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Cosmology Quotes

Browse 278 quotes about Cosmology.

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Cosmology Quotes

“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. … 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 does not have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything. … So when people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them 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. It does not have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.”

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Author:Stephen W. Hawking
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“Strange how, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and more clearly a universe read by desire. Haven't you read your Newton, she would like to say to the people in the dating agency (would like to say to Nietzsche too if she could get in touch with him)? Desire runs both ways. A pulls B because B pulls A, and vice versa: that is how you go about building a universe. Or if desire is still too rude a word, then what of appetency? Appetency and chance: a powerful duo, more than powerful enough to build a cosmology on, from the atoms and the little things with nonsense names that make up atoms to Alpha Centauri and Cassiopeia and the great dark back of beyond. The gods and ourselves, whirled helplessly around by the winds of chance, yet pulled equally towards each other, towards not only B and C and D but towards X and Y and Z and Omega too. Not the least thing, not the last thing but is called to by love.”

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Book:Elizabeth Costello
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“Strange how, as desire relaxes its grip on her body, she sees more and more clearly a universe ruled by desire. Haven't you read your Newton, she would like to say to the people in the dating agency (would like to say to Nietzsche too if she could get in touch with him)? Desire runs both ways: A pulls B because B pulls A, and vice versa: that is how you go about building a universe. Or if desire is still too rude a word, then what of appetency? Appetency and chance: a powerful duo, more than powerful enough to build a cosmology on, from the atoms and the little things with nonsense names that make up atoms to Alpha Centauri and Cassiopeia and the great dark back of beyond. The gods and ourselves, whirled helplessly around by the winds of chance, yet pulled equally towards each other, towards not only B and C and D but towards X and Y and Z and Omega too. Not the least thing, not the last thing but is called to by love.”

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Book:Elizabeth Costello
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“It is possible that these millions of suns, along with thousands of millions more we cannot see, make up altogether but a globule of blood or lymph in the veins of an animal, of a minute insect, hatched in a world of whose vastness we can frame no conception, but which nevertheless would itself, in proportion to some other world, be no more than a speck of dust.”

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Book:The garden of Epicurus
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“[On the Human Soul] While the Bible offers a clear distinction that the soul is separate from the body and discusses the idea of eternal life in a general context, it may come as a surprise that the Bible does not specifically indicate that the human soul is immortal. The postulation that we have an immortal soul is an extrapolation or ‘a reading between the lines ’ made by the Church Fathers. Even though the Bible itself cannot affirm the eternal soul, this has been the prevailing thought for billions of people.”

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Book:The Naked Truth about God: The Quest to Find Evidence for Whether God Exists Reveals an Epic Discovery that has Eluded Religion and Science
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“The living world is not the harsh domain of classical Darwinism, where each struggle against all, with every species, every organism and every gene competing for advantage against every other. Organisms are not skin-enclosed selfish entities, and competition is never unfettered. Life evolves, as does the universe itself, in a 'sacred dance' with an underlying field. This makes living beings into elements in a vast network of intimate relations that embraces the entire biosphere itself an interconnected element within the wider connections that reach into the cosmos.”

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Book:NON-DUALITY: THE PARTICIPATORY UNIVERSE
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“There is very little hope for life of any kind surviving the big crunch in a closed universe. However, one cannot be dogmatic about this as one does not know the limits of human ingenuity. If indeed the universe is closed, we probably have tens of billions of years to think about how to survive the big crunch, if it is not against the laws of nature that something should survive.”

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Book:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe
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“Someday they would discover that the stars were not sacred, but made from the same material as their bodies. They would learn it was the stars that created their worlds, that worlds created their minds, that minds created tools, and tools could create stars. Growing, sprawling, thriving until they too became masters of their own understanding, chasing enlightenment with the fervor of having nothing to lose, launching from their homelands like fireworks with glorious yellow tails.”

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Book:The Day I Wore Purple
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“We may take it that the world is undoubtedly itself [i.e., is indistinct from itself], but, in any attempt to see itself, as an object, it must, equally, undoubtedly act so as to make itself distinct from and therefore false to itself. In this sense, in respect to its own information, the universe must expand to escape the telescopes through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is us.”

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Book:Laws of Form
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“The biblical account of the origin of the cosmos in Genesis, for example, posits that a god created the physical universe particularly with human beings in mind, and so unsurprisingly placed the Earth at the center of creation. Modern cosmological knowledge has refuted such an account. We are living in the golden age of cosmology: More has been discovered about the large-scale structure and history of the visible cosmos in the last 20 years than in the whole of prior human history. We now have precise knowledge of the distribution of galaxies and know that ours is nowhere near the center of the universe, just as we know that our planetary system has no privileged place among the billions of such systems in our galaxy and that Earth is not even at the center of our planetary system. We also know that the Big Bang, the beginning of our universe, occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, whereas Earth didn’t even exist until about 10 billion years later. No one looking at the vast extent of the universe and the completely random location of homo sapiens within it (in both space and time) could seriously maintain that the whole thing was intentionally created for us. This realization began with Galileo, and has only intensified ever since.”

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Author:Tim Maudlin
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“Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distances that their trajectories are rectilineal; nevertheless, from time to time, two of them may come near enough together to be deviated from their course, like a comet that passed too close to Jupiter. In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.”

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Book:Science and Method
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“The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper’s seven stars speed in different directions.”

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Book:Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
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“Weinberg said: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." I must disagree with my old teacher. To me the universe seems quite the opposite of pointless. It seems that the more we learn, the more we see how it all fits together. As we study the universe as a whole, we realize that microcosm and macrocosm are, increasingly, the same subject. By unifying them, we are learning that nature is as it is not because it is the chance consequence of a random series of meaningless events; quite the opposite. More and more, the universe appears to be as it is because it must be that way.”

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Book:Wrinkles in Time
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“For many thousands of years, human beings have wondered and asked questions about the distant past and the remote future of our world. The fact that we continue to ask such questions does not distinguish us from our ancient ancestors. What does make us different is that for the first time in history we, as a species, are capable of producing real and credible answers to these questions. We are among the first to be witness of the Big Bang.”

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Book:At the Edge of Time: Exploring the Mysteries of Our Universe’s First Seconds
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“It is clear that there is a very great deal to be learnt about the universe and the endless subtleties of its various manifestations. What about the moral side of man, or what people with a religious bent of mind would prefer to call the spiritual nature of man? How will this develop in the endless aeons of the future? Perhaps in most of these questions like Newton we are still standing on the shore while the great ocean of knowledge lies ahead. It is significant that after more than two centuries of the acquisition of knowledge eminent men of science still have similar feelings.”

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Book:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe
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“It is possible that those strange sentient beings of the far-future cold universe will find contemplating a warm universe such as ours not very pleasant, much as a nocturnal creature shuns daylight. But the more speculative amongst them may look back to our universe and to the Earth as an ideal world full of sunshine and a supply of adequate energy to last for billions of years, a dream world which will have passed away never to return. And what do we human beings do with this ideal dream world of ours? We oppress each other, build nuclear weapons for each other's destruction, and plunder the resources of the Earth!”

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Book:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe
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“If the standard model is correct, the universe started in a state of high density and temperature, with all matter and radiation forming one great continuous mass. It is very remarkable that this undifferentiated soup should have the intrinsic property that in due course of time it develops into galaxies of which at least one creates life with such staggering complexity, subtlety and diversity and often such stunning beauty. It also creates thinking and feeling beings which in turn can contemplate the universe and study its properties and which can love and hate.”

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Book:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe
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“It is perhaps worth noticing that we have arrived 'on the scene' at a fairly early date. By this I mean that the time scale that it has taken nature to create us is of the same order of magnitude as the age of the universe. The universe is about 10-15 billion years old, and the Earth about 4.5 billion years old. Life is supposed to have begun on Earth about 3 billion years ago. It would not have been possible to evolve life, because of the hostile conditions, in the first few billion years after the big bang. Thus we have been created almost as soon as the universe was in a position to create us. It is an interesting question how long the universe will continue to create entirely new forms of life, assuming that it is open.”

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Book:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe
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“It is possibly true that intelligent life with a sophisticated technology is needed for the eventual survival of life. Dinosaurs and many other species became extinct because they could not adapt themselves to changes in the environment. Of course many other species have lived through many crises. But it is doubtful that any species, other than human beings (or atany rate, intelligent beings) can survive.”

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Book:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe
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“The big question in cosmology in the early 1960s was did the universe have a beginning? Many scientists were instinctively opposed to the idea, because they felt that a point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God to determine how the universe would start off. This was clearly a fundamental question, and it was just what I needed to complete my PhD thesis. Roger Penrose had shown that once a dying star had contracted to a certain radius, there would inevitably be a singularity, that is a point where space and time came to an end. Surely, I thought, we already knew that nothing could prevent a massive cold star from collapsing under its own gravity until it reached a singularity of infinite density. I realised that similar arguments could be applied to the expansion of the universe. In this case, I could prove there were singularities where space–time had a beginning. A eureka moment came in 1970, a few days after the birth of my daughter, Lucy. While getting into bed one evening, which my disability made a slow process, I realised that I could apply to black holes the casual structure theory I had developed for singularity theorems. If general relativity is correct and the energy density is positive, the surface area of the event horizon—the boundary of a black hole—has the property that it always increases when additional matter or radiation falls into it. Moreover, if two black holes collide and merge to form a single black hole, the area of the event horizon around the resulting black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the event horizons around the original black holes.”

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Book:Brief Answers to the Big Questions
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“At the present time... we certainly do not know all the laws of nature, and it is a good bet that most of our current formulations of those laws will be revised in the future. Yet the great majority of scientists believe that a complete and final set of laws governing all physical phenomena exists, and that we are making continual progress toward discovery of those laws.”

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Book:The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew
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“In this messianic vision, machine intelligence will come to redeem the universe of its incalculable stupidity. He takes a goal-oriented approach to cosmology, imposing upon the universe itself a kind of corporate project-management structure, composed of a series of key deliverables across deep time.”

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Book:To Be a Machine : Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
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“There were no witnesses to what was about to happen. 'Happen' didn't yet exist. Reality was timeless. Space also didn't exist. The distance between two points was immeasurable. The points themselves could be anywhere, hovering and bouncing. Infinity tangled into itself. There was no here and now. Only Being.”

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Book:The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang
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“The complex order we now observe [in the universe] could *not* have been the result of any initial design built into the universe at the so-called creation. The universe preserves no record of what went on before the big bang. The Creator, if he existed, left no imprint. Thus he might as well have been nonexistent.”

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Book:God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
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“In fact, it could be said that our language evolved for the express purpose of allowing us to participate in that interaction with others. That would explain why it is so hard to talk about whatever it is that might lie beyond or behind the description of the world: our language evolved to represent the description, and not the world itself.”

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Book:Hoodwinked: Uncovering Our Fundamental Superstitions
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