The media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.
One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.
Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.
What I have done is to show that it is possible for the way the universe began to be determined by the laws of science. In that case, it would not be necessary to appeal to God to decide how the universe began. This doesn’t prove that there is no God, only that God is not necessary.
I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street.
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? 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?
[In the Universe it may be that] Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.
I think computer viruses should count as life … I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.
I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.
I regard the afterlife to be a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.”
[The Science of Second-Guessing (New York Times Magazine Interview, December 12, 2004)]
In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.
Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.
Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.
The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can’t solve the equations, directly in the abstract.
I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.
It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
If determinism, the predictability of the universe, breaks down with black holes, it could break down in other situations. Even worse, if determinism breaks down, we can’t be sure of our past history either. The history books and our memories could just be illusions. It is the past that tells us who we are; without it, we lose our identity.
So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.
People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.
One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.
I think computer viruses should count as life … I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
Science can lift people out of poverty and cure disease. That, in turn, will reduce civil unrest.
God may exist, but science can explain the universe without the need for a creator.
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
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.
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there–but why is the past so different from the future?
It is a matter of common experience that disorder will tend to increase if things are left to themselves… However, one can create order out of disorder[.]
It is just that modern physicists seem to have more imaginative ways of naming new particles and phenomena – they no longer restrict themselves to Greek!
Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it.
If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed.
It is said that there is no such thing as a free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch.
If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?
I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don’t know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.
In space no one can hear you scream; and in a black hole, no one can see you disappear.
Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations of physics.
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?
Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe.
It seems to me much better and less confusing if you admit in print that you were wrong.
There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.
The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.
Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.
Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can’t be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.
The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don’t think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them
Just as one cannot talk about events in theuniverse without the notions of space and time, so in general relativity it became meaningless to talk aboutspace and time outside the limits of the universe.