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
I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first... 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
We still believe that the universe should be logical and beautiful; we just dropped the word "God."

Stephen Hawking
There's nothing like the Eureka moment, of discovering something that no one knew before.

Stephen Hawking
The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.

Stephen Hawking
As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth. As citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change... There's a realization that we are changing our climate for the worse. That would have catastrophic effects. Although the threat is not as dire as that of nuclear weapons right now, in the long term we are looking at a serious threat.

Stephen Hawking