Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time (1988)

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

Stephen Hawking
The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

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
Maybe that is our mistake: maybe there are no particle positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that we try to fit the waves to our preconceived ideas of positions and velocities. The resulting mismatch is the cause of the apparent unpredictability.

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
In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle.

Stephen Hawking