Stephen Hawking Quotes
Stephen Hawking Quotes
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us very special.
Quiet people have the loudest minds.
So Einstein was wrong when he said, “God does not play dice.” Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.
I think the human race doesn’t have a future if we don’t go into space. We need to expand our horizons beyond planet Earth if we are to have a long-term future. We cannot remain looking inward at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. We need to look outward to the wider universe.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.
If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space. If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.
Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long term survival, is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.
One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest and is now used for agriculture or urban development. The polar icecaps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night, the Earth is no longer dark, but large areas are lit up. All of this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit. But human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land. There isn’t any more available.
The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.
So when people ask me if I believe God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the earth; the earth is a sphere, it doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.
Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.
So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
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Stephen Hawking Quotes about Science
My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer.
We live in the most probable of all possible worlds.
When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my pistol.
Stephen Hawking Quotes on Success
Success is a relative term. It brings so many relatives.
Stephen Hawking Quotes on Knowledge
[Question: What do you think was the most important physics idea to emerge this year?] We won’t know for a few years.
We won’t know for a few years.
I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity. We have already discovered the basic laws that govern matter and understand all the normal situations. We don’t know how the laws fit together, and what happens under extreme conditions. But I expect we will find a complete unified theory sometime this century. The is no limit to the complexity that we can build using those basic laws.
Stephen Hawking Quotes about Giving Up
Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.
One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.
It matters that you don’t just give up,
Stephen Hawking Quotes Time Travel
Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a ‘crank.’
Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.
I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible.
Time travel may be possible, but it is not practical.
Stephen Hawking Quotes on Life
Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.
It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven’t done badly. People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.
One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.
What I have learned from life is to make the most of what you have got.
Stephen Hawking Quotes on Love
One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.
Stephen Hawking Quotes on Artificial Intelligence
It [AI] would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded.
Everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone’s list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last.
The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.
Stephen Hawking Quotes on Hope
While there’s life, there is hope.
Stephen Hawking Quotes on Earth
Not to leave planet Earth would be like castaways on a desert island not trying to escape…Sending humans to other planets … will shape the future of the human race in ways we don’t yet understand, and may determine whether we have any future at all.
Because imaginary time behaves like another direction in space, histories in imaginary time can be closed surfaces, like the surface of the Earth, with no [existential] beginning or end.
Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.
Time and space are finite in extent, but they don’t have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.
Stephen Hawking Quotes about the Brain
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
Stephen Hawking Quotes about the Universe
When people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the big bang, so there is no time for god to make the universe in. It’s like asking directions to the edge of the earth; The Earth is a sphere; it doesn’t have an edge; so looking for it is a futile exercise. We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is; there is no god. No one created our 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.
Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.
I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.
One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist. Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.
Stephen Hawking Quotes about Stars
Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.
Stephen Hawking Quotes on Technology
The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME’s Person of the Century.
We believe human begins have existed for only a small fraction of cosmic history, because human race has been improving so rapidly in knowledge and technology that if people had been around for millions of years, the human race would be much further along in it’s mastery.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
One could imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.
Stephen Hawking Quotes on Time
This required abandoning the idea that there is a universal quantity called time that all clocks measure. Instead, everyone would have his own personal time. The clocks of two people would agree if they were at rest with respect to each other but not if they were moving. This has been confirmed by a number of experiments, including one in which an extremely accurate timepiece was flown around the world and then compared with one that had stayed in place. If you wanted to live longer, you could keep flying to the east so the speed of the plane added to the earth
The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future.
Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases.
Stephen Hawking Quotes on Intelligence
It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.
Stephen Hawking Quotes about A.i
We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth.
I fear that AI may replace humans altogether,” he told the magazine. “If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that improves and replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans.
Success in creating effective AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst. We just don’t know. So we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and side-lined, or conceivably destroyed by it.
Stephen Hawking Quotes Theory of Everything
Life would be tragic if it were not funny.
People who boast about their IQ are losers.
