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Stephen Hawking on Science

1942–2018 England

← All quotes by Stephen Hawking

7 quotes

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

A Brief History of Time (1988)

Science could predict that the universe must have had a beginning.

Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993)

Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.

A Brief History of Time (1988)

It's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction, but this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever.

Brief Answers to the Big Questions (2018)

Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.

Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points.

A Brief History of Time (1988)

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

A Brief History of Time (1988)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Stephen Hawking (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.