Stephen Hawking Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Stephen Hawking
Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.

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.

Stephen Hawking
You would have to fly around the world four hundred million times to add one second to your life; but your life would be reduced by more than that by all those airline meals.

Stephen Hawking
I think the universe is completely self-contained. It doesn't have any beginning or end, it doesn't have any creation or destruction.

Stephen Hawking
Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.

Stephen Hawking
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.

Stephen Hawking
I do not agree with the view that the universe is a mystery, something that one can have intuition about but never fully analyze or comprehend.

Stephen Hawking
Each equation, I was told, would halve the sales of the book. But that was okay. Equations are necessary if you are doing accountancy, but they are the boring part of mathematics. Most of the interesting ideas can be conveyed by words or pictures.

Stephen Hawking
Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

Stephen Hawking
I regard [the many worlds interpretation] as self-evidently correct. [T. F.: Yet some don't find it evident to themselves.] Yeah, well, there are some people who spend an awful lot of time talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. My attitude — I would paraphrase Goering—is that when I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun.

Stephen Hawking
The Steady State theory was what Karl Popper would call a good scientific theory: it made definite predictions, which could be tested by observation, and possibly falsified. Unfortunately for the theory, they were falsified.

Stephen Hawking
In an infinite number universe, every point can be regarded as the center, because every point has an infinity of stars on each side of it.

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.

Stephen Hawking
The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope.

Stephen Hawking
The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron.... The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.

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
The point is that the new raw material doesn't really have to come from anywhere.... The universe can start off with zero energy and still create matter.

Stephen Hawking
A million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe.

Stephen Hawking
Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.

Stephen Hawking