Stephen Hawking — "I believe that the universe is infinite, and that there are an infinite number o…"
I believe that the universe is infinite, and that there are an infinite number of universes.
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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.
Details
Likely from a public lecture or interview, discussing multiverse theories.
Date: Approx. 2000s
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Found in 1 providers: grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Reality extends without limit — our universe isn't a closed, finite bubble but something boundless. Beyond that, existence itself may be plural: an enormous collection of separate universes, each potentially governed by different physical laws. The idea reframes humanity's place in reality from residents of the one and only cosmos to inhabitants of a single universe among a potentially limitless number of them.
Relevance to Stephen Hawking
Hawking devoted his career to understanding the universe's origins and structure. His Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal described a universe with no distinct starting moment, compatible with infinite or self-creating cosmologies. He engaged seriously with M-theory, which predicts a vast landscape of possible universes. Known for fearless intellectual courage despite his ALS diagnosis, Hawking consistently pushed physics toward its most ambitious questions about the ultimate nature and scope of existence.
The era
During Hawking's lifetime, multiverse theory evolved from philosophical speculation into serious physics. Alan Guth's 1981 inflation theory led to the eternal inflation concept, implying bubble universes are constantly spawning. The 1990s string theory revolution and M-theory predicted up to 10^500 distinct vacuum states, each a potential universe. Meanwhile, WMAP and Planck satellite data confirmed the universe's geometry is strikingly flat, consistent with infinite extent, making Hawking's claim scientifically credible rather than merely poetic.
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