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A Brief History of Time QUOTES

A Brief History of Time QUOTES

1 " 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? "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

2 " If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future? "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

3 " Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

4 " …only in the few universes that are like ours would intelligent beings develop and ask the question: “Why is the universe the way we see it?” The answer is then simple: If it had been any different, we would not be here! "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

5 " Today will still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

6 " God abhors a naked singularity. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

7 " There should be no boundary to human endeavor. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

8 " God does not play dice. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

9 " Roger Penrose and I showed that Einstein’s general theory of relativity implied that the universe must have a beginning and, possibly, an end. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

10 " associates and collaborators were Roger Penrose, Robert "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

11 " associates and collaborators were Roger Penrose, "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

12 " The universe doesn't allow perfection. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

13 " This picture of a hot early stage of the universe was first put forward by the scientist George Gamow in a famous paper written in 1948 with a student of his, Ralph Alpher. Gamow had quite a sense of humor—he persuaded the nuclear scientist Hans Bethe to add his name to the paper to make the list of authors “Alpher, Bethe, Gamow, "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

14 " In the spring of 1974 about two years before the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars, I was at a meeting in England sponsored by the Royal Society of London to explore the question of how to search for extraterrestrial life. During a coffee break, I noticed that a much larger meeting was being held in an adjacent hall, which out of curiosity I entered. I soon realized that I was witnessing one of the most ancient scholarly organizations on the planet. In the front row a young man in a wheelchair was, very slowly, signing his name in a book that bore on its earliest pages the signature of Isaac Newton. When at last he finished, there was a stirring ovation. Steven Hawking was a legend even then "

― Carl Sagan , A Brief History of Time

15 " Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

16 " In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

17 " ...if the sun were to cease to shine at this very moment, it would not affect things on earth at the present time because they would be in the elsewhere of the event when the sun went out. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

18 " . . .a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations: it exists only in our minds. So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, "real" or "imaginary" time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

19 " Thus the no boundary proposal is a good scientific theory in the sense of Karl Popper: it could have been falsified by observations but instead its predictions have been confirmed. In an expanding universe in which the density of matter varied slightly from place to place, gravity would have caused the denser regions to slow down their expansion and start contracting. This would lead to the formation
of galaxies, stars, and eventually even insignificant creatures like ourselves. Thus all the complicated structures that we see in the universe might be explained by the no boundary condition for the universe together with the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.
The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have
come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. 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? "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time

20 " We have developed from the geocentric cosmologies of Ptolemy and his forebears, through the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo, to the modern picture in which the earth is a medium-sized planet orbiting around an average star in the outer suburbs of an ordinary spiral galaxy, which is itself only one of about a million million galaxies in the observable universe. "

― Stephen Hawking , A Brief History of Time