Author of quotes: Stephen Hawking. Page 3

Before diagnosis, life seemed to me dull. It seemed that in it there is nothing worthwhile to do. After leaving the hospital, I felt sentenced to death and suddenly realized that I very much could have, if the execution of the sentence was postponed.

School science is often taught in a dry and interesting form. Children learn rote memorization to pass the exam, and not see the connection of science with the world.

Now I'm definitely happier. Before I thought life was boring. But the prospect of dying early made me realize that life is worth living. So much you can do, everyone can do so much!

We just developed are descendants of monkeys on a minor planet from an unremarkable star. But we have a chance to understand the Universe. That makes us special.

God could not create the Universe in seven days because he didn't have time, because before the Big Bang time did not exist.

The anthropic principle exists in two versions - weak and strong. The weak anthropic principle States that in a Universe that is large or infinite in space or time, the conditions necessary for the development of intelligent beings would be in some areas, limited in space and time. Therefore, the intelligent beings in these regions should not be surprised to find that the area where they live, meets the conditions necessary for their existence. So rich, living in an affluent area, did not see any poverty around them.
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Few people objected to the fairness and applicability of the weak anthropic principle. Some go much further, offering it a strong option. It lies in the fact that there are either many different universes or many different regions of a single universe, each of which has its own initial configuration and, perhaps, its own set of scientific laws. In most of these universes the conditions were unsuitable for the development of complicated organisms; only a few like our own, the universes could evolve intelligent beings and these sentient beings, the question arose: "Why is our universe the way we see it?" Then the answer is simple: "If the universe was different, there wouldn't be us!"

During the seventies I was mostly engaged in the study of black holes, but in 1981, when I was at a conference on cosmology organized in the Vatican by the Jesuit priests, I woke up again interest in the question of the origin and death of the Universe. The Catholic Church made a big mistake in his relationship with Galileo, when trying to bend the law a question of science, announced that the Sun goes around the Earth. Now, centuries later, the Church decided to invite experts and get their advice on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were given an audience with the Pope. He said that the evolution of the Universe after the big Bang, you can explore, but should not venture into the big Bang, because it was the moment of Creation and therefore a Divine act. I was very glad that Dad didn't know the topic just made me report on the possibility that space-time has no boundaries, i.e. it has no beginning, and therefore no moment of Creation. I didn't want to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I think I have something in common though is that by a strange coincidence, I was born exactly 300 years after his death!

There are other models to explain the results of observations of Cygnus X-1 without the involvement of black holes, but they are quite artificial. The black hole appears to be the only perfectly natural explanation for the observations. Despite this, I made a bet with Keane Thorne of the California Institute of technology, which is actually in Cygnus X-1 black hole! For me this bet is a kind of insurance. I'm very much involved with black holes, and all my work goes down the drain if it turns out that black holes do not exist. But in this case a comfort, I won the bet, and I for four years I will be free to the magazine "Private Eye". If black holes do exist, the TRC will be a year to the magazine "Penthouse". Placing a bet in 1975, we were 80% certain that Cygnus X-1 is a black hole. Now our confidence has increased, I would say to 95%, but the bet remains in force.

The computer memory is, roughly speaking, a device containing elements that can be in one of two States. A simple example of such a device is abacus the ancient abacus. In its simplest form is a set of horizontal wires, each of which is mounted the bead. Each bead is in one of two positions. Until the memory of the computer nothing is entered, it is in a chaotic state in which both the possible locations of the beads are equiprobable (the beads on the wires distributed randomly). After the memory proteinopathy system, which we must remember, her condition will be very specific, depending on the state of the system. (Each bead on the accounts will be either in the right or in the left end of the wire). So, computer memory has moved from disorder to an ordered state. But in order to be sure that the memory is in the right state, you have to spend a certain amount of energy (for example, for throwing of beads or the power of the computer). This energy goes into heat and thereby increase the degree of disorder in the Universe. It can be shown that this increase in disorder is always greater than the increase in the orderliness of the memory itself. The need for a computer cooling fan, says that when the computer writes something to the memory, the total disorder in the Universe still increases.
The direction of time in which a computer remembers the past is the same, in which disorder increases.
Consequently, our subjective sense of direction of time, the psychological arrow of time is defined in our brain by the thermodynamic arrow of time. Like a computer, we must remember things in the same order in which entropy increases. The second law of thermodynamics becomes almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. It's hard to argue with this logic!

Surfing the Internet is as brainless idea, as the constant switching of channels.

I think computer viruses should be viewed as a form of life. It says a lot about human nature that the only form of life that we have created to date, brings only destruction. We create life in the image and likeness.

Our modern computers still lag behind in processing power from simple brain of an earthworm.

Any alien life we meet is likely to be either much more primitive or much more advanced.

Some people blame the atom bomb Einstein because he discovered the relationship between mass and energy, but with the same success can be accused of Newton in the plane crash because he discovered gravity.