

Mindy Sparks
October 19, 2018

Stephen Hawking, who died in March this year, was one of the most significant scientists of the world and the most prolific astrophysicist of the contemporary era. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate, "he writes".


"I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science", Hawking wrote in the book."If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask: What role is there for God?" "There are forms of intelligent life out there", writes Hawking. Hawking's family and colleagues worked, er, religiously to complete the manuscript with help from his archives.

They include the question "is time travel possible" - which the scientist said "can't be ruled out". I do not want to offend any believer, but I think science has a more convincing explanation than a god creator.

Hawking previously said he did not believe in God and admitted to being an atheist, Time reported, but he also made several other interesting conclusions in his latest book.

He also believes humans will be capable of extraordinary space travel reaching "anywhere in the Solar System within the next hundred years".

And he raised a very good question: "How good is the track record of the human race in using advances in technology for the good of ordinary people?"

"It sometimes feels like he's still here because we talk about him and hear his voice - and then we have the reminder that he's left us", Lucy Hawking said for AFP. The book was meant to collect Hawking's answers to the questions he received most frequently from answer seekers. "We need to be wary of answering back until we have developed a bit further".

Hawking had been a critic of the United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union, and called Donald Trump a "demagogue" in 2016. Lucy explained that her father often brought up "how we seem to have lost the ability to look outward, and we are increasingly looking inward to ourselves".

Acknowledging that science had yet to overcome major challenges for the world - including climate change, overpopulation, species extinction, deforestation and the degradation of the oceans - the physicist still urged young people "to look up at the stars and not down at your feet".

"We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe", Hawking concludes the first chapter of his final book, "and for that I am extremely grateful".

Other reports by Iphone Fresh

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