“Yet all the evidence is that it evolves in a regular way according to certain laws. It would therefore seem reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the boundary conditions.”
"The Quantum State of the Universe", Nuclear Physics (1984) <!-- B239, p. 258 -->
Context: Many people would claim that the boundary conditions are not part of physics but belong to metaphysics or religion. They would claim that nature had complete freedom to start the universe off any way it wanted. That may be so, but it could also have made it evolve in a completely arbitrary and random manner. Yet all the evidence is that it evolves in a regular way according to certain laws. It would therefore seem reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the boundary conditions.
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Stephen Hawking 122
British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author 1942–2018Related quotes
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 156-157
Context: To a reasonable mind the Divine attributes must appear, not diminished or reduced in any way, by supposing a creation by law, but infinitely exalted. It is the narrowest of all views of the Deity, and characteristic of a humble class of intellects, to suppose him acting constantly in particular ways for particular occasions. It, for one thing, greatly detracts from his foresight, the most undeniable of all the attributes of Omnipotence. It lowers him towards the level of our own humble intellects. Much more worthy of him it surely is, to suppose that all things have been commissioned by him from the first, though neither is he absent from a particle of the current of natural affairs in one sense seeing that the whole system is continually supported by his providence.
Committee on the Judiary, United States House of Representatives, Plaintiff, v. Donald F. McGahn II, Defendant. (Nov 25, 2019)
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
B 374
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)
Context: A plant, an animal, the regular order of nature — probably also the disposition of the whole universe — give manifest evidence that they are possible only by means of and according to ideas; that, indeed, no one creature, under the individual conditions of its existence, perfectly harmonizes with the idea of the most perfect of its kind — just as little as man with the idea of humanity, which nevertheless he bears in his soul as the archetypal standard of his actions; that, notwithstanding, these ideas are in the highest sense individually, unchangeably, and completely determined, and are the original causes of things; and that the totality of connected objects in the universe is alone fully adequate to that idea.
Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 15
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance with the laws of the world of the senses; but it must not therefore be imagined that they desire escape from the region of law. Nothing lawless can show the least reason why it should exist, or could at best have more than an appearance of life.
§ 5
From Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius
28 May 1794
On the Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1794)