“As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control.”
- January 8, 1942 – March 14, 2018
- British
- Theoretical physicist, science writer
- Announced the black hole singularity theorem and Hawking radiation, and contributed to the popularization of science with his book “Talking about the Universe”
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Quote
“As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control.”
Explanation
This quote reflects Stephen Hawking’s early curiosity and hands-on approach to learning. As a child, Hawking’s interest in understanding how things worked and gaining the ability to control them foreshadowed his later work in theoretical physics and cosmology. The desire to build and control complicated models speaks to his instinctive engineering mindset—a trait that often aligns with future physicists and scientists. By taking abstract ideas and creating physical representations of them, he was honing skills that would eventually allow him to conceptualize the universe in terms of mathematical models and physical laws.
Hawking’s collaboration with a friend on these projects also reflects the importance of teamwork and shared curiosity in the development of scientific ideas. This idea of experimenting with and manipulating systems resonates with how scientific models work—they simplify complex phenomena in the real world, allowing us to better understand and predict how things behave. This hands-on attitude would become a central part of his later work, as he modeled abstract concepts like black holes and the origin of the universe.
In modern times, this early experience of building and controlling models can be seen as a precursor to the way young people today engage with technology, such as through the use of programming, robotics, or virtual reality. Hawking’s early interest in controlling models may have even been a precursor to the computational methods he would later use in his groundbreaking work in cosmology. It demonstrates that the drive to understand and control our world often begins with simple curiosity and experimentation.
