Quotes from Brian Cox

You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe.

So if we assume we are not the only civilisation in the galaxy, then at least a few others must have arisen billions of years ahead of us. But where are they?

Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil'.

One of the great joys of science is to understand something for the first time–to really understand, which is very different from, and far more satisfying than, knowing the facts.

The current worldview is never claimed to be correct, in the very important sense that there are no absolute truths in science. The body of scientific knowledge at any point in history, including now, is simply the collection of theories and views of the world that have not yet been shown to be wrong.

Thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams exist on Earth because of electrical activity inside a 1.5-kilogram blob of stuff, which hasn't changed much since the earliest modern humans began the long journey out of Africa

To me, and to the participants of at the Green Bank conference, the idea that a civilization might destroy itself is both ludicrous and likely. We are pathetically inadequate at long-term planning, idiotically primitive in our destructive urges and pathologically incapable of simply getting along.

Science is most definitely not a priesthood where people stand on a mountain and pass truths down to the waiting minions below.

Science is delighted frustration. It is about asking questions, to which the answers may be unavailable – now, or perhaps ever. It is about noticing regularities, asserting that these regularities must have natural explanations and searching for those explanations.

All good research scientists understand that] no position is unassailable. There are no absolute truth in science. Authority counts for nothing when contradicted by nature.

a prerequisite for the creation of the intellectual edifice upon which your spreadsheets, air-conditioned offices and mobile phones rest was the curiosity-driven quest to understand the motions of the planets and the Earth's place amongst the stars.

The trick as an educated citizen of the twenty-first century is to realise that Nature is far stranger and more wonderful than human imagination, and the only appropriate response to new discoveries is to enjoy one's inevitable discomfort, take delight in being shown to be wrong and learn something as a result.

Things inexorably get worse.

One of the beautiful things about mathematical physics is that equations contain stories.

Art cannot be limited by temporal aberations

I believe powerfully that we who have the power should strive to extend the gift of education to everyone. Education is the most important investment a developed society can make, and the most effective way of nurturing a developing one.

You have to get old because of the geometry of spacetime.

questions by doing science. We will observe, measure and think. One of the great joys of science is to understand something for the first time–to really understand, which is very different from, and far more satisfying than, knowing the facts.

I deliberately borrow from Shakespeare; the most precious objects on Earth are not gems or jewels, but ink marks on paper. No single human brain could conceive of Hamlet, Principia Mathematica or Codex Leicester; they were created by and belong to the entire human race, and the library of wonders continues to grow.

Common sense is completely worthless and irrelevant when trying to understand reality. This is probably why people who like to boast about their common sense tend to rail against the fact that they share a common ancestor with a monkey.

They would certainly have been simpler than the earliest known microbial mats, but somewhere in your genome there will be sequences of DNA that have been faithfully passed down across the great sweep of geological time, and if you have children, you'll pass these four-billion-year-old messages on to them.

most southerly rising point occurs at

it only ever makes sense to speak of motion relative to something else.

Rutherford, Bohr, Planck, Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac.