Quotes from Stephen Hawking

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.) There

Do the laws governing the universe allow us to predict exactly what is going to happen to us in the future? The short answer is no, and yes. In principle, the laws allow us to predict the future. But in practice the calculations are often too difficult.

The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.

Science seems to have uncovered a set of laws that, within the limits set by the uncertainty principle, tell us how the universe will develop with time, if we know its state at any one time. These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

Among physicists, I'm respected I hope.

Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

Earth might one day soon resemble the planet Venus.

the statement "All uranium-235 spheres are less than a mile in diameter" could be thought of as a law of nature because, according to what we know about nuclear physics, once a sphere of uranium-235 grew to a diameter greater than about six inches, it would demolish itself in a nuclear explosion. Hence we can be sure that such spheres do not exist. (Nor would it be a good idea to try to make one!)

Nothing is better than reading and gaining more and more knowledge.