Brief Answers to the Big Questions

by Stephen Hawking

When we see the Earth from space, we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity, and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message; one planet, one human race.

I was born exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo,

While there’s life, there is hope.

The big question in cosmology in the early 1960s was did the universe have a beginning?

that a point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God to determine how the universe would start off.

Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.

Aristarchus took it even further. He suggested that stars were not chinks in the floor of heaven, as his contemporaries believed, but that stars were other suns, like ours, only a very long way away. What a stunning realisation it must have been. The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws – laws that can be understood by the human mind.

Something very wonderful happened to time at the instant of the Big Bang. Time itself began.

The discovery of the expansion of the universe was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.

“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”’