Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSAis an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge. His scientific works include a collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. Hawking was the first to set forth a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth8 January 1942
CityOxford, England
Stephen Hawking quotes about
Most people don't have time to master the very mathematical details of theoretical physics.
Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.
I had not expected 'A Brief History of Time' to be a best seller.
The human race may be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.
I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space.
My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected.
The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.
I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.
Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.
My three children have brought me great joy.
We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.
It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.
There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.
I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice - if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair.