「Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going?」
「How real ie time? Will it ever come to an end? Where does the difference between the past and the future come from? Why do we remember the past, but not the future?」
「Well,coxes can be adventurous, and some coxes can be very steady people. He was rather an adventurous type. You never knew quite what he was going to do when he went out with the crew. I think he used to bring his work with him into the boat sometimes. His sort of thinking gear was going on different levels.」
「We were asked to read chapter 10 in a book called Electricity and Magnetism by Bleaney and Bleaney, an unlikely combination, a husband-and-wife team, and at the end of that chapter, there were 13 questions, all of them final honors questions. I discovered very rapidly that I couldn't do any of them. Richard and I worked together for the week, and we managed to do 1½ questions which we felt very proud of. Gordon refused all assistance and managed to do one all by himself. Stephen, as always, hadn't even started but the next morning, he went up to his room at 9:00. And we came back about 12:00, maybe five past 12:00, and down came Stephen, and we were in the college gateway, the lodge. "Ah, Hawking," I said, "How many have you managed to do, then?" "Well," he said, "I've only had time to do the first ten."
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I think at that point we realized that it's not just we weren't in the same street. We weren't on the same planet.」
「He used to produce his work every week for tutorial, and, as he never kept any notes or papers or that sort of thing, on leaving my room,he would normally throw it in my wastepaper basket. And when he was with other undergraduates at the tutorial and they saw this happen, they were absolutely horrified 'cause they thought,he did this work in probably half an hour. If they could have done it in a year, they wouldn't have thrown it in the wastepaper basket. They would've put it in a frame on their walls.」
「Before my condition had been diagnosed I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of hospital I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I were reprieved.」
「Roger Penrose proved that a dying star,collapsing under its own gravity, eventually shrinks to a singularity, a point of infinite density and zero size. I realized that if I reversed the direction of time, so that the collapse became an expansion, I could prove that the universe had a beginning. But my proof based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, also showed that we cannot understand how the universe began, because it showed that all scientific theories including general relativity itself, break down at the beginning of the universe.」
「Black hole radiation has shown us that gravitational collapse is not as final as we once thought. If an astronaut falls into a black hole, he will be returned to the rest of the universe in the form of radiation. Thus,in a sense, the astronaut will be recycled. However,it would be a poor sort of immortality because any personal concept of time would come to an end as he is torn apart inside the black hole.」
「My interest in the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology in the Vatican. Aftewards,we were granted an audience with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the Big Bang, but we should not inquire into the Big Bang itself because that was the moment of creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad that he did not know the subject of the talk I had just given, the possibility that the universe had no beginning, no moment of creation.」
「So long as the universe had a beginning. We could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would neither be created nor destroyed. It would simply be. What place,then,for a creator? 」
「He does believe very intensely, in the almost infinite possibility of the human mind. You have to find out what you can't know before you know you can't, don't you? So I don't think that thought should be restricted at all. Why shouldn't you go on thinking about the unthinkable? Somebody's got to start sometime. Think how many things were unthinkable a century ago, and yet people have thought them. And often they also seemed quite unpractical. Not all the things Stephen says probably are to be taken as gospel truth. He's a searcher. He's looking for things. And sometimes he probably talks nonsense. Well, don't we all? But the point is people must think. People must go on thinking. They must try to extend the boundaries of knowledge, and they don't sometimes even know where to start. You don't know where the boundaries are, do you? You don't know what your taking-off point is.」
「If we do discover a complete theory of the universe, 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 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.」
