Stephen Hawking quotes - page 3

One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer. (Stephen Hawking)
I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos? View quote
Stephen Hawking
Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science. View quote
Stephen Hawking
Science could predict that the universe must have had a beginning. View quote
Stephen Hawking
Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points. View quote
Stephen Hawking
There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe and what can be more special than that there is no boundary? View quote
Stephen Hawking
The life we have on Earth must have spontaneously generated itself. It must therefore be possible for life to generate spontaneously elsewhere in the universe. View quote
Stephen Hawking
In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years? View quote
Stephen Hawking
However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. Where there's life, there's hope. View quote
Stephen Hawking
People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining. View quote
Stephen Hawking
When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my pistol. (Stephen Hawking)
While there's life, there is hope. View quote
Stephen Hawking
Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
Stephen Hawking
I don't believe that the ultimate theory will come by steady work along existing lines. We need something new. We can't predict what that will be or when we will find it because if we knew that, we would have found it already! View quote
Stephen Hawking
The universe doesn't allow perfection. View quote
Stephen Hawking
Not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen. View quote
Stephen Hawking
The subject of this book is the structure of space-time on length-scales from 10-13cm, the radius of an elementary particle, up to 1028cm, the radius of the universe. ...we base our treatment on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. This theory leads to two remarkable predictions about the universe: first, that the final fate of massive stars is to collapse behind an event horizon to form a 'black hole' which will contain a singularity; and secondly, that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to the universe. View quote
Stephen Hawking
When I gave a lecture in Japan, I was asked not to mention the possible re-collapse of the universe, because it might affect the stock market. However, I can re-assure anyone who is nervous about their investments that it is a bit early to sell: even if the universe does come to an end, it won't be for at least twenty billion years. By that time, maybe the GATT trade agreement will have come into effect. View quote
Stephen Hawking
Maybe that is our mistake: maybe there are no particle positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try to fit the waves to our preconceived ideas of positions and velocities. The resulting mismatch is the cause of the apparent unpredictability. (Stephen Hawking)
These lectures have shown very clearly the difference between Roger and me. He's a Platonist and I'm a positivist. He's worried that Schrödinger's cat is in a quantum state, where it is half alive and half dead. He feels that can't correspond to reality. But that doesn't bother me. I don't demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don't know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I'm concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements. Quantum theory does this very successfully. It predicts that the result of an observation is either that the cat is alive or that it is dead. It is like you can't be slightly pregnant: you either are or you aren't. View quote
Stephen Hawking
On seeing the Enterprise's warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he would briefly play himself in the 1993 episode Descent, Part I), Hawking smiled and said: I'm working on that. View quote
Stephen Hawking
Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. View quote
Stephen Hawking
We each exist for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe. View quote
Stephen Hawking