying, 'We'll arrive in a few decades', would we just reply, 'O...”
• “One could say: "The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary." The universe would be completely sel...”
• “Appearance in the National Geographic Channel program Naked Science: Alien Contact, as quoted in The New York Times (24 ...”
• “At a press conference for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as the Doomsday Clock is moved forward by two minutes t...”
• “During a debate with Roger Penrose in 1994 at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of ...”
• “Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely m...”
• “The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which co...”
• “Stephen Hawking at 70: Exclusive interview" in New Scientist, (4 January 2012). In his comment that he "used to think th...”
• “The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life...”
• “I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accid...”
• “During the same 1994 exchange with Penrose as the previous quote, transcribed in The Nature of Space and Time (1996) by ...”
• “On seeing the Enterprise's warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he would briefly ...”
• “Title of a collection, by Hawking, of the most significant papers in Quantum mechanics: The Dreams That Stuff Is Made of...”
• “So Einstein was wrong when he said, "God does not play dice." Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God d...”
• “I imagine what happens to human consciousness when we die is much like turning off a computer. I don't believe in a heav...”
• “Unsourced variants: Not only does God play dice with the Universe; he sometimes casts them where they can't be seen. Not...”
• “The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that...”
• “Science AMA Series: Stephen Hawking AMA Answers!", reddit.com (8 October 2015); also quoted in "Stephen Hawking Says We ...”
• “I think computer viruses should count as life … I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life ...”
• “Speech at Macworld Expo in Boston, as quoted in The Daily News (4 August 1994). A nearly identical quote can be found at...”
• “I used to think that information was destroyed in black holes. But the AdS/CFT correspondence led me to change my mind. ...”
• “The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me...”