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Quote by Craig F. Bohren

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Atmospheric Thermodynamics

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Author

Craig F. Bohren

Craig F. Bohren is a renowned author known for his works in the fields of optics and meteorology. Born in 1940, his contributions have significantly impacted scientific education and public understanding of science. more

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“It also means that cosmology doesn’t really have a well-defined concept of “now.” Or rather, the “now” you experience is highly specific to you, to where you are and to what you are doing. What does it mean to say “that supernova is going off now” if we see the light of it now, and we can watch the star explode now, but that light has been traveling for millions of years? The thing we’re watching is essentially fully in the past, but the “now” for that exploded star is unobservable to us, and we won’t receive any knowledge of it for millions of years, which makes it, to us, not “now,” but the future. When we think of the universe as existing in spacetime—a kind of all-encompassing universal grid in which space is three axes and time is a fourth—we can just think of the past and the future as distant points on the same fabric, stretching across the cosmos from its infancy to its end. To someone sitting at a different point on this fabric, an event that is part of the future to us might be the distant past to them. And the light (or any information) from an event that we won’t see for millennia is already streaming across spacetime toward us “now.” Is that event in the future, or the past, or, perhaps, both? It all depends on perspective.”

“In the meantime, we'll continue on, making new pathc through the woods to see what we might find hiding there. Someday, deep in the unknown wilderness of the distant future, the Sun will expand, the Earth will die, and the cosmos itself will come to an end. In the meantime, we have the entire universe to explore, pushing our creativity to its limits to find new ways of knowing our cosmic home. We can learn and create extraordinary things, and we can share them with each other. And as long as we are thinking creatures, we will never stop asking: "What comes next?”

“You are easy to explain – even to you.  You may call yourself a soul if that pleases you, but what you are is a nexus of electromagnetic forces, so arranged that all the interconnections and interrelationships are exactly imitative of those of your brain in your Universe-existence – down to the smallest detail.  Therefore you have your capacity for thought, your memories, your personality.  It still seems to you that you are you.”

“Millions of books have been published in English language. Can you merge them all into one book? Sounds impossible? Merge all the words of all the books in a single file, delete multiple occurrences of the same word, arrange the words in alphabetical order. What do you get? A small book with list of all English words. A book smaller than a dictionary. This world seems so complex. More outward you go, more complex it gets. More inward you go, simpler it gets. At the origin, it’s so simple that we can’t describe it using complicated human language.”

“Your legs, hands, eyes etc. have come together in ONE PLACE to create a system which is called a “Body”. It helps you fulfill your desires. Your friends, family, co-workers, leaders etc. have come together in ONE TIME to create a system which is called “life”. The day you start feeling that you are the brain of this system, the day you start feeling that you are the origin of everything around you, everyone will seem to be working to fulfill your desires.”