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Black Holes Quotes

Browse 40 quotes about Black Holes.

Black Holes Quotes

“Look at the universe! What do you see? An order? Tranquillity? A divine peace? You fool! You ignorant! Over there, galaxies are colliding, suns are exploding, black holes swallowing stars! Now look at the universe again! What do you see? A disorder? Chaos? Anything savage? You see a hell? Now, you see the truth!”

UniverseStarsSpaceMehmet Murat Ildan QuotesUniversalChaosDisorderTurkish LiteratureTurkish QuotesTurkish WritersMehmet Murat Ildan QuotationsIldan Wise SayingsTurkish Wisdom WordsTurkish PlaywrightsTurkish QuotationsTurkish AuthorsIldan WisdomIldan WordsUniverse QuotesTurkish AphorismsTurkish SayingsTurkish ThinkersBlack HoleUniverse QuotationsUniversal TruthsBlack HolesDivine OrderUniverse QuoteBlack Hole QuotesDivine Order QuotesDivine Peace
Author:Mehmet Murat Ildan
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“If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing? That is why there must be a law like gravity. Because gravity is attractive, gravitational energy is negative: One has to do work to separate a gravitationally bound system, such as the earth and moon. This negative energy can balance the positive energy needed to create matter, but it’s not quite that simple. The negative gravitational energy of the earth, for example, is less than a billionth of the positive energy of the matter particles the earth is made of. A body such as a star will have more negative gravitational energy, and the smaller it is (the closer the different parts of it are to each other), the greater this negative gravitational energy will be. But before it can become greater than the positive energy of the matter, the star will collapse to a black hole, and black holes have positive energy. That’s why empty space is stable. Bodies such as stars or black holes cannot just appear out of nothing. But a whole universe can. Because gravity shapes space and time, it allows space-time to be locally stable but globally unstable. On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing in the manner described in Chapter 6. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

LifeUniverseEnergyNothingBlack Holes
Book:The Grand Design
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“During our glorious year of 1974–5, while I was dithering over gravitational waves, and Stephen was leading our merged group in black hole research, Stephen himself had an insight even more radical than his discovery of Hawking radiation. He gave a compelling, almost airtight proof that, when a black hole forms and then subsequently evaporates away completely by emitting radiation, the information that went into the black hole cannot come back out. Information is inevitably lost. This is radical because the laws of quantum physics insist unequivocally that information can never get totally lost. So, if Stephen was right, black holes violate a most fundamental quantum mechanical law. How could this be? The black hole’s evaporation is governed by the combined laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity—the ill-understood laws of quantum gravity; and so, Stephen reasoned, the fiery marriage of relativity and quantum physics must lead to information destruction. The great majority of theoretical physicists find this conclusion abhorrent. They are highly sceptical. And so, for forty-four years they have struggled with this so-called information-loss paradox. It is a struggle well worth the effort and anguish that have gone into it, since this paradox is a powerful key for understanding the quantum gravity laws. Stephen himself, in 2003, found a way that information might escape during the hole’s evaporation, but that did not quell theorists’ struggles. Stephen did not prove that the information escapes, so the struggle continues. In my eulogy for Stephen, at the interment of his ashes at Westminster Abbey, I memorialised that struggle with these words: “Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions. And Hawking’s questions themselves keep on giving, generating breakthroughs decades later. When ultimately we master the quantum gravity laws, and comprehend fully the birth of our universe, it may largely be by standing on the shoulders of Hawking.”

UniversePhysicsBlack HolesInformation Paradox
Book:Brief Answers to the Big Questions
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“This was a golden age, in which we solved most of the major problems in black hole theory even before there was any observational evidence for black holes. In fact, we were so successful with the classical general theory of relativity that I was at a bit of a loose end in 1973 after the publication with George Ellis of our book The Large Scale Structure of Space–Time. My work with Penrose had shown that general relativity broke down at singularities, so the obvious next step would be to combine general relativity—the theory of the very large—with quantum theory—the theory of the very small. In particular, I wondered, can one have atoms in which the nucleus is a tiny primordial black hole, formed in the early universe? My investigations revealed a deep and previously unsuspected relationship between gravity and thermodynamics, the science of heat, and resolved a paradox that had been argued over for thirty years without much progress: how could the radiation left over from a shrinking black hole carry all of the information about what made the black hole? I discovered that information is not lost, but it is not returned in a useful way—like burning an encyclopedia but retaining the smoke and ashes. To answer this, I studied how quantum fields or particles would scatter off a black hole. I was expecting that part of an incident wave would be absorbed, and the remainder scattered. But to my great surprise I found there seemed to be emission from the black hole itself. At first, I thought this must be a mistake in my calculation. But what persuaded me that it was real was that the emission was exactly what was required to identify the area of the horizon with the entropy of a black hole. This entropy, a measure of the disorder of a system, is summed up in this simple formula which expresses the entropy in terms of the area of the horizon, and the three fundamental constants of nature, c, the speed of light, G, Newton’s constant of gravitation, and ħ, Planck’s constant. The emission of this thermal radiation from the black hole is now called Hawking radiation and I’m proud to have discovered it.”

UniversePhysicsGravityQuantum TheoryBlack Holes
Book:Brief Answers to the Big Questions
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“On September 14, 2015, the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors (built by a 1,000-person project that Rai and I and Ronald Drever co-founded, and Barry Barish organised, assembled and led) registered their first gravitational waves. By comparing the wave patterns with predictions from computer simulations, our team concluded that the waves were produced when two heavy black holes, 1.3 billion light years from Earth, collided. This was the beginning of gravitational-wave astronomy. Our team had achieved, for gravitational waves, what Galileo achieved for electromagnetic waves. I am confident that, over the coming several decades, the next generation of gravitational-wave astronomers will use these waves not only to test Stephen’s laws of black hole physics, but also to detect and monitor gravitational waves from the singular birth of our universe, and thereby test Stephen’s and others’ ideas about how our universe came to be.”

UniversePhysicsBlack HolesGravitational WavesLigo
Book:Brief Answers to the Big Questions
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“On September 14, 2015, the LIGO gravitational-wave detectors (built by a 1,000-person project that Rai and I and Ronald Drever co-founded, and Barry Barish organised, assembled and led) registered their first gravitational waves. By comparing the wave patterns with predictions from computer simulations, our team concluded that the waves were produced when two heavy black holes, 1.3 billion light years from Earth, collided. This was the beginning of gravitational-wave astronomy. Our team had achieved, for gravitational waves, what Galileo achieved for electromagnetic waves. I am confident that, over the coming several decades, the next generation of gravitational-wave astronomers will use these waves not only to test Stephen’s laws of black hole physics, but also to detect and monitor gravitational waves from the singular birth of our universe, and thereby test Stephen’s and others’ ideas about how our universe came to be. During our glorious year of 1974–5, while I was dithering over gravitational waves, and Stephen was leading our merged group in black hole research, Stephen himself had an insight even more radical than his discovery of Hawking radiation. He gave a compelling, almost airtight proof that, when a black hole forms and “and then subsequently evaporates away completely by emitting radiation, the information that went into the black hole cannot come back out. Information is inevitably lost.”

PhysicsBlack HolesGravitational WavesLigo
Book:Brief Answers to the Big Questions
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“If black holes were of a 3d construct, then it is feasible that we should have seen a tail end of one by now, but we haven't. This leads me to believe that black holes are actually flat. We only perceive them as having depth, just like the 3d paintings that we see around the world. This then would also lead me to believe that there is no outlet within this universe unless we do don't recognize the exit mechanism. A whirlpool has depth and volume, but say if it didn't, then would that too be a black hole within a water world?”

Quote Of The DayPhysicsAnthony T HincksHincksOuter SpaceWhirlpoolsAlbert EinsteinBlack Holes
Author:Anthony T. Hincks
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“Despite this, I have a bet with Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology that in fact Cygnus X-1 does not contain a black hole! This is a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would bring me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kip will get one year of Penthouse. When we made the bet, in 1975, we were 80 per cent certain that Cygnus was a black hole. By now, I would say that we are about 95 per cent certain, but the bet has yet to be settled.”

PhysicsBlack HolesStephen HawkingScience HumorBlack Hole Quotes
Book:A Briefer History of Time
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“The existence of radiation from black holes seems to imply that gravitational collapse is not as final and irreversible as we once thought. If an astronaut falls into a black hole, its mass will increase, but eventually the energy equivalent of that extra mass will be returned to the universe in the form of radiation. Thus, in a sense, the astronaut will be 'recycled'. It would be a poor sort of immortality, however, because any personal concept of time for the astronaut would almost certainly come to an end as he was torn apart inside the black hole! Even the types of particles that were eventually emitted by the black hole would in general be different from those that made up the astronaut: the only feature of the astronaut that would survive would be his mass or energy.”

HumorPhysicsAstronautBlack HolesScience HumorSpace Humor
Book:A Brief History of Time
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“We will start with Hawking's few quotations. “The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to spacetime and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of spacetime at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for spacetime. One could say: ‘The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.’ The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.” Or, in the same manner: “There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe, and what can be more special than the condition that there is no boundary?” Also, he stated, “According to the no-boundary proposal, asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless—like asking what is south of the South Pole—because there is no notion of time available to refer to. The concept of time only exists within our universe.” The “no-boundary proposal” is a classic example of a device called in Latin, Deus ex machina—God from the machine, invented by the ancient Greek dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides. The primary purpose of the device was to resolve the irresolvable. The question of what came before the Big Bang is not meaningless. We cannot accept that our Big Bang is the beginning of all existence. Since there is "no notion of time available to refer to," that does not mean there is nothing to refer to. This reasoning is a logical fallacy based on the idea that there should be nothing to refer to if there is no time to refer to it. This kind of reasoning falsifies reality to fit the argument. For this statement to be accurate, there must be proof that there is nothing to refer to, not "no notion of time to refer to." The lack of notion of time to refer to or its availability is not proof that there is nothing to refer to, but only that there is no notion of time to refer to and that it is not available. The lack of availability is only proof that something is not available to someone but not proof that nothing exists beyond the “point” where “time” stops. If Something, the Being, the Universal Source of Everything, is not available or approachable in any way by some particular scientist, that does not mean that the Universal Source of Everything (the Absolute) does not exist beyond the physical world. In this sense, the no-boundary proposal is a boundary proposal of a different kind. Since it is impossible to speculate about abstract concepts or ideas, such as God, Absolute, or Universal Source, it is easier to invent some trick (pardon my language), with all due respect, to compensate for the lack of understanding of the most abstract ideas and to compensate for the limitations of a frame of mind of any particular scientist or philosopher. In this case, the no-boundary proposal precisely serves the purpose of a boundary—to limit the world to the point where “time stops” and declare that there is nothing beyond because time stops there. That should mean that the laws of nature and science stop at this artificially produced boundary. But what do we have as proof that this is true? Precisely like in religions, we have words that sound seductively beautiful and convincing. Also, to a large extent, these words are supported by scientific knowledge and investigation. Yet, they are just words, and in no way do they prove that there is no immaterial Universal Source beyond the “point” where time stops.”

TruthScienceDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindBig BangBlack HolesStephen HawkingNo Boundary Proposal
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“Hawking’s insistence on scientific laws hides the desire to transform the current scientific laws into the ultimate and absolute knowledge of everything, physical and metaphysical, of this world and the outer world. According to him, we are on the verge of declaring, with almost absolute certainty, that we have solved the whole enigma of existence and gone down to nearly the deepest end of science and scientific laws. Although he expressed many ideas in a simple, popular, and often funny way, there is a little bit of unjustifiable scientific conceit (to call it that way) behind some statements. If we were to imagine the creative force capable of creating the Universe, this creative force would be out of time or eternal. The Eternal Being is not contingent or affected by the boundaries of the physical world. The no-boundary proposal is accurate in that there are no boundaries we can apply to the Eternal Being. Still, the Universe, as the Being with its beginning, is bounded by time. The first point of the Universe is its first limit; it would have no limits if it were a timeless Being. Even if there were a series of births and rebirths, these would still be limited creations or recreations of something eternal that creates or recreates itself through the creation of universes. The creative power of the Eternal Being is the ultimate force that keeps the Eternal Being alive. The only way for the Eternal Being to exist with meaning is through its creative power to rejuvenate itself in new ways and myriad forms constantly. The Creator is its creation, and the creation creates the creator in a deeper sense. Without creating, the Universal Being loses its purpose and becomes meaningless. Meaning is only possible in plurality. The World, or Universe, gives the Universal Being meaning and purpose. The world is its salvation.”

ScienceUniverseDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindBig BangBlack HolesStephen HawkingNo Boundary Proposal
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“The nonmaterial world is the spaceless "space" and timeless "time." In the nonmaterial world, there is no time and no space. Paradoxically, no time means eternity, and no space means infinity. No boundary proposal is a proposal about an everlasting world and everlasting time. Everlasting means time with a beginning and no end. The concept or idea of eternal implies no beginning and no end. The concept of the everlasting Being, or time, or space, as an ultimate principle is shaky because we cannot use our limitations in thinking to argue against reality as it is and not as we say it is. If we do not understand the idea of time in its totality, we cannot talk about time from the point of superior “knowledge.”

ScienceUniverseDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindSpace TimeBig BangBlack HolesStephen HawkingNonmaterial World
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“Whatever has a beginning is not eternal. What is not eternal must have come from "somewhere." The worst thing is to try to prove something, counting on the idea that it came from nothing. It is also as unscientific as it can get. No chaos theory can prove this reasoning, and no "butterfly effect" can prove it because nothing is only nothing and cannot be anything else except nothing. Nothingness cannot move the Nothing or create from nothing.”

ScienceUniverseDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindBig BangBlack HolesStephen HawkingSpace And TimeNo Boundary Proposal
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“The idea of infinite regress is absurd. The question of God cannot be reduced to a cosmological argument either. The ultimate question of reality is if there is something or not. If we agree that there is something, then the question is if that something can come into existence from nothing. Wouldn't it be more logical that there is just nothing? But just the idea that there is nothing implies, at least linguistically, that nothing is something; otherwise, we would not use the words ‘there is.’ Again, language demonstrates how limited it is.”

ScienceUniverseDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindBig BangBlack HolesStephen HawkingSpace And TimeNo Boundary Proposal
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“We should conclude that this Nothing is eternal. To prove that Something is not eternal, we would have to prove that this Something just appeared from nowhere and became something. The burden of proof here lies on atheists to demonstrate how something came into existence from nothing. This burden is the same one Bertrand Russell tried to impose on theists, deists, or any believer. Why would believers be burdened with the burden of proving God and disbelievers get away without proving how Something, whatever we choose to call it—God, Universe, World, came to be?”

ScienceUniverseDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindBig BangBlack HolesStephen HawkingNo Boundary Proposal
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“That the matter originated just by itself or was always "there" in the form of "energy" and organized itself into superbly sophisticated organisms forming the Universe borders on insanity. We can, perhaps, all (both atheists and those who believe in a higher source) agree that there always was Something. The question is how we define this Something. It is much easier to prove that the Something always existed than to prove the opposite. Scientists can deal with this Something more easily because, moving back, step by step, scientists will come to nothing. When they come to nothing, the "spotless spot" before the Big Bang, they will have to scientifically explain how all the reality, the whole of what we think the "Universe" is, was contained within an immeasurable "spotless spot." Once they find the answer, they will understand that this "spotless spot" from which everything originated is immaterial and spaceless. This immaterial Being is the Creator of all reality and is the reality itself. Plotinus would call this reality intelligence or mind.”

ScienceDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindBig BangBlack HolesStephen HawkingNo Boundary ProposalPlotinus
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“We provided the frame from which scientists can prove that matter is a construct, program, and “instruction” of the Universal Mind and that the same program predetermines our perception. Our understanding of the world is contingent upon our experience, cognition, and perception (tertiary quality in my system of thought), which is contingent upon the secondary in my system of thought (originally, primary quality) since there is no matter as we perceive it or conceptualize it. There is no matter as such.”

SciencePhysicsDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindBig BangBlack HolesStephen HawkingNo Boundary Proposal
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“The comment about the South of South Pole is a logical fallacy because it presupposes nothing existed before the Big Bang. The Entity before the Big Bang is not comparable to what is south of the South Pole. The idea that we do not understand that there is something "North, South, East, and West" of the Big Bang does not mean that these "North, South, East, and West" do not exist in a way incomprehensible to our limited cognitive powers, senses, and based on limited scientific discoveries. That which lies beyond time and space and is the source of everything we see cannot be referenced only by the too-simplistic and sometimes semi-humorous means. Our language and words or terms describing the sides of the “physical world” are limited if we want to apply them to the metaphysical, immaterial realm beyond space and time. In no way does this kind of reasoning or “arguments” prove that the Universal Source of Everything does not exist. I have chosen to call this Source of Everything, known and unknown, the Universal Mind. In our sense of the word, there is no space before the Big Bang, and there are no sides of any kind, not to mention sides of the World. South of the South Pole is just Nothingness from a physical point of view. There are no sides of the world in the primordial Nothingness or the Absolute Vacuum. At the same time, this Nothingness “hides” immaterial Being, the Universal Source of everything.”

PhilosophyScienceDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindBig BangBlack HolesStephen HawkingSpace And TimeNo Boundary Proposal
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“No Need for Time Before the Creation of the World Here is one more quotation representative of the way Stephen Hawking thought: “The role played by time at the beginning of the Universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a grand designer and revealing how the Universe created itself. As we travel back in time towards the moment of the Big Bang, the Universe gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until it finally comes to a point where the whole Universe is a space so small that it is in effect a single infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense black hole. And just as with modern-day black holes, floating around in space, the laws of nature dictate something quite extraordinary. They tell us that here too time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no time before the Big Bang. We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in. People want answers to the big questions, like why we are here. They don’t expect the answers to be easy, so they are prepared to struggle a bit. When people ask me if a God created the Universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the Universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth—the Earth is a sphere that doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.” In its absolute state, beyond the World, the Being is immaterial, and the Nonbeing is an absolute vacuum, nothingness, or emptiness. In the primordial state of the Absolute, the Being and the Nonbing become the same—the Nonbeing. There is no time or space in the absolute realm beyond the World. Timeless “time” is the potential for Eternity. Eternity is beyond time because it is all time, past and future. Spaceless “space” or nothingness is the infinite potential for space. Infinity is beyond space because infinity is all space, past and future. Creation or recreation of the World (Universe) activates the two poles of the Absolute. Creation of the World is the salvation of the Absolute. Absolute is absolute potential. The activity of the Being enveloping the Nonbeing (Nothingness) transforms the Being and the Nonbeing into the World (Universe). When the Absolute transforms into the World, the Being becomes positive, and the Nonbeing becomes negative. The Being is positive “energy.” The Nonbeing is negative “energy.” Zero is the point of equilibrium between the Being and the Nonbeing. Zero is the passage (wormhole) between the primordial state of the Absolute and the World or Universe. Before the spacetime continuum, plus and minus are the same: + = – Before the creation, Absolute is 0 (+ – = 0) At the point of the World Creation, the Being envelopes the Nonbeing: + 0 – The Being cannot envelop the whole of the Nonbeing because Nothingness is infinite in its potential. The Being is infinite in its potential, too. (+ [plus] is the Being; – [minus] the Nonbeing; 0 [Zero] is the Absolute) The primordial state of the Absolute is immaterial, spaceless, and timeless. The primordial state of the Absolute is absolute potential. In its potential, the Absolute is infinite and eternal. Absolute can only exercise its potential and power in the infinite number of possibilities and universes or worlds it can transform into.”

ScienceUniverseDejan StojanovicAbsoluteUniversal MindBig BangBlack HolesStephen HawkingSpace And TimeNo Boundary Proposal
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“A black hole has all the characteristics of a whirlpool. We just have to look at the similarities to work out how to use them to our advantage. I mean, space isn't exactly a fluid or is it? Maybe we just need to redefine our fluid parameters. We have whirlpools, tornadoes, wirly-gigs that use the same dynamics. Why not black holes? It's worth thinking about.”

LightSpaceQuote Of The DayAnthony T HincksHincksTornadoesAstrophysicsWhirlpoolsBlack HolesOuterspace
Author:Anthony T. Hincks
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