Stephen Hawking Quotes

My first popular book, 'A Brief History of Time,' aroused a great deal of interest, but many found it difficult to understand.

I had not expected 'A Brief History of Time' to be a best seller.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was George Gamow's 'One Two Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science.'

Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

I wouldn't say that 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.

I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.

Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less.

I would love to photograph Stephen Hawking. I am just fascinated by science, I really am.

My first published writings were trying to take scientific concepts and make them clear for a general audience.

If you like 'The Nature of Things,' or if you like 'Quirks and Quarks' you'll certainly like Lee Smolin's writing, and 'Time Reborn' is his latest nonfiction book, and it's an absolutely compelling read. It's worth the time.

I love learning about the science that governs the universe around us and want to share the delight of discovering how things work and why.

I'd really like to go on a date with Stephen Hawking. I just think we'd have really good chat. I'd just like to sit and listen to him.

I am a successful lecturer in physics for popular audiences. The real entertainment gimmick is the excitement, drama and mystery of the subject matter. People love to learn something, they are 'entertained' enormously by being allowed to understand a little bit of something they never understood before. One must have faith in the subject and in people's interest in it.

Without space, there is no time.

We know from astronomy that the universe had a beginning, from physics that the future is both open and unpredictable, from geology and paleontology that the whole of life has been a process of change and transformation. From biology we know that our tissues are not impenetrable reservoirs of vital magic, but a stunning matrix of complex wonders, ultimately explicable in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. With such knowledge we can see, perhaps for the first time, why a Creator would have allowed our species to be fashioned by the process of evolution.

As the twentieth century began, science equaled a materialistic worldview. As the twenty-first century began, the worldview of science, at least of physics and astronomy, may have traded place with that of religion. Consider Einstein's famous equation E = mc2. Nothing of matter dies but continues on in another form, elsewhere. The church divines and theologians for two thousand years have devised arguments and "proofs" of immortality but nothing equal to this.

Our job in physics is to see things simply, to understand a great many complicated phenomena in a unified way, in terms of a few simple principles.

At one point I wanted to work for NASA and be an astrophysicist, so I did physics, math, and chemistry before realizing I probably wasn't quite smart enough to do that. But I am still hugely interested in cosmology and astrophysics. That is my geeky subject area.

There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

The Universe in a Nutshell

In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.

I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills on the businessman's special to Tokyo.

To understand the stars would spoil their appearance.

A friend tweeted me with 'The Big Freeze.' I don't know about that one. I've got to go home, play around with the kids and figure something out. I'll have one.