Stephen Hawking Quotes

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!

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

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.

When a book was published entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein, he retorted, “If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!

The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them

there are lots of things you want to do before your life is over.

The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

In the early universe — when the universe was small enough to be governed by both general relativity and quantum theory — there were effectively four dimensions of space and none of time. That means that when we speak of the “beginning” of the universe, we are skirting the subtle issue that as we look backward toward the very early universe, time as we know it does not exist! We must accept that our usual ideas of space and time do not apply to the very early universe. That is beyond our experience, but not beyond our imagination, or our mathematics.

As a father, I would try to instill the importance of asking questions, always.

We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us.

There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. (...) However bad life may seem (...) While there’s life, there is hope.

As often happens in science, discoveries are made in the pursuit of an elusive (and sometimes nonexistent) goal.

The computer in your cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful and about a hundred thousand time smaller than the one computer at MIT in 1965.

In an infinite universe, every point can be regarded as the center, because every point has an infinite number of stars on each side of it.