Quotes About Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking's been watching too many Hollywood movies. I think the only kind aliens in Hollywood are the ones created by Steven Spielberg - 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'E.T.,' for example. All other aliens are trying to suck our brains out.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.

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.

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.

Ultimately, my Ph.D. is in mathematical physics, focusing on quantum field theory and curved space-time, and I worked with Stephen Hawking.

A million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe.

It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.

This means it will take about a thousand million million million million years for the earth to run into the sun, so there's no immediate cause for worry!

The message of this lecture is that black holes ain't as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once though…things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don't give up – there's a way out.

I'm the archetype of a disabled genius, or should I say a physically challenged genius, to be politically correct. At least I'm obviously physically challenged. Whether I'm a genius is more open to doubt.

I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!

general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. They are the great intellectual achievements of the first half of this century.

The true miracle is that abstract considerations of logic lead to a unique theory that predicts and describes a vast universe full of the amazing variety that we see.

If we find the answer to that (why the universe exists), it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason. For then we would know the mind of God.

one has a singularity contained within a region of space-time known as a black hole.

In short, the advent of super-intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The real risk with AI isn't malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours we're in trouble.

theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe. If one were religious, one could say that God really does play dice.

Real gravitons make up what classical physicists would call gravitational waves, which are very weak—and so difficult to detect that they have not yet been observed. The

the physicist John Wheeler once calculated that if one took all the heavy water in all the oceans of the world, one could build a hydrogen bomb that would compress matter at the center so much that a black hole would be created. (Of course, there would be no one left to observe it!)

I have taken the opportunity to update the book and include new theoretical and observational results obtained since the book was first published (on April Fools' Day, 1988).

accuracy. The sun and the moon might still be gods, but they were gods who obeyed strict laws, apparently without any exceptions, if one discounts stories like that of the sun stopping for Joshua.

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.