Stephen Hawking Quotations | Page 5

The idea of 10 dimensions might sound exciting, but they would cause real problems if you forget where you parked your car.

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.

The human capacity for guilt is such that people can always find ways to blame themselves

We each exist for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe

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.

Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end.

As those who have seen Jurassic Park will know, this means a tiny disturbance in one place, can cause a major change in another. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause rain in Central Park, New York. The trouble is, it is not repeatable. The next time the butterfly flaps its wings, a host of other things will be different, which will also influence the weather. That is why weather forecasts are so unreliable.

If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.

We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?

The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.

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

The rate of progress is so rapid that what one learns at school or university is always a bit out of date. Only a few people can keep up with the rapidly advancing frontier of knowledge, and they have to devote their whole time to it and specialize in a small area. The rest of the population has little idea of the advances that are being made or the excitement they are generating.

Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this.

We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. But I'm an optimist.

It matters if you don't just give up.

Never put off the work till tomorrow what you can put off today.

It often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find they don't work, so I have to give it up.

Success is a relative term. It brings so many relatives.

The wise never marry, and when they marry they become otherwise.

Gravity is so strong that space is bent round onto itself, making it rather like the surface of the earth. If one keeps traveling in a certain direction on the surface of the earth, one never comes up against an impassable barrier or falls over the edge, but eventually comes back to where one started.

Someone told me that each equation I included in my book would halve the sales. I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = MC squared. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers.

Love the neighbor. But don't get caught.

Computer viruses are alive.

science will win because it works.

If human life were long enough to find the ultimate theory, everything would have been solved by previous generations. Nothing would be left to be discovered.

You cannot predict the future.

Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?

Exploration by real people inspires us.

I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be space and that it represents an important life insurance for our future survival, as it could prevent the disappearance of humanity by colonizing other planets,

If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He's everything that I'm not.

Children in backseats cause accidents. Accidents in backseats cause children.

The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression,

Computers double their performance every month.

I do not believe in a personal God.

One should love animals. They are so tasty.

If it [the universe] was expanding fairly slowly, the force of gravity would cause it eventually to stop expanding and then to start contracting. However, if it was expanding at more than a certain critical rate, gravity would never be strong enough to stop it, and the universe would continue to expand forever.

I believe in the possible. I believe, small though we are, insignificant though we may be, we can reach a full understanding of the universe. You were right when you said you felt small, looking up at all that up there. We are very, very small, but we are profoundly capable of very, very big things.

A snooze button is a poor substitute for no alarm clock at all.

So great a contribution to physics was Two New Sciences that scholars have long maintained that the book anticipated Isaac Newton's laws of motion.

If I knew what was going to happen in ten years I would do it now. I just follow my nose.

A picture is worth a thousand words...and uses up a thousand times the memory.

Doing a job RIGHT the first time gets the job done. Doing the job WRONG fourteen times gives you job security.

At times, I get very lonely because people are afraid to talk to me or don't wait for me to write a response. I'm shy and tongue-tied at times. I find it difficult to talk to people who I don't know.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

TEAMWORK...means never having to take all the blame yourself.

Plagiarism saves time.

Humanities deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for continuing our quest. and our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.

One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary. The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a creator.

Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.

Money is not everything. There's Master card & Visa.

Perhaps we could write code to optimize code, then run that code through the code optimizer?

To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.

Succeed in spite of management.

I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex. [Hawking adopted this statement from a remark made to him by his former post-doc, Nathan Myhrvold.]

[Question: Do you feel that scientists correct themselves as often as they should?] More often than politicians, but not as often as they should.

[Question: What do you think was the most important physics idea to emerge this year?] We won't know for a few years.

The concern here is that financial services become a kind of tech-led Wild West.

When the going gets tough, the tough take a coffee break.

But a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System - and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.

If at first you don't succeed, try management.

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.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over.

Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it.

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.

[Asked what he thinks about most during the day] Women. They are a complete mystery.

We've created life in our own image.

We explore because we are human.

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

In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle.

More often than politicians, but not as often as they should.

Maybe my viriety is due to bad absorption of vitamins.

Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us.

Maxwell is the physicist's physicist.

Do you believe in first love - or should I pass by again?

If any one of about 40 physical qualities had more than slightly different values, life as we know it could not exist...

It is tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform experiments whose results we can not predict.

Over a very small number of rolls of the dice, the uncertainty principle is very important.

I may contradict myself, but at least I don't contradict myself.

I'm here to chew gum and kick some ass, and I'm all out of gum.

There should be a better way to start a day than waking up every morning.

The more you learn, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why bother to learn.

Chaos, when left alone, tends to multiply.

The moment you understand the whole Universe, is the moment you slightly begin to understand the way God's mind works

When something is made idiot proof, they will just make better idiots.

When two's company, three's the result!

In my mind, I am free.

When I get to heaven I'm gonna find the guy in charge of the weather and kick his rear.

The "Powers That Be" are not smart enough to engineer Armageddon, but they may yet be stupid enough. If governments are involved in covering up the knowledge of aliens, then they are doing a much better job of it than they seem to do at anything else.

Save water. Shower with your girlfriend.

Is god omnipotent ? If he is, can he create a rock so heavy he can't lift it ?

We live in the most probable of all possible worlds.

One could imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand.

Science makes god unnecessary.

Being confined to a wheelchair doesn't bother me as my mind is free to roam the universe, but it felt wonderful to be weightless.

You may see a cup of tea fall off a table and break into pieces on the floor... But you will never see the cup gather itself back together and jump back on the table. The increase of disorder, or entropy, is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.

While there's life, there is hope.

I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. It has no beginning and no end.

A person who smiles in the face of adversity...probably has a scapegoat.

People think I'm a Simpsons character.

Of course it is possible that UFO's really do contain aliens as many people believe, and the government is hushing it up