Stephen Hawking Quotes

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

Modern physics often advances only by sacrificing some of our traditional philosophical convictions

Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.

Of course, Einstein was a very great scientist indeed, and I have enormous respect for him, and great admiration for the discoveries he made. But he was very committed to a view of the objectivity of the physical world.

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.

Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.

What the founders of modern science ... had to do was to destroy one world and replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, and a new concept of science — and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common sense, by another which is not natural at all.

Philosophy treats of physics where a more careful knowledge is required because the problems which come under this head are numerous... So the reader of Ctesibius or Archimedes and the other writers of treatises of the same class will not be able to appreciate them unless he has been trained in these subjects by the philosophers.

The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton's formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

Actually, I was more or less determined to be a theoretical physicist at the age of thirteen.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

Sir Isaac Newton gave the extraterrestrials their biggest shot in the arm when he embraced the infinite universe as the basis for his hugely influential system of physics. Even so, the aliens of the early modern period remained creatures of philosophy rather than science.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives.

I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history.

We could live at the present day without a Plato, but a double number of Newtons is required to discover the secrets of nature, and to bring life into harmony with the laws of nature.

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

In the history of science, we often find that the study of some natural phenomenon has been the starting point in the development of a new branch of knowledge.

Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before.

I love science and that time in history when science and the humanities were the same thing.

I thought I should study physics because it's fundamental to all science.

Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics - chemistry, the structure of big molecules - in those domains, there is a lot of progress. In many other domains, there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding.