We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.
Stephen HawkingRead
If everything in the universe depends upon everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation.
Interpretation
Understanding the universe requires acknowledging the interconnectedness of its components.
Stephen Hawking's quote emphasizes the complexity of the universe, suggesting that all elements are interdependent. Therefore, isolating parts of a problem may lead to incomplete solutions, as the entirety of the system must be considered to truly understand its behavior and nature.
In practice
In a lecture on systems thinking, to illustrate how complex problems cannot be solved by looking at individual components.
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.
I was not a good student. I did not spend much time at college; I was too busy enjoying myself.
The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.
In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.
The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?
If you want to become a fossil, you actually need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface. And then you hope that one of us lot will walk around and find small pieces of you.
We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.
One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
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