Stephen Hawking Quotes

It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time. ~ Stephen Hawking

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

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. ~ Stephen Hawking

During our glorious year of 1974–5, while I was dithering over gravitational waves, and Stephen was leading our merged group in black hole research, Stephen himself had an insight even more radical than his discovery of Hawking radiation. He gave a compelling, almost airtight proof that, when a black hole forms and then subsequently evaporates away completely by emitting radiation, the information that went into the black hole cannot come back out. Information is inevitably lost.
This is radical because the laws of quantum physics insist unequivocally that information can never get totally lost. So, if Stephen was right, black holes violate a most fundamental quantum mechanical law.
How could this be? The black hole's evaporation is governed by the combined laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity - the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity; and so, Stephen reasoned, the fiery marriage of relativity and quantum physics must lead to information destruction.
The great majority of theoretical physicists find this conclusion abhorrent. They are highly sceptical. And so, for forty-four years they have struggled with this so-called information-loss paradox. It is a struggle well worth the effort and anguish that have gone into it, since this paradox is a powerful key for understanding the quantum gravity laws. Stephen himself, in 2003, found a way that information might escape during the hole's evaporation, but that did not quell theorists' struggles. Stephe ~ Stephen Hawking

I believe in universal health care. And I am not afraid to say so. ~ Stephen Hawking

I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. ~ Stephen Hawking

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

The Greeks' Christian successors rejected the idea that the universe is governed by indifferent natural law. They also rejected the idea that humans do not hold a privileged place within that universe. And though the medieval period had no single coherent philosophical system, a common theme was that the universe is God's dollhouse, and religion a far worthier study than the phenomena of nature. Indeed, 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

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

One has to be grown up enough to realize that life is not fair. You just have to do the best you can in the situation you are in. ~ Stephen Hawking

Stem cell research is the key to developing cures for degenerative conditions like Parkinson's and motor neuron disease from which I and many others suffer. The fact that the cells may come from embryos is not an objection, because the embryos are going to die anyway. ~ Stephen Hawking

Sometimes I wonder if I'm as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries. ~ Stephen Hawking

Women. They are a complete mystery. ~ Stephen Hawking

I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex. ~ Stephen Hawking

One could imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. ~ Stephen Hawking

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

In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years? ~ Stephen Hawking

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. ~ Stephen Hawking

The origin of the name is an enigmatic quotation from James Joyce: "Three quarks for Muster Mark! ~ Stephen Hawking

An elipse is an elongated circle ~ Stephen Hawking

It's clearly possible for a something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors: we evolved to be smarter than our ape-like ancestors, and Einstein was smarter than his parents. ~ 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? ~ Stephen Hawking

In physics a system is said to have a symmetry if its properties are unaffected by a certain transformation such as rotating it in space or taking its mirror image. For example, if you flip a donut over, it looks exactly the same (unless it has a chocolate topping, in which case it is better just to eat it). ~ Stephen Hawking

Being confined to a wheelchair doesn't bother me as my mind is free to roam the universe, but it felt wonderful to be weightless. ~ Stephen Hawking

Thus, in a sense, we are all doomed. even if we stay away from black holes ~ Stephen Hawking

Now, if you believe that the universe is not arbitrary, but is governed by definite laws, you ultimately have to combine the partial theories into a complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe. ~ Stephen Hawking

Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently, ~ Steve Wozniak

The doctor who diagnosed me with ALS, or motor neuron disease, told me that it would kill me in two or three years. ~ Stephen Hawking

The world has been changing even faster as people, devices and information are increasingly connected to each other. Computational power is growing and quantum computing is quickly being realised. This will revolutionise artificial intelligence with exponentially faster speeds. It will advance encryption. Quantum computers will change everything, even human biology. There is already one technique to edit DNA precisely, called CRISPR. The basis of this genome-editing technology is a bacterial defence system. It can accurately target and edit stretches of genetic code. The best intention of genetic manipulation is that modifying genes would allow scientists to treat genetic causes of disease by correcting gene mutations. There are, however, less noble possibilities for manipulating DNA. How far we can go with genetic engineering will become an increasingly urgent question. We can't see the possibilities of curing motor neurone diseases - like my ALS - without also glimpsing its dangers.
Intelligence is characterised as the ability to adapt to change. Human intelligence is the result of generations of natural selection of those with the ability to adapt to changed circumstances. We must not fear change. We need to make it work to our advantage.
We all have a role to play in making sure that we, and the next generation, have not just the opportunity but the determination to engage fully with the study of science at an early level, so that we can go on to fulfil our pote ~ Stephen Hawking

Anaximander, 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

I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. ~ Stephen Hawking

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. ~ Stephen Hawking

I don't have much positive to say about motor neurone disease. But it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I could still do. ~ Stephen Hawking

Galileo , perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science. ~ Stephen Hawking

One of the great revelations of the space age has been the perspective it has given humanity on ourselves. When we see the Earth from space, we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity, and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message; one planet, one human race. ~ Stephen Hawking

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life. ~ Stephen Hawking

Sex is the strongest force in the universe. Forget about the Grand Unifying Theory, Stephen Hawking, I'll tell you what it is: women. Aren't women the strongest sex? What force is more magnetic than that? It's not just pussy. We're attracted to women for their energy. We're attracted to their fluidness, their ability to nurture a baby without even knowing how, to be able to put up with screaming and crying and colic and shitty diapers where men would go, "I'm fucking outta here! I'm gonna go kill me a saber-toothed woolly mammoth an'bring it on home to eat tonight. Wa-haaaaaa!" We don't have tits; we couldn't nourish a gnat. ~ Steven Tyler

We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years, but if we want to continue, our future is in space. ~ Stephen Hawking

I thought Eddie Redmayne portrayed me very well ... At times I thought he was me. ~ Stephen Hawking

In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. ~ Stephen Hawking

Does general relativity predict that our universe should have had a big bang, a beginning of time? ~ Stephen Hawking

All of my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them. If, like me, you have looked at the stars, and tried to make sense of what you see, you too have started to wonder what makes the universe exist. ~ Stephen Hawking

The cyclic universe theory predicts no gravitational waves from the early universe. ~ Stephen Hawking

The idea that we are alone in the universe seems to me completely implausible and arrogant, considering the number of planets and stars that we know exist, it's extremely unlikely that we are the only form of evolved life. ~ Stephen Hawking

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. ~ 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

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. ~ Stephen Hawking

There's no way to remove the observer - us - from our perceptions of the world. ~ Stephen Hawking

I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street ~ Stephen Hawking

God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God. ~ Stephen Hawking

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

Once again, my colleague Stephen Hawking has upset the apple cart. The event horizon surrounding a black hole was once though to be an imaginary sphere. But recent theories indicate that it may actually be physical, maybe even a sphere of fire. But I don't trust any of these calculations until we have a full-blown string theory calculation, since Einstein's theory by itself is incomplete. ~ Michio Kaku

What I have learned from life is to make the most of what you have got. ~ Stephen Hawking

The universe is not indifferent to our existence - it depends on it. ~ Stephen Hawking

I would love to photograph Stephen Hawking. I am just fascinated by science, I really am. ~ Helena Christensen

I like physics, but I love cartoons. ~ Stephen Hawking

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! ~ Stephen Hawking

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. ~ Stephen Hawking

What I'd really like to control is not machines, but people. ~ Stephen Hawking

Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us. ~ Stephen Hawking

(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.) There ~ Stephen Hawking

It is very important for young people keep their sense of wonder and keep asking why. ~ Stephen Hawking

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of. ~ Stephen Hawking

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. ~ Stephen Hawking

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. ~ Stephen Hawking

I think it's very easy for people who are not deep in the technology itself to make generalizations, which may be a little dangerous. And we've certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it's going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field. ~ Rodney Brooks

To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. ~ Stephen Hawking

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. ~ Stephen Hawking

What place, then, for a creator? ~ Stephen Hawking

If any one of about 40 physical qualities had more than slightly different values, life as we know it could not exist ... ~ Stephen Hawking

The "Powers That Be" are not smart enough to engineer Armageddon, but they may yet be stupid enough. If governments are involved in covering up the knowledge of aliens, then they are doing a much better job of it than they seem to do at anything else. ~ Stephen Hawking

In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder. ~ Stephen Hawking

I want to encourage public interest in space. I have never let my condition stop me. You only live once. ~ Stephen Hawking

FIGURE 3.1 Stars ~ Stephen Hawking

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition. ~ Stephen Hawking

Computer viruses are alive. ~ Stephen Hawking

Success is a relative term. It brings so many relatives. ~ Stephen Hawking

When we understand string theory, we will know how the universe began. It won't have much effect on how we live, but it is important to understand where we come from and what we can expect to find as we explore. ~ Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking said that his quest is simply "trying to understand the mind of God". ~ Stephen Hawking

There is no such thing as a standard, run-of-the-mill, human being. ~ Stephen Hawking

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark. ~ Stephen Hawking

I grew up thinking that a research scientist was a natural thing to be. ~ Stephen Hawking

The concern here is that financial services become a kind of tech-led Wild West. ~ Stephen Hawking

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

The problem is, most people believe that real science is too difficult and complicated for them to understand. But I don't think this is the case. To do research on the fundamental laws that govern the universe would require a commitment of time that most people don't have; the world would soon grind to a halt if we all tried to do theoretical physics. But most people can understand and appreciate the basic ideas if they are presented in a clear way without equations, which I believe is possible and which is something I have enjoyed trying to do throughout my life. ~ Stephen Hawking

I enjoy all forms of music - pop, classical and opera. ~ Stephen Hawking

It matters if you don't just give up. ~ Stephen Hawking

To say anything negative about Stephen Hawking is like bullying a blind man. He has an unfair disadvantage, and that gives him a free pass on some of his absurd ideas. ~ Kirk Cameron

Science does not deny religion, it just offers a simpler alternative. ~ Stephen Hawking

If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed. ~ Stephen Hawking

God abhors a naked singularity. ~ Stephen Hawking

If you understand the universe, you control it, in a way. ~ Stephen Hawking

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. ~ Stephen Hawking

In 1992 came the first confirmed observation of a planet orbiting a star other than our sun. ~ Stephen Hawking

Playing Stephen [Hawking] was a constant reminder to put things in perspective: we only have one chance at this ~ Eddie Redmayne

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

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing. ~ Stephen Hawking

When I was young, Stephen Hawking wasn't the world's most famous physicist. The fame didn't arrive until the publication of "A Brief History of Time," by which time I was in my late teens. When I was a child, he was well known among physicists, but they are a fairly select, serious bunch, not much given to celebrity idolizing. ~ Stephen Hawking

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem. ~ Stephen Hawking