Stephen Hawking Quotes

133 Sourced Quotes

Cosmology used to be considered a pseudoscience and the preserve of physicists who might have done some useful work in their earlier years but who had gone mystic in their dotage.

Stephen Hawking
Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

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

Stephen Hawking
But if he [God] had started it [the universe] off in such an incomprehensible way, why did he choose to let it evolve according to laws that we could understand?

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

Stephen Hawking
Science fiction like Star Trek is not only good fun but it also serves a serious purpose, that of expanding the human imagination.

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
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
At present, computers are a useful aid in research, but they have to be directed by human minds. If one extrapolates their recent rapid rate of development, however, it would seem quite possible that they will take over altogether in theoretical physics. So maybe the end is in sight for theoretical physicists, if not for theoretical physics.

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
If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.

Stephen Hawking
I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.
[Hawking adopted this statement from a remark made to him by his former post-doc, Nathan Myhrvold.]

Stephen Hawking
The theory of relativity does, however, force us to change fundamentally our ideas of space and time. We must accept that time is not completely separate from and independent of space, but is combined with it to form an object called space-time.

Stephen Hawking
It is impossible to imagine a four-dimensional space. I personally find it hard enough to visualize a three-dimensional space!

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
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
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
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
There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you ever meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.

Stephen Hawking
We see the universe the way it is because we exist.

Stephen Hawking
So great a contribution to physics was Two New Sciences that scholars have long maintained that the book anticipated Isaac Newton's laws of motion.

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

Stephen Hawking
The light that we see from distant galaxies left them millions of years ago, and in the case of the most distant object we have seen, the light left some eight billions years ago. Thus, when we look at the universe, we are seeing it as it was in the past.

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