Quotes from Stephen Hawking

You can't get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn't have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.

But humans are a curious species. We wonder, we seek answers. Living in this vast world that is by turns kind and cruel, and gazing at the immense heavens above, people have always asked a multitude of questions: How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator?

in 1992 came the first confirmed observation of a planet orbiting a star other than our sun.

I told him never to be afraid to come up with an idea or a hypothesis no matter how daft (his words not mine) it might seem.

It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love.

Because gravity shapes space and time, it allows space time to be locally stable but globally unstable. On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6.

for the fluctuations in the background. However, within a few years we should know whether we can believe that we live in a universe that is completely self-contained and without beginning or end.

I have taken the opportunity to update the book and include new theoretical and observational results obtained since the book was first published (on April Fools' Day, 1988).

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?

Up to about thirty years ago, it was thought that protons and neutrons were "elementary" particles, but experiments in which protons were collided with other protons or electrons at high speeds indicated that they were in fact made up of smaller particles.

According to some accounts, a journalist told Eddington in the early 1920s that he had heard there were only three people in the world who understood general relativity. Eddington paused, then replied, "I am trying to think who the third person is.")

His argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis and the antithesis are really the same argument.