Stephen Hawking Quotes

A person who smiles in the face of adversity ... probably has a scapegoat.

When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have.

It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven't done badly. People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining. - Stephen Hawking

[In the Universe it may be that] Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.

As often happens in science, discoveries are made in the pursuit of an elusive (and sometimes nonexistent) goal.

Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Thus our presence selects out from this vast array only these universes that are compatible without existence. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense, the lords of creation.

Every man should marry. After all, happiness is not the only thing in life.

Of course it is possible that UFO's really do contain aliens as many people believe, and the government is hushing it up

I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.

I like physics, but I love cartoons.

I'm never any good in the morning. It is only after four in the afternoon that I get going.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I'm no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity. We have already discovered the basic laws that govern matter and understand all the normal situations. We don't know how the laws fit together, and what happens under extreme conditions. But I expect we will find a complete unified theory sometime this century. The is no limit to the complexity that we can build using those basic laws.

My work and my family are very important to me.

We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.

Obviously, because of my disability, I need assistance. But I have always tried to overcome the limitations of my condition and lead as full a life as possible. I have traveled the world, from the Antarctic to zero gravity.

Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end.

Real science can be far stranger than science fiction and much more satisfying.

Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch - which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity.

One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn't exist ... Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist

Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.

I am discounting reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?

The meaning in life is not out there but inbetween our ears. In many ways this makes us the lords of creation.

The most remarkable property of the universe is that it has spawned creatures able to ask questions.

The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them

As a father, I would try to instill the importance of asking questions, always.

Jesus loves you, but everyone else thinks you're an ass.

If you understand how the universe operates, you control it, in a way.

In the Game of Life, as in our world, self-reproducing patterns are complex objects. One estimate, based on the earlier work of mathematician John von Neumann, places the minimum size of a self-replicating pattern in the Game of Life at ten trillion squares - roughly the number of molecules in a single human cell.

I want my books sold on airport bookstalls.

The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.

The idea of 10 dimensions might sound exciting, but they would cause real problems if you forget where you parked your car.

Is god omnipotent ? If he is, can he create a rock so heavy he can't lift it ?

I have visited Japan several times and have always been shown wonderful hospitality.

Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

Descartes, for instance, in order to preserve the idea of free will, asserted that the human mind was something different from the physical world and did not follow its laws. In his view a person consists of two ingredients, a body and a soul. Bodies are nothing but ordinary machines, but the soul is not subject to scientific law.

All the known particles in the universe can be divided into two groups: particles of spin ½, which make up the matter in the universe, and particles of spin 0, 1, and 2, which, as we shall see, give rise to forces between the matter particles.

There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. ( ... ) However bad life may seem ( ... ) While there's life, there is hope.

Yet if there really were a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions - so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion? Or no conclusion at all?

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

We waste time, so you don't have to.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

When there's life, there's hope

Do you believe in first love - or should I pass by again?

Why do we see only three space dimensions and one time dimension? The suggestion is that the other dimensions are curved up into a space of very small size, something like a million million million million millionth of an inch. This is so small that we just don't notice it: we see only one time dimension and three space dimensions, in which space-time is fairly flat.

Most people don't have time to master the very mathematical details of theoretical physics.

I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.

I am very aware of the preciousness of time. Seize the moment. Act now.

The message of this lecture is that black holes ain't as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once though…things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up – there's a way out.

Although quantum mechanics has been around for nearly 70 years, it is still not generally understood or appreciated, even by those that use it to do calculations.

We believe human begins have existed for only a small fraction of cosmic history, because human race has been improving so rapidly in knowledge and technology that if people had been around for millions of years, the human race would be much further along in it's mastery.

Personally, I get uneasy when people, especially theoretical physicists, talk about consciousness.
Consciousness is not a quality that one can measure from the outside. If a little green man were to appear on our doorstep tomorrow, we do not have a way of telling if he was conscious and self-aware or was just a robot.

It is tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform experiments whose results we can not predict.

Calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5 percent in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4 percent in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Change those rules of our universe just a bit, and the conditions for our existence disappear!

even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would break down at the big bang.

If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He's everything that I'm not.

This "Hawking temperature" of a black hole and its "Hawking radiation" (as they came to be called) were truly radical - perhaps the most radical theoretical physics discovery in the second half of the twentieth century. They opened our eyes to profound connections between general relativity (black holes), thermodynamics (the physics of heat) and quantum physics (the creation of particles where before there were none). For example, they led Stephen to prove that a black hole has entropy, which means that somewhere inside or around the black hole there is enormous randomness. He deduced that the amount of entropy (the logarithm of the hole's amount of randomness) is proportional to the hole's surface area. His formula for the entropy is engraved on Stephen's memorial stone at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, where he worked.
For the past forty-five years, Stephen and hundreds of other physicists have struggled to understand the precise nature of a black hole's randomness. It is a question that keeps on generating new insights about the marriage of quantum theory with general relativity - that is, about the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity.

There are only two types of waves that can travel across the universe bringing us information about things far away: electromagnetic waves (which include light, X-rays, gamma rays, microwaves, radio waves…); and gravitational waves.
Electromagnetic waves consist of oscillating electric and magnetic forces that travel at light speed. When they impinge on charged particles, such as the electrons in a radio or TV antenna, they shake the particles back and forth, depositing in the particles the information the waves carry. That information can then be amplified and fed into a loudspeaker or on to a TV screen for humans to comprehend.
Gravitational waves, according to Einstein, consist of an oscillatory space warp: an oscillating stretch and squeeze of space. In 1972 Rainer (Rai) Weiss at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had invented a gravitational-wave detector, in which mirrors hanging inside the corner and ends of an L-shaped vacuum pipe are pushed apart along one leg of the L by the stretch of space, and pushed together along the other leg by the squeeze of space. Rai proposed using laser beams to measure the oscillating pattern of this stretch and squeeze. The laser light could extract a gravitational wave's information, and the signal could then be amplified and fed into a computer for human comprehension.
The study of the universe with electromagnetic telescopes (electromagnetic astronomy) was initiated by Galileo, when he built a small optical tele

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space.

My three children have brought me great joy.

Gravity is so strong that space is bent round onto itself, making it rather like the surface of the earth. If one keeps traveling in a certain direction on the surface of the earth, one never comes up against an impassable barrier or falls over the edge, but eventually comes back to where one started.

Women. They are a complete mystery.

It [AI] would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded.

Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.

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?

If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences.

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. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn't prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.

Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival, as has been maintaining a sense of humor.

I am damned if I'm going to die before I have unraveled more of the universe

What is important is that we have the ability to create.

Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life.

There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.

String theory is rather like plumbing, in a way.

It is generally recognized that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multitasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics. It is not politically correct to say such things ... But it cannot be denied that there are differences between men and women. Of course, these are differences between the averages only. There are wide variations about the mean.

an­ti­quarks? Why are there not equal num­bers of each? It is cer­tain­ly for­tu­nate for us that the num­bers are un­equal be ear­ly uni­verse and left a uni­verse filled with ra­di­ation but hard­ly any mat­ter. There would then have been no galax­ies, stars, or plan­ets on which hu­man life could have de­vel­oped.

[Question: Do you feel that scientists correct themselves as often as they should?]
More often than politicians, but not as often as they should.

Save water. Shower with your girlfriend.

And one final point - we never really know where the next great scientific discovery will come from, nor who will make it. Opening up the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery, creating innovative and accessible ways to reach out to the widest young audience possible, greatly increases the chances of finding and inspiring the new Einstein. Wherever she might be.

Bodies such as stars or black holes cannot just appear out of nothing. But a whole universe can.

Half the battle is just showing up.

So if a beautiful alien in a flying saucer invites you into her time machine, step with care. You might fall into one of these trapped repeating histories of only finite duration.

I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls ... 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?

I have so much that I want to do. I hate wasting time.

If you feel you are trapped in a black hole, don't give up. There is a way out.

Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.

It's the gravity that shapes the large scale structure of the universe, even though it is the weakest of four categories of forces.

Money is not everything. There's Master card & Visa.

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. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: 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.

Some forms of motor neuron disease are genetically linked, but I have no indication that my kind is. No other member of my family has had it. But I would be in favour of abortion if there was a high risk.

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.

Up to about thirty years ago, it was thought that protons and neutrons were "elementary" particles, but experiments in which protons were collided with other protons or electrons at high speeds indicated that they were in fact made up of smaller particles.

I'm a child myself, in the sense that I'm still looking. Children are fascinated by black holes and ask me questions. I find they soon get the idea if it is explained in nontechnical language.

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.

In space no one can hear you scream; and in a black hole, no one can see you disappear.

Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced [robots] wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

As a result, in more than three dimensions the sun would not be able to exist in a stable state with its internal pressure balancing the pull of gravity. It would either fall apart or collapse to form a black hole, either of which could ruin your day.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

I have found far greater enthusiasm for science in America than here in Britain. There is more enthusiasm for everything in America.