Stephen Hawking — "I have always been fascinated by the big questions: Where did we come from? How …"
I have always been fascinated by the big questions: Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? What is the nature of reality?
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More from Stephen Hawking
"I tell my kids: Don't spend all your time at the computer. But then I realize, I do that myself all day."
"The human race is a single, genetic family. When a child is born, it is born into the human race, not into some particular tribe or nation. The human race is one. And we are all brothers and sisters."
"There are no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope."
"The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believ…"
"My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."
About Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)
British theoretical physicist whose Hawking radiation work and A Brief History of Time (1988) brought black-hole physics to a mass audience while he lived with ALS for 55 years. Closely associated with Roger Penrose (his collaborator on singularity theorems) and Carl Sagan (fellow popularizer who wrote Brief History's foreword). For an intellectual contrast, see William Lane Craig, American philosopher of religion — Craig's Kalam cosmological argument depends on the Big Bang requiring a divine first cause; Hawking's no-boundary proposal was specifically designed to remove the moment that would require one — the cleanest cosmology-vs-natural-theology contrast in modern thought.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Some questions about existence are so fundamental they captivate the human mind across generations: our origins, the birth of the cosmos, and what reality actually is beneath its surface. These aren't idle curiosities but the deepest problems science and philosophy can pursue. Wrestling with them drives genuine intellectual life and pushes human understanding to its limits.
Relevance to Stephen Hawking
Hawking dedicated his career to exactly these questions, developing groundbreaking theories about the Big Bang, black hole radiation, and spacetime. Confined to a wheelchair by ALS from his twenties, his mind remained fixated on the universe's largest scales. His books A Brief History of Time and The Grand Design were direct attempts to answer these questions for a mass audience.
The era
Hawking worked during the golden age of theoretical cosmology: the 1960s–2000s saw confirmation of the Big Bang via cosmic microwave background radiation, discovery of dark energy, and quantum field theory's maturation. Public interest in these questions exploded alongside his career, as science communication became culturally significant and cosmology shifted from pure abstraction to empirically testable theory.
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