Quotes from John Gribbin

Tunny should still have been unbreakable, but like Enigma it was made vulnerable by the carelessness of its operators and the bureaucratic nature of their system.

De acuerdo con las reglas usuales de la biología, los seres humanos también deberíamos ser clasificados como chimpancés (Pan sapiens), y es solo nuestra inclinación natural a vernos como algo especial la que nos lleva a clasificarnos como un género distinto, el Homo.

Curiously, though, we only have to look at one of the two slits for the outcome of the whole experiment to be affected, as if the electrons passing through the other slit also knew what we were doing. This is an example of quantum "non-locality," which means that what happens in one location seems to affect events in another location instantly. Non-locality is a key feature of the central mystery of quantum mechanics, and a vital ingredient in quantum computers.

Las razones por las que estamos aquí forman una cadena tan inverosímil que la posibilidad de que alguna otra civilización tecnológica exista en la Vía Láctea en la actualidad es remotísima. Estamos solos, y lo mejor es que nos hagamos la idea.

whole universe can be thought of as a delayed-choice experiment in which the existence of observers who notice what is going on is what imparts tangible reality to the origin of everything. Following

laws of physics as we know them break down somewhere between the time of the Big Bang and time zero.

single electron, or a single photon, on its way through one hole in the wall, obeys the statistical laws which are only appropriate if it 'knows' whether or not the other hole is open. This is the central mystery of the quantum world.

The electrons not only know whether or not both holes are open, they know whether or not we are watching them, and they adjust their behaviour accordingly.

Nothing is real unless we look at it, and it ceases to be real as soon as we stop looking.

A black hole with the mass of the Sun would take 1066 years for this to occur, even if it never swallowed any outside matter along the way. A black hole with the mass of a galaxy will evaporate in 1099 years, and even a hole containing the mass of a supercluster of galaxies – the biggest ever likely to form – will be gone in 10117 years. That

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Einstein

it is not the way of science to sit idly back and hope that someone will come up with a better answer to our problems. In the absence of a better answer, we have to face up to the implications of the best answer we've got.

The Big Bang was not the beginning of the Universe.

action, and there are also structures so distinct from the rest of the cell 'jelly', like cells within cells, that the best explanation of their presence is that that is indeed what they are. These semi-autonomous 'cells within the cell' are called organelles. As we saw in Chapter Four, Lynn Margulis has explained how the ancestors of the organelles used to be separate, bacteria

El destino al que está abocado cualquier especialista de cualquier área de la ciencia es ceñirse cada vez más estrechamente al tema de su especialidad, aprendiendo cada vez más sobre cada vez menos materia, hasta acabar finalmente sabiéndolo todo sobre nada.

spacetime is flat, that about 5 per cent of the mass of the Universe is in the form of baryons (including bright stars and gas and dust), some 27 per cent is in the form of cold dark matter, and 68 per cent is in the form of the lambda field, also known as dark energy.

The one sure thing we know about the quantum world is not to trust our common sense and only to believe things we can see directly or detect unambiguously with our instruments. We don't know what goes on inside a box unless we look.

Las posibilidades de la civilización humana están enturbiadas por muchas incertidumbres de nuestra propia creación, incluyendo las guerras, el cambio de clima antropogénico, y la degradación del medio ambiente.

La cuestión de si sobrevivimos a estos peligros no es un tópico de debate científico, sino un tema de voluntad política.

Las personas son entidades interesantes y complicadas, y vivimos en el momento más interesante y complicado de la vida del Universo porque es el único momento en que las criaturas como nosotros podríamos existir.

the Germans, complacently sure it was uncrackable, were careless in its use.

Absolute, true, and mathematical time, for itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure for duration by means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.