Stephen Hawking Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

I think that it's important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.

Stephen Hawking
I'm not religious in the normal sense. 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
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.

Stephen Hawking
There may be ultimate answers, but if there are, I would be sorry if we were to find them. For my own sake I would like very much to find them, but their discovery would leave nothing for those coming after me to seek. Each generation builds on the advances of the previous generation, and this is as it should be. As human beings, we need the quest.

Stephen Hawking
Consideration of particle emission from black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.

Stephen Hawking
The zero-G part was wonderful and the higher-G part was no problem. I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come!

Stephen Hawking
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.

Stephen Hawking
When I gave a lecture in Japan, I was asked not to mention the possible re-collapse of the universe, because it might affect the stock market. However, I can re-assure anyone who is nervous about their investments that it is a bit early to sell: even if the universe does come to an end, it won't be for at least twenty billion years. By that time, maybe the GATT trade agreement will have come into effect.

Stephen Hawking
It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don't, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival. However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would be valid also in our search for a complete unified theory, and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions.

Stephen Hawking
Time refuses to be simplified or reduced. You cannot say that it is only found in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs only in one direction, or in everyone imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. It is all of these things.

Stephen Hawking
Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe.

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
As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.

Stephen Hawking
In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars.

Stephen Hawking
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.

Stephen Hawking
Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

Stephen Hawking
All my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them.

Stephen Hawking
But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System - and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.

Stephen Hawking
The stars and galaxies that fill our view as we survey the depths of the Universe are really just a froth delineating the massive, dark unseen structures beneath.

Stephen Hawking
Although I'm regarded as a dangerous radical by particle physicists for proposing that there may be loss of quantum coherence, I'm definitely a conservative compared to Roger. I take the positivist viewpoint that a physical theory is just a mathematical model and that it is meaningless to ask whether it corresponds to reality. All that one can ask is that its predictions should be in agreement with observation. I think Roger [Penrose] is a Platonist at heart but he must answer for himself.

Stephen Hawking
In response to a question on how we should live:
We should seek the greatest value of our action.

Stephen Hawking
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.

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

Stephen Hawking
There may be no ultimate theory, and even if there is, we may not find it. But it is surely better to strive for a complete understanding than to despair of the human mind.

Stephen Hawking
We may not yet be able to boldly go where no man (or woman) has gone before, but at least we can do it in the mind.

Stephen Hawking