Top 532 Quotes & Sayings by Stephen Hawking - Page 8

I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be space and that it represents an important life insurance for our future survival, as it could prevent the disappearance of humanity by colonizing other planets.

If it [the universe] was expanding fairly slowly, the force of gravity would cause it eventually to stop expanding and then to start contracting. However, if it was expanding at more than a certain critical rate, gravity would never be strong enough to stop it, and the universe would continue to expand forever.

Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.

There are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time.

One does not have to appeal to God to set the initial conditions for the creation of the universe, but if one does He would have to act through the laws of physics.

Disability can be no handicap.

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

Over a very small number of rolls of the dice, the uncertainty principle is very important.

We've created life in our own image.

If we ever do find a complete theory of the universe, it would be a great triumph of human reason but it wouldn't leave much for us to do. We need an intellectual challenge.

As those who have seen Jurassic Park will know, this means a tiny disturbance in one place, can cause a major change in another. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause rain in Central Park, New York. The trouble is, it is not repeatable. The next time the butterfly flaps its wings, a host of other things will be different, which will also influence the weather. That is why weather forecasts are so unreliable.

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?

We each exist for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational.

We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.

Unless mankind redesigns itself by changing our DNA through altering our genetic makeup, computer-genera ted robots will take over our world.

Science will win because it works.

Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can't have a safer bet than that!

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.

Maxwell is the physicist's physicist.

The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.

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.

Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life.

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

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?

I think my dad [ Stephen Hawking] would have been pleased if I had turned out a scientist because he truly believes that is the most interesting career open to anyone. But he also believes that you have to follow your own path in life and so he certainly wasn't going to push me toward theoretical physics when it didn't look like I was going in that direction naturally.

A lot of prizes have been awarded for showing the universe is not as simple as we might have thought.

There is a very real danger that we will kill everything on this planet now that we have the technological power to do so.

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I learned from this exercise was not to begin a sentence with "And." When I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with "And," I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves at that time was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible.

I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

The moment you understand the whole Universe, is the moment you slightly begin to understand the way God's mind works

We won't know for a few years.

When I get to heaven I'm gonna find the guy in charge of the weather and kick his rear.

I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.

People think I'm a Simpsons character.

I have to speak through a computer... in my mind, I am free. Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions...

If I knew what was going to happen in ten years I would do it now. I just follow my nose.

All that my work has shown is that you don't have to say that the way the universe began was the personal whim of God.

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.

When I was first diagnosed with ALS, I was given two years to live. Now 45 years later, I am doing pretty well.

Now, radical forward thinking is offering hope for the future: Replacement body parts to order. A team of scientists in California believe that if you can design them on a computer, you should be able to print them out.

Don't be disabled in spirit as well as physically.

Hang in there, retirement is only thirty years away!

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.

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.

The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence. It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighborhood not seeing any poverty.

Perhaps we could write code to optimize code, then run that code through the code optimizer?

I think computer viruses should count as life.

We shouldn't be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life. We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There's not much personal about the laws of physics.

Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?

Physics as we know it will be over in six months - Max Born

Computer viruses are alive.

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

Maybe my variety is due to bad absorption of vitamins.

The Universe in a Nutshell

This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks measure. Instead, everyone would have his own personal time. The clocks of two people would agree if they were at rest with respect to each other but not if they were moving. This has been confirmed by a number of experiments, including one in which an extremely accurate timepiece was flown around the world and then compared with one that had stayed in place. If you wanted to live longer, you could keep flying to the east so the speed of the plane added to the earth

As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control. It was a natural next step to want to know how the universe works.

[On President Bush's plan to get to Mars in 10 years] Stupid. Robots would do a better job and be much cheaper because you don't have to bring them back.