Stephen Hawking · 176 pages
Rating: (9.7K votes)
“The most remarkable property of the universe is that it has spawned creatures able to ask questions.”
“We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars. We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary, average-sized, yellow star, near the outer edge of one of the spiral arms.”
“As often happens in science, discoveries are made in the pursuit of an elusive (and sometimes nonexistent) goal.”
“The discovery that the universe was expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.”
“one has a singularity contained within a region of space-time known as a black hole.”
“I realized that if one reversed the direction of time in Penrose’s theorem so that the collapse became an expansion, the conditions of his theorem would still hold, provided the universe were roughly like a Friedmann model on large scales at the present time.”
“There is no truer meditation than music and no journey of discovery greater than that of looking within. A”
“Show me a hero and I'll show you a man enslaved by his competence.”
“Who can be 'agents unto themselves' if they are in bondage to others and have to accept their terms?”
“violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.”
“My friend Madea has "attitude" that comes with wisdom. Back in our teens and twenties, we thought we knew everything and made all those foolish mistakes. Then, when we got a little older, at thirty, we started getting these flashes of light, revelations of what a great and lucky thing it is that we didn't get caught doing those stupid things back then. Around forty, if we are lucky, we stop lying to ourselves. Fifty and above, we've run out of patience for foolishness. Take me to the bottom line.”
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