Stephen Hawking Quotes

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.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

We are all different — but we share the same human spirit. Perhaps it's human nature that we adapt — and survive.

Yet if there really were a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions — so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion? Or no conclusion at all?

How do I know that a table still exists if I go out of the room and can’t see it? What does it mean to say that things we can’t see, such as electrons or quarks — the particles that are said to make up the proton and neutron — exist? One could have a model in which the table disappears when I leave the room and reappears in the same position when I come back, but that would be awkward, and what if something happened when I was out, like the ceiling falling in? How, under the table-disappears-when-I-leave-the-room model, could I account for the fact that the next time I enter, the table reappears broken, under the debris of the ceiling? The model in which the table stays put is much simpler and agrees with observation. That is all one can ask.

If a superior alien civilisation sent us a text message saying, 'We'll arrive in a few decades', would we just reply, 'OK, call us when you get here, we'll leave the lights on'? Probably not, but this is more or less what has happened with AI.

If a star were a grain of salt, you could fit all the stars visible to the naked eye on a teaspoon, but all the stars in the universe would fill a ball more than eight miles wide.

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

بالرغم من أنني لا أستطيع الحركة وأن علي أن أتكلم عبر الكمبيوتر، لكن في عقلي أنا حر، حر لأتجول في الكون وأن أخبر بالقصة الكبرى، قصة كل ما كان من لحظة بداية الكون

"In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!"

As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass rises ever more quickly, so it takes more and more energy to speed it up further. It can in fact never reach the speed of light, because by then its mass would have become infinite, and by the equivalence of mass and energy, it would have taken an infinite amount of energy to get it there. For this reason, any normal object is forever confined by relativity to move at speeds slower than the speed of light.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and
makes a universe for them to describe?

Black holes might be useful for getting rid of garbage or even some of one's friends.

We now know that every particle has an antiparticle, with which it can annihilate. (In the case of the force-carrying particles, the antiparticles are the same as the particles themselves.) There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you meet your antiself, don’t shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.

Only time(whatever that may be) will tell.