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·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, NASA (Public domain / CC0)
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
[In the Universe it may be that] Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.
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.
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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.