Quotes from John D. Barrow

What cannot be known is more revealing than what can.

There was no 'before' the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.

Since only a narrow range of the allowed values for, say, the fine structure constant will permit observers to exist in the Universe, we must find ourselves in the narrow range of possibilities which permit them, no matter how improbable they are. We must ask for the conditional probability of observing constants to take particular ranges, given that other features of the Universe, like its age, satisfy necessary conditions for life.

The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.' Oscar Wilde53

We have never explained the numerical value of any of the constants of Nature.

Natural units tell us that in a well-defined sense the Universe is very old already, about 1060 Planck times old. Life on Earth didn't appear until after the Universe was 1059 Planck times old. We were a late arrival.

belief in the ultimate simplicity and unity behind the rules that constrain the Universe leads us to expect that there exists a single unchanging pattern behind the appearances. Under different conditions this single pattern will crystallise into superficially distinct patterns that show up as the four separate forces governing the world around us. It has gradually become clear how this patterning probably works.

Particles like protons or electrons occupy microscopic niches into which only one particle is allowed to sit. Any attempt to compress matter so that more than one particle would be squeezed into each niche is met by a resisting force. The balance between this force and the inward push of gravity results in the large, stable, cold bodies we see in the solar system.

Universes that expand too slowly will collapse back to a big crunch before galaxies can form; universes that expand too quickly do not allow islands of matter to condense out into galaxies and form stars.

I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.' Freeman Dyson24

Newton, as we have said, was the promoter of a Design Argument based upon the precision and universality of the laws of motion and gravitation that he had discovered.

The more simultaneous variations of other constants one includes in these considerations, the more restrictive is the region where life, as we know it, can exist. It is very likely that if variations can be made then they are not all independent. Rather, making a small change in one constant might alter one or more of the others as well. This would tend to make the restrictions on most variations become even more tightly constrained.

There is no formula that can deliver all truth, all harmony, all simplicity. No Theory of Everything can ever provide total insight. For, to see through everything, would leave us seeing nothing at all.

the values of the constants of Nature are rather bio-friendly. If they are changed by even a small amount the world becomes lifeless and barren instead of a home for interesting complexity

For even if we expunged all the matter in the Universe the lambda force could still exist, causing the universe to expand or contract. It was always there, acting on everything but unaffected by anything. It began to look like an omnipresent form of energy that remained when everything that could be removed from a universe had been removed, and that sounds very much like somebody's definition of a vacuum.

But, as powerful mathematicians like Minkowski and Hilbert found striking harmony between their pure mathematical results and the workings of the physical world, many found the claims for such a harmony hard to resist. Thus, in the early years of the twentieth century, we begin to see why Minkowski's application of complex numbers to the description of space and time was hailed by one physicist as 'one of the greatest revolutions in our accepted views'.

Already we see a trend in our own technological societies towards the fabrication of smaller and smaller machines that consume less and less energy and produce almost no waste. Taken to its logical conclusion, we expect advanced life-forms to be as small as the laws of physics allow.

In recent years astronomers have made newspaper headlines all over the world by mapping this radiation in exquisite detail with receivers carried on balloons and satellites. We know that the radiation has the spectrum of pure heat radiation to very high precision and its temperature is the same in different directions on the sky to an accuracy of about one part in 100,000.

If the constants of Nature are slowly changing then we could be on a one-way slide to extinction. We have learnt that our existence exploits many peculiar coincidences between the values of different constants of Nature, and that the observed values of the constants fall within some very narrow windows of opportunity for the existence of life.

If constants like G and ? do not vary in time, then the standard history of our Universe has a simple broad-brush appearance. During the first 300,000 years the dominant energy in the Universe is radiation and the temperature is greater than 3000 degrees and too hot for any atoms or molecules to exist. The Universe is a huge soup of electrons, photons of light and nuclei.

Yet, despite the symmetry of the laws of Nature, we observe the outcomes of those symmetrical laws to be assymetrical states and structures.

Each of us is a complicated assymetrical outcome of the laws of electromagnetism and gravity.

If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.

A 4'33 összesen 273 másodpercet jelent, amire a fizikus rögtön felkapja a fejét. A -273 Celsius-fok az abszolút nulla hÅ'mérsékletet jelenti. Ez az az energiaszint, ahol megsz?nik minden molekuláris mozgás, ami azt is jelenti, hogy ezt a hÅ'mérsékletet már nem lehet tovább csökkenteni. Cage e m?vével a hang abszolút nullpontját kívánta megmutatni.