Maxwell’s big ideas was that magnetism and electricity are actually two facets of the same thing. ibid.
Light is an electromagnetic wave too. ibid.
Speed is relative to your perspective. ibid.
Gravity is the warping of space/time. ibid.
Inside the atoms the universe was revealed to be a strange, chaotic place. ibid.
The tiny electrons appeared to be defying the laws of physics. ibid.
It seems that M Theory is the system of laws that governs everything – the Grand Design. ibid.
Is there a meaning to life? Is there a reason we exist? Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design: The Meaning of Life
Philosophy is dead. I believe Science holds the key. ibid.
Descartes proposed that humans are made of two distinct components – the body and the mind. ibid.
Perhaps I am deluded about my own free will. ibid.
Our brains are just another complex system. ibid.
The Simulation Theory: For all we know every one of our perceived realities is simply fed to us by some all-powerful super-computer. ibid.
The concept of model-dependent reality. ibid.
It is every one of us that gives meaning to the universe. ibid.
The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws – laws that can be understood by the human mind. Stephen Hawking’s Great Design: Did God Create the Universe?
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. Stephen Hawking, Reality on the Rocks 1995
How does our universe work and how did it begin? Brave New World with Stephen Hawking II: Technology, Channel 4 2011
There was no beginning of the universe. Past, present, future. The universe has always existed and it always will. It stays the same. Hawking 2004 starring Benedict Cumberbatch & Michael Brandon & Tom Hodgkins & Lisa Dillon & Phoebe Nicholls & Adam Godley & Peter Firth & Tom Ward & John Sessions & Matthew Marsh & Alice Eve & Rohan Siva et al, director, Fred Hoyle on the box
There’s nothing wrong with feeling in science. Feeling matters. ibid. Hawking
It’s gradual paralysis. ibid. doctor
Two years probably. No more. ibid. dad
You have to fight for what you believe in tooth and nail or the buggers will stop you. ibid. tutor to Hawking
The physics is wrong. ibid. Hawking to Hoyle
If it’s true that we’re all from the centre of a star, every atom of us from the centre star, then we’re all the same thing ... all been recycled thousands of times ... therefore it’s only me out there. So what is there to be afraid of? What is there that needs solace-seeking? Nothing. There’s nothing to be afraid of because it’s all us. The trouble is, we have been separated by being born and given a name, an identity, being individuated. We’ve been separated from the oneness and that’s what religion exploits – that people have this yearning to be part of the overall one again – so they exploit that, they call it God, they say he has rules, and I think that’s cruel. I think you do it absent religion. George Carlin
If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little. George Carlin
The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. Robert G Ingersoll
Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. Arthur C Clarke
I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here. Arthur C Clarke, November 1996
Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe. Albert Einstein, attributions inc Humphry Davy
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. Albert Einstein, cited Principles of Research 1918
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. Albert Einstein, attributions & variations, cited Frederick S Perls, ‘Ego, Hunger & Aggression’ 1947
Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. Albert Einstein
For every one billion particles of antimatter there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained – and that’s our present universe. Albert Einstein
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. C S Lewis
Don’t let me catch anyone talking about the universe in my department. Ernest Rutherford, cited John Kendrew, BBC Radio Talk 26th July 1968
It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil – which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama. Richard Feynman, cited James Gleick ‘Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman’ 1992
One thing is that I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs, in different degrees of certainty, about different things. But I’m not absolutely sure of anything and of many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, if I can’t figure it out, then I go onto something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me. Richard Feynman, interview BBC Horizon 1981
Our universe seems to be made up of stars and planets and gas that are clumped together with vast gaps in between them. On an atomic level it’s pretty much all space. Dara O’Briain’s Science Club II, BBC 2012
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. ibid.
The story so far: In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it’s pretty damn complicated in the first place. Douglas Adams
The chances of finding out what’s really going on in the universe are so remote, the only thing to do is hang the sense of it and keep yourself occupied. Douglas Adams
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe. Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?