We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.
Stephen HawkingRead
As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a child's curiosity and ambition to understand and manipulate the world through creation. It highlights the joy of discovery and collaboration in learning.
In this quote, Stephen Hawking reminisces about his childhood fascination with understanding the mechanics of the world around him. His desire to build models with a friend signifies the importance of curiosity and teamwork in the pursuit of knowledge, encouraging exploration and innovation from a young age.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of curiosity in education.
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.
I was not a good student. I did not spend much time at college; I was too busy enjoying myself.
The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.
In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.
If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.
We are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids. This does not deny our humanity; it does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful. But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going.
It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.
[In mathematics] There are two kinds of mistakes. There are fatal mistakes that destroy a theory, but there are also contingent ones, which are useful in testing the stability of a theory.
The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it - language, art, science - seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to 'replay' evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn't.
...99 percent confident that the world really was getting warmer and that there was a high degree of probability that it was due to human-made greenhouse gases.
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