Quotes from Lawrence M. Krauss

As a scientist, I don't believe anything. Science shouldn't use the word belief. There are things more likely and less likely. Science can say nothing with absolute certainty.

The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.

In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God.

The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.

Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

More often than you might think, teaching science is inseparable from teaching doubt.

nature is more imaginative than we are.

Their mutual gravitational attraction will ultimately cause them to collapse inward, in manifest disagreement with an apparently static universe.

I don't make any claims to answer any questions that science cannot answer, and I have tried very carefully within the text to define what I mean by "nothing" and "something." If those definitions differ from those you would like to adopt, so be it. Write your own book. But don't discount the remarkable human adventure that is modern science because it doesn't console you.

In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God. Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant.

To argue that, in a universe in which there seems to be no purpose, our existence is without meaning or value is unparalleled solipsism, as it suggests that without us the universe is worthless. The greatest gift that science can give us is to allow us to overcome our need to be the center of existence even as we learn to appreciate the wonder of the accident we are privileged to witness.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. —DONALD RUMSFELD

like insects on a rubber sheet, we live in a universe whose true form is hidden from direct view.

At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs— as long as no one is watching, anything goes.

For, after all, in science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.

an electron accelerated to .9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999999999 times the speed of light would hit you with the same impact as a Mack truck traveling at normal speed.

Particle physicists are way ahead of cosmologists. Cosmology has produced one totally mysterious quantity: the energy of empty space, about which we understand virtually nothing. However, particle physics has not understood many more quantities for far longer!

Whenever one asks "Why?" in science, one actually means "How?". "Why?" is not really a sensible question in science because it usually implies purpose and, as anyone who has been the parent of a small child knows, one can keep on asking "Why?" forever, no matter what the answer to the previous question. Ultimately, the only way to end the conversation seems to be to say "Because!

If the universe doesn't care about us and if we're an accident in a remote corner of the universe, in some sense it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us; we provide our own meaning.

Our modern conception of the universe is so foreign to what even scientists generally believed a mere century ago that it is a tribute to the power of the scientific method and the creativity and persistence of humans who want to understand it.

In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God.

For most people, the central questions of existence ultimately come down to transcendental ones: Why is there a universe at all? Why are we here? Whatever presumptions one might bring to the question Why?, if we understand the how better, why will come into sharper focus.

why there is something rather than nothing: nothing is unstable.

a negative charge moving backward in time is mathematically equivalent to a positive charge moving forward in time!