We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.
Stephen HawkingRead
I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people.
Interpretation
Stephen Hawking emphasizes the importance of making science accessible and understandable to everyone.
In this quote, Stephen Hawking expresses his desire to demystify the field of physics, suggesting that it does not have to be daunting or exclusive to experts. He hopes that by raising the profile of science, he can inspire ordinary people to engage with and understand fundamental scientific concepts, thus breaking down barriers to knowledge and encouraging greater public interest in the subject.
In practice
In a lecture about making complex subjects like physics understandable to high school students.
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.
Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.
Working out another system to replace Newton's laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one's common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.
We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
Alone among businesses, the fossil-fuel industry is allowed to dump its main waste, carbon dioxide, for free.
The reality is the majority of us will not get off this planet. So the long run is, some kind of space exploration has to benefit us here on Earth.
But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.
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