Quotes about Stephen Hawking

Among physicists, I'm respected I hope.

the statement "All uranium-235 spheres are less than a mile in diameter" could be thought of as a law of nature because, according to what we know about nuclear physics, once a sphere of uranium-235 grew to a diameter greater than about six inches, it would demolish itself in a nuclear explosion. Hence we can be sure that such spheres do not exist. (Nor would it be a good idea to try to make one!)

Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

Indeed, if it were, it would by definition not be random. In modern times, we have effectively removed the third possibility above by redefining the goal of science: our aim is to formulate a set of laws that enables us to predict events only up to the limit set by the uncertainty principle.

There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice - if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.

Now, if you believe that the universe is not arbitrary, but is governed by definite laws, you ultimately have to combine the partial theories into a complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it.

His argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis and the antithesis are really the same argument.