Stephen Hawking Quotes
222 Stephen Hawking Quotes
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We each exist for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the
whole universe. But humans are a curious species. We wonder, we seek answers.
Stephen Hawking
How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying about these questions, but almost all of us worry about them some of the time.
Stephen Hawking
Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
Stephen Hawking
Until the advent of modern physics it was generally thought that all knowledge of the world could be obtained through direct observation, that things are what they seem, as perceived through our senses.
Stephen Hawking
Just as there is no flat map that is a good representation of the earth’s entire surface, there is no single theory that is a good representation of observations in all situations.
Stephen Hawking
Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states at later times, that is, at times like the present, long after their creation. Most of these states will be quite unlike the universe we observe and quite unsuitable for the existence of any form of life. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist.
Stephen Hawking
Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.
Stephen Hawking
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?
Stephen Hawking
The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
Stephen Hawking
Viewed on the timeline of human history, scientific inquiry is a very new endeavor.
Stephen Hawking
Anaximander (ca. 610 BC–ca. 546 BC), a friend and possibly a student of Thales, argued that since human infants are helpless at birth, if the first human had somehow appeared on earth as an infant, it would not have survived. In what may have been humanity’s first inkling of evolution, people, Anaximander reasoned, must therefore have evolved from other animals whose young are hardier.
Stephen Hawking
In 1277 Bishop Tempier of Paris, acting on the instructions of Pope John XXI, published a list of 219 errors or heresies that were to be condemned. Among the
heresies was the idea that nature follows laws, because this conflicts with God’s omnipotence. Interestingly, Pope John was killed by the effects of the law of gravity a few months later when the roof of his palace fell in on him.
Stephen Hawking
Today most scientists would say a law of nature is a rule that is based upon an observed regularity and provides predictions that go beyond the immediate situations upon which it is based.
Stephen Hawking
Our observations of the world tell us that there are no gold spheres larger than a mile wide, and we can be pretty confident there never will be. Still, we have no reason to believe that there couldn’t be one, and so the statement is not considered a law.
Stephen Hawking
Do people have free will? If we have free will, where in the evolutionary tree did it develop? Do blue-green algae or bacteria have free will, or is their behavior automatic and within the realm of scientific law? Is it only multicelled organisms that have free will, or only mammals?
Stephen Hawking
We might think that a chimpanzee is exercising free will when it chooses to chomp on a banana, or a cat when it rips up your sofa, but what about the roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans—a simple creature made of only 959 cells? It probably never thinks, ‘That was damn tasty bacteria I got to dine on back there,’ yet it too has a definite preference in food and will either settle for an unattractive meal or go foraging for something better, depending on recent experience. Is that the exercise of free will?
Stephen Hawking
A study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk. It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.
Stephen Hawking
Economics is also an effective theory, based on the notion of free will plus the assumption that people evaluate their possible alternative courses of action and choose the best. That effective theory is only moderately successful in predicting behavior because, as we all know, decisions are often not rational or are based on a defective analysis of the consequences of the choice. That is why the world is in such a mess.
Stephen Hawking
A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved goldfish bowls. The measure’s sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? Might not we ourselves also be inside some big goldfish bowl and have our vision distorted by an enormous lens? The goldfish’s picture of reality is different from ours, but can we be sure it is less real?
Stephen Hawking
If a theory called the holographic principle proves correct, we and our four-dimensional world may be shadows on the boundary of a larger, five-dimensional space-time. In that case, our status in the universe is analogous to that of the goldfish.
Stephen Hawking
The brain is so good at model building that if people are fitted with glasses that turn the images in their eyes upside down, their brains, after a time, change the model so that they again see things the right way up. If the glasses are then removed, they see the world upside down for a while, then again adapt.
Stephen Hawking
They aren’t just different in details, such as whether Elvis really did die young or whether turnips are a dessert food, but rather they differ even in their apparent laws of nature. In fact, many universes exist with many different sets of physical laws.
Stephen Hawking
It would be like asking for the probability amplitude that the present pope is Chinese. We know that he is German, even though the probability that he is Chinese is higher because there are more Chinese than there are Germans.
Stephen Hawking
Hundreds of years ago people thought the earth was unique, and situated at the center of the universe. Today we know there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, a large percentage of them with planetary systems, and hundreds of billions of galaxies.
Stephen Hawking
There seems to be a vast landscape of possible universes. We live in one in which life is possible, but if the universe were only slightly different, beings like us could not exist.
Stephen Hawking
The Chinese were right to think that a solar system with ten suns is not friendly to human life. Today we know that, while perhaps offering great tanning opportunities, any solar system with multiple suns would probably never allow life to develop.
Stephen Hawking
Kepler was upset by the idea that planets don’t move in perfect circles, but the earth’s orbit has an eccentricity of only about 2 percent, which means it is nearly circular. As it turns out, that is a stroke of very good fortune.
Stephen Hawking
Large orbital eccentricities are not conducive to life, so we are fortunate to have a planet for which orbital eccentricity is near zero.
Stephen Hawking
For beings such as humans to exist, the carbon must be moved from inside the star to friendlier neighborhoods. That, as we’ve said, is accomplished when the star, at the end of its life cycle, explodes as a supernova, expelling carbon and other heavy elements that later condense into a planet.
Stephen Hawking
In the United States, because the Constitution prohibits the teaching of religion in schools, that type of idea is called intelligent design, with the unstated but implied understanding that the designer is God.
Stephen Hawking
Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other?
Stephen Hawking
The word “game” in the Game of Life is a misleading term. There are no winners and losers; in fact, there are no players. The Game of Life is not really a game but a set of laws that govern a two dimensional universe. It is a deterministic universe: Once you set up a starting configuration, or initial condition, the laws determine what happens in the future.
Stephen Hawking
As in our universe, in the Game of Life your reality depends on the model you employ.
Stephen Hawking
How can one tell if a being has free will? If one encounters an alien, how can one tell if it is just a robot or it has a mind of its own?
Stephen Hawking
If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing?
Stephen Hawking
Bodies such as stars or black holes cannot just appear out of nothing. But a whole universe can.
Stephen Hawking
It is not good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.
Stephen Hawking
Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.
Stephen Hawking
One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.
Stephen Hawking
Why should we go into space? What is the justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of Moon rock? Aren’t there better causes here on Earth?
Stephen Hawking
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