Stephen Hawking Two Quotations

The doctor who diagnosed me with ALS, or motor neuron disease, told me that it would kill me in two or three years.

Maybe I don't have the most common kind of motor neuron disease, which usually kills in two or three years.

When two's company, three's the result!

Bodies like the earth are not made to move on curved orbits by a force called gravity; instead, they follow the nearest thing to a straight path in a curved space, which is called a geodesic. A geodesic is the shortest (or longest) path between two nearby points.

So great a contribution to physics was Two New Sciences that scholars have long maintained that the book anticipated Isaac Newton's laws of motion.

If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space. If we are the only intellegent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue. . . . Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.

A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: it must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

When I was first diagnosed with ALS, I was given two years to live. Now 45 years later, I am doing pretty well.

Thirty years ago I was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, and given two and a half years to live. I have always wondered how they could be so precise about the half.

Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.