Science & Tech Quote by Stephen Hawking

Hawking’s genius here isn’t the cosmology; it’s the rhetorical trap he sets for science itself. He starts by granting physics its most flattering self-image: disciplined, mathematical, predictive. Then he slides in the heretical move - the claim that even the best model is, at heart, a description in search of a reason. A universe can be exquisitely “solved” and still feel metaphysically unaccounted for. The line exposes a quiet anxiety at the center of modern physics: explanation keeps winning battles while meaning keeps retreating.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “The usual approach” sounds like a mild procedural note, but it’s a gentle indictment of an entire epistemology. “Cannot answer” isn’t anti-science; it’s boundary drawing, the kind that makes hardheaded empiricists nervous because it smells like theology without the incense. And then Hawking lands the punch with a joke that isn’t a joke: “go to all the bother of existing.” The cosmic question is made domestic, almost bureaucratic, as if reality has filed paperwork it didn’t need to. That everyday diction smuggles awe past the reader’s defenses.

Context matters: late-20th-century physics was increasingly confident about origin stories - inflation, quantum cosmology, grand unification dreams. Hawking was both architect and critic of that confidence. The subtext is a dare to his own tribe: if your account of the universe leaves “why anything at all” untouched, is that humility, or is it an evasion dressed up as rigor?