You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn’t much time left.
Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
A lot of prizes have been awarded for showing that the universe is not as simple as we might have thought!
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you meet your antiself, don’t shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
He [Wolfgang Pauli] was the archetypal theoretical physicist: it was said of him that even his presence in the same town would make experiments go wrong!
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
The story that Newton was inspired by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea of gravity came to him as he sat “in a contemplative mood” and “was occasioned by the fall of an apple”.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
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?
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
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.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time