On January 8, 1942, Stephen Hawking was born to Frank and Isobel Hawking in Oxford, England. Frank was a researcher specializing in tropical diseases. He later became the Head of the Division of Parasitology at The National Institute of Medical Research. it was at this research center that the two met and got together for a meaningful future. She hasd got in to odd jobs before she ended up as a secretary at the institute.
The Hawkings lived in London, at the peak of World War II bombardment which was shortly before Stephen was due. So Isobel had to move to Oxford, which was safe. Oxford and Cambridge were spared on the condition that England reciprocated by not bombing the German University towns of Heidelberg and Gottingen.
A point of coincidence or an oddity whatever it may be termed as, is the fact that, the birth date was the 300th death anniversary date of the great Italian scientist Galileo Galilei. The day he (Stephen) was born the world was in the midst of war and strife. But the great man has pointed that there were 2000 other babies born on the same day and hence, does not 'hold any much water' on the event as such.
Isobel returned to London with the two-week old Stephen, who later began schooling at Highgate where they resided. In 1950, Frank Hawking joined the Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill. The Hawking family left for St. Albans from where Mill Hill was easily accessible. His school there was St. Albans High School for Girls, which admitted boys too! Later, he shifted to St. Albans School for Boys. His father wanted him to study at the prestigious Westminster Public School, to give him exposure of the status–conscious society of England. But he fell ill at the time of the scholarship examination and had to continue in St. Albans School, an abbey school with rigorous academics and high intellectual standard. Stephen himself has no regrets, "I got an education there that was as good as, if not better than, that I would have had at Westminster. I have never found that my lack of social graces has been a hindrance."
Isobel’s influence is quite apparent in shaping Stephen’s ideals, especially political ones. Isobel was an active member of the Communist Party earlier and the Labor Party, later. Stephen has been a leftist all his life. Frank used to conduct researches abroad for long periods and was never an intimate father figure to the children – Stephen, his two younger sisters, Mary and Philippa and the adopted younger brother, Edward. This would have had its most telling effect on the young Stephen.
At school, Stephen did not cut an impressive figure. Awkward and skinny Stephen spoke with a lisp called Hawkingese by his classmates. He had few friends, and highbrow tastes. He preferred classical music to Jazz, Rock’ n Roll and Pop. Bertrand Russell was his hero, and he loved to read Kingsley Amis, Aldous Huxley and William Golding. His favorite pastime was to cycle around the countryside, along with his friends, and to create complex board games. One such game that he invented Dynasty, had a set of complicated rules and took days to finish one game. It was perhaps Stephen’s desire to play God, the feeling of having created the world and the laws that govern it, which comes through right from childhood. But his brilliance was evident even then. After dabbling in aeromodelling, mysticism and the occult, Stephen’s interest finally turned to physics and mathematics. His father objected to his appearing for his A-Level examination with these subjects.
He wanted Stephen to study medicine, as it was the subject of his vocation. Another reason for the opposition was the absence of Mathematics Fellow at the University College, Oxford, where Frank had studied earlier and wanted Stephen to go. As a compromise, chemistry was selected along with mathematics and physics. During the final years of school, Stephen and his friends developed and built a computer – LUCE – the Logical Uniselector Computing Engine.
In March 1959, Stephen took the scholarship examination and cleared about 12 hours of theory papers and three interviews and was finally awarded the scholarship at Oxford. He studied physics there, where his intuitive understanding, rather than hard work helped him master the subject. He won the University Physics Prize in the second year. But slightly bored with what he considered an easy curriculum, he joined the Rowing Club and acquired a taste for alcohol and rowdy pranks. He barely put up 1,000 hours of work during his three years stay at Oxford and just scraped through with a first-class BA (Hon.) degree in 1962. Two things seem to have worked against him in this. The first was that the final examination of Oxford required a lot of factual knowledge, for which Stephen was not really prepared. So he attempted only the theoretical questions and had to face a personal interview because of his below par performance.
Secondly, it was the prevalent work attitude at Oxford. Stephen explains, "The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to be brilliant without effort, or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was regarded as the mark of a grey man – the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary."
Stephen went to Cambridge University to begin his doctorate in general relativity and cosmology. He hoped to do his research under Fred Hoyle, but was assigned to a tutor; a theorist named Dennis Sciama instead. He was aware of the abilities as well as the physical sufferings that Stephen was undergoing at that time. But the great man in the making did have a bad phase : bouts of depression.
It all started during his final days at Oxford. Stephen noticed that he was becoming ‘clumsy’. He bumped into things, fell for no apparent reason and his speech was at times slurred. He was never well coordinated as a child, and avoided sport or any physical activity. His handwriting was a cause for concern to his teachers. During Christmas of ’62, his parents noticed something queer in him, and in the beginning of 1963, Stephen had to spend two weeks at the hospital undergoing various tests.
The prognosis was not good. He was diagnosed as having Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis (ALA), also known as Motor Neuron Disease or Lou Gehrig’s Syndrome. An incurable disease, ALA affects the nerve cells and the body is slowly wasted away. The mind is not affected at all, and there is no physical pain, but the despair of seeing the body wasting away breaks the strongest will. He was not expected to live long enough to complete his doctorate and achieve his dream.
A feeling of despair and depression was but natural. However, Stephen took matters in his own hands. Whenever he felt sorry for himself, he thought of a little boy he had met in the hospital who died of leukemia soon afterwards. Perhaps the main driving force behind his will to live was his meeting with and love for Jane Wilde. They were soon engaged and Stephen realized that he had to complete his Ph.D. before he could get a job and marry Jane. Things began to improve. He met Roger Penrose at King’s College in London. Penrose, a mathematician at Birkbeek College in London had developed the idea of space-time singularity in a black hole. Stephen decided to apply the singularity theory to the universe, and was awarded a Ph.D. on the strength of this one brilliant stroke of genius.
Upon completion of his doctorate in 1966, Stephen was awarded a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, initially as a Research Fellow and later on as Professional Fellow. In 1973, he left the Institute of Astronomy and joined the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge. In 1977, he became Professor of Gravitational Physics at Cambridge and in 1979, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. The man born 300 years after the death of Galileo Galilei, now held the chair, a position previously held by the likes of Isaac Barrow and Isaac Newton.
Stephen and Jane married soon after he got the fellowship at Caius. Theoretical Physics the subject of his study, was one area where his physical condition was not a major handicap. He acknowledges the fact that "… I was fortunate that my scientific reputation increased, at the same time that my disability got worse. This meant that people were prepared to offer me a sequence of positions in which I only had to do research, without having to lecture."
Jane was still an undergraduate at Westfield College in London. She had to go to London every week. Hence, they had to find a place where Stephen could manage things on his own.
After looking around for some time, living in temporary accommodations, they finally rented a house about a 100 yards from the college, which they ultimately bought. They lived there for some years, until Stephen found it difficult to walk up the stairs. The college then offered them a ground floor flat with large rooms and wide doors, close to the University department, also enabling Stephen to commute in his electric wheel chair. By now he was father of two children.
Until 1974, Jane had managed to help Stephen and look after the house and bring up the children, without any outside help. But now it was getting a little difficult to do so. They decided to have one of the research students to come and live with them in return for free accommodation and special attention. Together, they helped Stephen in his daily routine as the disease was rearing its ugly head, paralyzing him completely. Five or six years later, they had to hire regular nurses, who came for an hour or two in the mornings and evenings. But after 1985, when Stephen caught pneumonia and had to have a tracheotomy operation, he needed 24 hours nursing care. All this was made possible only due to grants from several foundations in appreciation of his wealth of knowledge and as a tribute to his singular efforts in the field of Cosmic Research.
Stephen was in Geneva when he caught pneumonia and had to be kept on life support systems. Doctors felt that he would not survive and they advised Jane to remove his life support systems, as it was not worth it. Jane did not allow them to do so. Stephen was flown back to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, where Roger Grey, a surgeon carried out the tracheotomy. He saved Stephen, but the operation took away his voice.
Even before the operation, Stephen’s speech was slurred and few could decipher. He could communicate, dictate his scientific papers to his secretary and conduct seminars through an interpreter who would repeat Stephen’s words more clearly. But the operation changed all that. For quite some time, Stephen could communicate only by spelling a word - letter by letter raising his eyebrows when someone pointed to the correct letter. He faced difficulty communicating, and writing a scientific paper was out of question.
When Walt Woltosz, a computer expert in California, heard about Stephen’s plight, he sent a computer program, Equalizer. This program allowed a person to select words from a series of menus on the screen, controlled by a switch, which could be operated either by hand or by eye movement.
After the sentence or the paragraph is completed, it could be sent to a speech synthesizer or for printing. Initially, Stephen ran this program on his desktop computer. Later, David Mason of Cambridge Adaptive Communication fitted a small portable computer and speech synthesizer to Stephen’s wheel chair, giving him a voice, with an American accent no doubt, but a voice, nonetheless.
Communication became much easier as Stephen could either speak what he wanted to say, or save it on a disk for later use – to print or to recall sentence by sentence. This system has allowed him not only to write books and scientific papers, but also to take part in scientific and popular talks and seminars. His bestseller book A Brief History of Time was revised after he had found his electronic voice.
Stephen Hawking has received and continues to receive many honors and awards. In 1974, he was elected Fellow of The Royal Society, one of the youngest to be honored. He received the CBE in 1982 and was made a Companion of Honor in 1989. Amongst the many international and foreign awards and prizes is the Membership of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. His marriage ended after 25 years over his affair with Elaine Mason, one of his nurses and the wife of the man who designed his voice synthesizer.
He has subsequently married her. Stephen Hawking remains active even today. While most physicists naturally use paper and pencil for their calculations, Hawking has the capacity to do them in his mind. Kip Thorne, a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech recalls, "As Stephen gradually lost the use of his hands, he had to start developing geometrical arguments that he could do pictorially in his head. He developed a very powerful set of tools that nobody else really had….." His memory, like his genius, is legendary. Dependent on prostheses – wheelchair, customized computer, voice synthesizer, Stephen has reached brilliant heights, not letting his handicap push him down the hill. Along with his research, he travels a lot to give public lectures. One of his Graduate Assistant has confessed that in 12 months that he was with Stephen Hawking, they traveled to San Jose, Monterrey, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington, Chicago, Santa Barbara, Atlanta, Berlin and Boston.
Hawking has an obsession to remain in control, and it is perhaps this need which drives him to conduct cosmic research. He once said, "My aim was always to build working model that I could control. I didn’t care what they looked like. I think it was the same drive that led me to invent a series of very complicated games… I think these games… came from an urge to know how things worked and to control them. Since I began my Ph.D., this need has been met by my research into cosmology. If you understand how the universe operates, you control it in a way."
Mankind since time immemorial has tried to answer the question about the universe. This quest for knowledge about the origins of the universe has remained unanswered. The greatest of minds from Aristotle to Galileo, Newton to Einstein have all tried to unravel this oldest of mysteries, and the most recent being Stephen Hawking.
Despite his physical handicap (Lou Gehrig’s syndrome), Stephen Hawking has done some astounding research in Astrophysics. His cosmic theory has brought in an element of simplicity and easy access to the most complex subject. His simplified deductions that have gained wide acceptance greatly astonished the scientific circles when they first appeared.
We still do not have all the answers that we’ve been looking for. All that we now look forward to is at this man in the wheelchair, the inner recesses of whose mind may contain the answers that have long eluded us, completing the chain of knowledge initiated by Aristotle and drawn forward by Galileo, Einstein and.... Hawking.
1942
Born on January 8, in Oxford, UK. Taken back to London when two weeks old.
1950
Moved to the city of St Albans in Hertfordshire.
1952
Joined St Albans School.
1958
Participated in the 1st Aldermaston march with his mother. Built a computer - the LUCE, Logical Uniselector Computing Engine, as a school project.
1959
Won a scholarship to study physics and mathematics at the University College, Oxford.
1962
Awarded a first-class BA (Hon.) degree of Oxford. Joined the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the Cambridge University to do a Ph.D. in cosmology under Dennis Sciama.
1963
Formally introduced to Jane Wilde. Diagnosed as having Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.
1964
Met Jayant Narlikar and got interested in his equations. Had a confrontation with Fred Hoyle at a meeting of The Royal Society of London. Met Roger Penrose at King’s College, London and was introduced to his idea of space-time singularity.
1965
Awarded Ph.D. for his thesis Properties of Expanding Universes. Became a Fellow in theoretical physics at Gonville and Caius College. Married Jane Wilde. Attended the summer school on general relativity at Cornell University, New York.
1967
First child Robert born.
1968
Joined the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, Cambridge.
1969
The National Health Service loaned a three-wheel invalid car.
1970
Second child Lucy born.
1973
Joined the faculty of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge. Met Boris Zel’dovich at the Institute for Physical Problems of the USSR Academy of Science, Moscow. Co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with G.F.R. Ellis.
1974
Announced the emission of Hawking Radiation by Black Holes at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Conference, Oxford. Became a Fellow of The Royal Society. Went to the US on a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholarship to study cosmology with Kip Thorne at Caltech, Pasadena.
1975
Returned to England. Appointed Reader in Gravitational Physics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge.
1976
Went on an American tour, addressed conferences at Chicago and Boston.
1977
BBC program on Hawking – The Key to the Universe broadcast. Became Professor of Gravitational Physics at Cambridge University, and Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College.
1979
Appointed the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Edited General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey with Werner Israel. Third child Timothy born.
1981
Proposed No-boundary Theorem at the Vatican Conference organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Published Superspace and Supergravity.
1982
Awarded the Commander of the British Empire.
1983
Profiled in the BBC Horizon program. Published The Very Early Universe.
1985
Went to Geneva to work at CERN. Had to be hospitalized, windpipe sliced and a breathing device implanted, lost voice completely. Started using a voice-synthesizer with a computer program Equalizer.
1988
A Brief History of Time published.
1990
Hawking and Jane separated after 25 years of marriage.
1993
Published Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays.
1995
Published The Nature of Space and Time.
6/1/97
Professor Stephen Hawking uses modems to help him conduct research on the universe from the confines of his wheelchair.
20/3/97
Professor Stephen Hawking stays connected to the world through the latest Intel Technology. In a meeting at Cambridge University with Intel Chairman Gordon Moore, renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking demonstrated publicly for the first time his new wireless access to the Internet.
6/3/98
Stephen Hawking presented a lecture for The White House Millennium Program in Washington, DC: 'Imagination and Change -- Science in the Next Millennium'.
14/3/98
Stephen Hawking announces his new theory - that the universe began as an 'instanton', an exploding cocktail of space, time, matter and gravity.
4/5/98
The City College of San Francisco to produce a musical fantasy based on the life of Hawking, "Falling Through A Hole In The Air", to run from May 8th to May 17th.
15/11/98
Professor Hawking on visit to the US, gave a lecture entitled "Is Time Travel Possible?" at California, Texas and other cities.
25/12/99
Larry King interviewed Hawking on his weekend program.
2/11/00
Stephen Hawking and his graduate assistant Chris Burgoyne announced Friday the launch of Hawking's new website. The new site, www.hawking.org.uk, contains much more info on Hawking and upcoming events, presented in a very professional looking format.
26/4/01
The Times reported that Hawking was getting a voice upgrade - his new voice has been developed in India and would have an English Accent.
1/9/01
In an interview in newsmagazine Focus, Professor Hawking commented that he hoped that genetic engineering would be used to augment the human brain so that we can keep pace with the rapid advances in computers and remain superior to machines.
6/11/01
Hawking's new book "The Universe in a Nutshell" out in hardcover from Bantam Doubleday to critical acclaim.
8/1/02
HAPPY BIRTHDAY STEPHEN! - Hawking celebrated his 60th birthday, quite an achievement for someone given a couple of years to live nearly 40 years ago.
"Where do we come from? How did the universe begin? Why is the universe the way it is? How will it end?
"All my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them. If, like me, you have looked at the stars, and tried to make sense of what you see, you too have started to wonder what makes the universe exist. The questions are clear, and deceptively simple. But the answers have always seemed well beyond our reach. Until now.
"The ideas which had grown over two thousand years of observation have had to be radically revised. In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. And our galaxy itself is just one of billions of galaxies, in a universe that is infinite and expanding. But this is far from the end of a long history of inquiry. Huge questions remain to be answered, before we can hope to have a complete picture of the universe we live in.
"I want you to share my excitement at the discoveries, past and present, which have revolutionized the way we think. From the Big Bang to black holes, from dark matter to a possible Big Crunch, our image of the universe today is full of strange sounding ideas, and remarkable truths. The story of how we arrived at this picture is the story of learning to understand what we see."
Stephen Hawking
"It is the most persistent and greatest adventure in human history, this search to understand the universe, how it works and where it came from. It is difficult to imagine that a handful of residents of a small planet circling an insignificant star in a small galaxy have as their aim a complete understanding of the entire universe, a small speck of creation truly believing it is capable of comprehending the whole", says Murray Gell – Mann, one of those who have embarked on this adventure.
Since the time of Galileo, scientists have tried to unravel the mysteries of the universe. Galileo was the first one to define gravitation, going beyond the then accepted ideas and away from the mainstream, pioneering the research of cosmology. The later scientists mainly corrected, redefined and adjusted the original explanation. Newton refined Galileo and Einstein broadened Newton’s basic law to include the entire universe. The present day cosmologist, including Hawking, are trying to do the same to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein’s theories are based on two apparently contradictory postulates – that all motion is relative and that the speed of light is constant. The old kind of geometry, the Euclidean geometry was obsolete for his new way of looking at the universe. A friend asked him to look into the geometry of curved space, just developed by a German Mathematician, Bernhard Riemann.
Einstein was able to get rid of the concept of gravity as a force. Instead it was geometry of the universe, the curved geometry supplied by Riemann, which was responsible for the force that we think of as gravity. Einstein named this curved space – space-time continuum. Along with Einstein, other scientist like Alexander Friedman and Edwin Hubble also tried to unravel the mystery of the universe. Einstein’s theory of relativity, along with Friedman’s interpretation and Hubble’s observations have provided us with a in-the-sense complete, though not necessarily accurate picture of the universe.
Alexander Friedman, a Russian mathematician had solved Einstein’s equations giving two models of an expanding universe. In the first, the universe would expand forever and in the second, the expansion would cease one day. The latter view is held by most modern day cosmologists.
Edwin Hubble was able to give physical evidence of an expanding universe. He discovered that distant galaxies were distributed evenly across the heavens and were flying apart from each other as spray from a shotgun and that they were moving apart at a rate directly in proportion to this distance from the Milky Way. Known as Hubble’s Law, this was the first direct proof of an expanding universe.
Physicists were trying to discover what had happened at the very beginning of the universe, by running Friedman’s model backward in a theoretical contraction, that is going backward in time. They wanted to prove that the universe had a beginning in which all the matter was concentrated in a single point and then there was the Big Bang. In the Big Bang this point exploded, creating our universe, space and time. But it was left to Hawking and Roger Penrose, a colleague mathematician and theoretical physicist at the Birkbeck College at the University of London, to accomplish this fear.
According to this theory the heat of the primeval fireball, of the Big Bang contained the two simplest elements of hydrogen and helium. Galaxies and stars were born, when this fireball expanded and cooled, which in turn were hurled out into space with explosions following the death of massive stars. This debris mixed with the gases from interstellar clouds formed a new generation of stars by collecting into cool dense pockets. The gravitational collapse of a rotating molecular cloud core resulted in the formation of the Sun, which was surrounded by a spinning disk of gas and dust. The dust contained heavy elements, which produced stars, which accumulated to form planetary cores of rock and ice. One such planet had water on it and the carbon chemistry in the liquid oceans of that planet supported living organism, which eventually evolved and conquered the land.
From about 1965 to 1970, Hawking worked on his theory of ‘Big Bang’. Along with Roger Penrose, Hawking worked on singularities in the theory of general relativity devising new mathematical techniques to study this area of cosmology.
According to Hawking, the Big Bang was a singularity and because it was a singularity all the laws of physics broke down. Therefore, the universe would have a beginning and an end, in the sense that the degrees of latitude have a beginning and an end at the North and South Poles, respectively. There is no point in the universe before the Big Bang and yet the Big Bang was a perfectly regular point of space-time. "The universe does not have any beginning or end. It does not have any cause or consequence. It simply is as Hawking states."
Hawking had first put forward this theory at a conference on cosmology held in the Vatican. He had proposed then that Einstein’s general theory of relativity would have to be modified to take quantum mechanics into account, which would mean that there was no singularity. Space-time would be finite in extent, but with no singularities, like the surface of the earth. It is finite in extent, but it does not have any boundary or edge or singularities. (He collaborated with James Hartle to formulate this mathematically in 1983).
This theory gave rise to a lot of philosophical questions as to the role of God in the formation of the universe.
Two astronomical discoveries confirmed Friedman’s theoretical work. One was the chance discovery by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of the background radiation distributed evenly throughout the universe. It was rightly thought to be a relic of the Big Bang. The second finding was that helium comprises about 25 per cent of the mass of all matter in the cosmos and the other 75 per cent is made up mostly of hydrogen. This explained the presence of so much helium in the universe.
By 1971, Hawking had begun to apply his idea to the study of black holes. His study suggests that following the Big Bang, certain objects containing several million tons of mass, but occupying as little space as a proton, were formed. These objects called mini black holes, are unique. Their immense mass and gravity required that the laws of relativity rule them, while their minute size requires that the laws of quantum mechanics apply to them.
Called Hawking radiation, this theory linked gravity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics mathematically for the first time. Hawking’s work has greatly helped and spurred the efforts to theoretically delineate the properties of black holes, objects about which, it was believed, nothing could be known. It also showed these properties’ relationship to the laws of classical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.
Perhaps, what appeals to Hawking is the utter oblivion before the Big Bang as well as in the center of the black hole, when normal time ceases to exist as it did not exist, before the Big Bang. Moreover, in both of them, the two major theories of physics come together – Einstein’s theory of general relativity and Max Planck’s quantum theory.His research further revealed that the surface area of a black hole can increase, but not decrease, that there is a limit to the radiation emitted when black holes collide and that a single black hole cannot cleave into two black holes. In 1974, Hawking calculated that the black holes thermally create and emit subatomic particles, until they exhaust their energy and explode.
SOME SPECIAL WORKS
The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, 1973
Co-author: G F R Ellis
General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, 1979
Co-Editor: Werner Israel.
Three Hundred Years of Gravity
Co-Editor: Werner Israel.
Superspace and Supergravity, 1981
The Very Early universe, 1983
Co-editors: G W Gibbons, S.T.C.Siklos
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, 1988
Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, 1993
The Nature of Space and Time, 1995
The Universe In A Nutshell, 2001
• I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.
• My body may be stuck in this chair, but with the internet my mind can go to the ends of the universe.
• If, like me, you have looked at the stars and tried to make sense of what you see, you have started to wonder what makes the universe exist. The questions are clear and deceptively simple but the answers have always been beyond our reach – until now.
• …both time and space are finite in extent, but they don’t have my boundary or edge… there would be no singularities, and the laws of science would hold everywhere, including at the beginning of the universe.
• There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.
• My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
• 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.
• To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
• We cannot predict what comes out of a singularity…. It is a disaster for science.
• God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can’t see them.
• It matters if you just don’t give up.
• 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’m sure my disability has a bearing on why I’m well known. People are fascinated by the contrast between my very limited physical powers, and the vast nature of the universe I deal with.
• 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 ?
• I think that science itself is morally neutral. But scientists themselves need not be morally neutral…. They have moral responsibilities.
