Stephen Hawking

“I don't want to write an autobiography because I would become public property with no privacy left.”

“It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreason...”

“The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to minus 271.3*C - not much good for defrostin...”

“If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size....”

“A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazi...”

“When we understand string theory, we will know how the universe began. It won't have much effect on how we live, but it is important to understand where we come from and what we can expect t...”

“Time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions.”

“I had a bet with Gordon Kane of Michigan University that the Higgs particle wouldn't be found.”

“We live in a bewildering world.”

“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.”

“There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.”

“Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology and the fundamental equations...”

“In my school, the brightest boys did math and physics, the less bright did physics and chemistry, and the least bright did biology. I wanted to do math and physics, but my father made me do...”

“I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.”

“Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperatu...”

“It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.”

“It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of in...”

“There are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.”

“Only black holes of very low mass would emit a significant amount of radiation.”

“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 e...”