Brief Answers to the Big Questions

by Stephen Hawking

black hole has entropy, which means that somewhere inside or around the black hole there is enormous randomness.

Electromagnetic waves consist of oscillating electric and magnetic forces that travel at light speed. When they impinge on charged particles, such as the electrons in a radio or TV antenna, they shake the particles back and forth, depositing in the particles the information the waves carry. That information can then be amplified and fed into a loudspeaker or on to a TV screen for humans to comprehend.

when a black hole forms and then subsequently evaporates away completely by emitting radiation, the information that went into the black hole cannot come back out. Information is inevitably lost. This is radical because the laws of quantum physics insist unequivocally that information can never get totally lost.

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 believe that the discovery of these laws has been humankind’s greatest achievement, for it’s these laws of nature – as we now call them – that will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all.

One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God. They mean a human-like being, with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe, and how insignificant and accidental human life is in it, that seems most implausible.

Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either.