Stephen Hawking on the Creation of the Universe
"At the Big Bang, the universe and time itself came into existence, so that
this is the first cause. If we could understand the Big Bang, we would
know why the universe is the way it is. It used to be thought that
it was impossible to apply the laws of science to the beginning
of the universe, and indeed that it was sacrilegious to try. But
recent developments in unifying the two pillars of twentieth-century
science, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and the
Quantum Theory, have encouraged us to believe that it may
be possible to find laws that hold even at the creation
of the universe. In that case, everything in the universe
would be determined by the laws of science. So if we understood
those laws, we would in a sense be Masters of the Universe."
--Stephen Hawking (Cambridge, July 28, 1997),
from the Foreword of
Stephen Hawking's Universe: The Cosmos Explained
by David Filkin.
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