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.

After my expectations had been reduced to zero, every new day became a bonus, and I began to appreciate everything I did have. While there’s life, there is hope.

We are all time travellers, journeying together into the future.

Be brave, be curious, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done.

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.

I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science.

space and energy were spontaneously invented in an event we now call the Big Bang.

The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called ‘negative energy’.

So what does this mean in our quest to find out if there is a God? It means that if the universe adds up to nothing, then you don’t need a God to create it. The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

What could cause the spontaneous appearance of a universe? At first, it seems a baffling problem – after all, in our daily lives things don’t just materialise out of the blue. You can’t just click your fingers and summon up a cup of coffee when you feel like one. You have to make it out of other stuff like coffee beans, water and perhaps some milk and sugar. But travel down into this coffee cup – through the milk particles, down to the atomic level and right down to the sub-atomic level, and you enter a world where conjuring something out of nothing is possible. At least, for a short while. That’s because, at this scale, particles such as protons behave according to the laws of nature we call quantum mechanics. And they really can appear at random, stick around for a while and then vanish again, to reappear somewhere else.

You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.

When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth – the Earth is a sphere that doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.

We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.

It is a matter of common experience that things get more disordered and chaotic with time. This observation even has its own law, the so-called second law of thermodynamics. This law says that the total amount of disorder, or entropy, in the universe always increases with time. However, the law refers only to the total amount of disorder. The order in one body can increase provided that the amount of disorder in its surroundings increases by a greater amount.

All I can say is that if governments were hiding something they are doing a poor job of extracting useful information from the aliens.