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Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity. - Stephen Hawking
" "Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.
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About Stephen Hawking
Stephen William Hawking CH CBE FRS (8 January 1942 - 14 March 2018) was a British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Native Name:
Stephen William Hawking
Alternative Names:
Hawking
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S. W. Hawking
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stephen
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S. Hawking
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Additional quotes by Stephen Hawking
To apply quantum theory to the entire universe... is tricky... particles of matter fired at a screen with two slits in it... exhibit interference patterns just as water waves do.
Feynman showed that this arises because a particle does not have a unique history.
That is, as it moves from its starting point A to some endpoint B, it doesn’t take one definite path, but rather simultaneously takes every possible path connecting the two points.
From this point of view, interference is no surprise because, for instance, the particle can travel through both slits at the same time and interfere with itself.
In this view, the universe appeared spontaneously, starting off in every possible way.
As I shall describe, the prospects for finding such a theory seem to be much better now because we know so much more about the universe. But we must beware of overconfidence - we have had false dawns before! At the beginning of this century, for example, it was thought that everything could be explained in terms of the properties of continuous matter, such as elasticity and heat conduction. The discovery of atomic structure and the uncertainty principle put an emphatic end to that. Then again, in 1928, physicist and Nobel Prize winner Max Born told a group of visitors to Gottingen University, "Physics, as we know it, will be over in six months." His confidence was based on the recent discovery by Dirac of the equation that governed the electron. It was thought that a similar equation would govern the proton, which was the only other particle known at the time, and that would be the end of theoretical physics. However, the discovery of the neutron and of nuclear forces knocked that one on the head too. Having said this, I still believe there are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.
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