Stephen Hawking Quotes

With current technology interstellar travel is utterly impractical. Alpha Centauri can never become a holiday destination.

I regard it as almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth at some point in the next 1,000 years which, as geological time goes, is the mere blink of an eye. By then I hope and believe that our ingenious race will have found a way to slip the surly bonds of Earth and will therefore survive the disaster.

If one made a research grant application to work on time travel it would be dismissed immediately. No government agency could afford to be seen to be spending public money on anything as way out as time travel. Instead one has to use technical terms like closed time-like curves, which are code for time travel.

<nowiki>[</nowiki>Planck<nowiki>]</nowiki> said instead [of possibility that amount of radiation could have just any value] that radiation came only in packets or quanta of a certain size. It is a bit like saying that you can't buy sugar loose in the supermarket, it has to be in kilogram bags.

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

I discount suggestions that UFOs contain beings from outer space, as I think that any visits by aliens would be much more obvious - and probably also much more unpleasant.

It is a matter of common experience that things get more disordered and chaotic with time. This observation even has its own law, the so-called second law of thermodynamics.

If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God that you would meet and put questions to. Although, if there were such a God, I would like to ask however did he think of anything as complicated as M-theory in eleven dimensions.

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

We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful. (Quoted from the Discovery Channel, 15 August 2011.)

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.

If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans. … We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.

So next time someone complains that you have made a mistake, tell him that may be a good thing. Because without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.

Mathematics is more than a tool and language for science. It is also an end in itself, and as such, it has, over the centuries, affected our worldview in its own right.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all P-brains are created equal.