Quotes About Expansion

The old frontiers have been conquered, and the boundaries of the new are not so clearly marked.

The leader has to ask the question, how is the circle being drawn? Who is inside it? Who is outside it? What can I do to name the circle bigger?

there are particles of matter and antimatter popping into existence and popping out again—and that these are pushing the universe outwards at an accelerating rate.

In its first three minutes, according to inflation theory, the universe ran away with itself, doubling in size every one million million million million millionths of a second. Ninety-eight per cent of all that exists was created in those first 180 seconds.

galaxies of the universe are racing away from us, but that they are doing so at a rate that is accelerating.

well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe.

growth. Often used contrarily by economists and those who write about them: 'It now looks as if growth will remain stagnant until spring' (Observer); '… with the economy moving into a negative growth phase' (The Times). Growth obviously indicates expansion. If a thing is shrinking or standing still, growth simply isn't the word for it.

Because it expands, ice floats on water—"an utterly bizarre property," according to John Gribbin.

The universe was vaster—vastly vaster—than anyone had ever supposed.

Vesto Slipher, of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, was the first person to notice that distant galaxies appeared to be moving away from us—evidence that the universe was not, as everyone had long assumed, static.

no less than 99.5 per cent of the world's habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally—in practical terms completely—off limits to us. It

Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite.

In my experience, the last people you want trying to solve any problem, but especially those involving roads, are highway engineers. They operate from the principle that while no traffic problem can ever truly be solved, it can be spread over a much larger area.

Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.

People read more. It is no coincidence that the mid-nineteenth century saw a sudden and lasting boom in newspapers, magazines, books, and sheet music. The number of newspapers and periodicals in Britain leaped from fewer than 150 at the start of the century to almost 5,000 by the end of it.

The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare—twenty years' worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day—and, as this volume slimly attests, the number keeps growing.

In 1846, America had more than 650 whaling ships, roughly three times as many as all the rest of the world put together.

By modern standards the whole of greater London, including Southwark and Westminster, was small. It stretched only about two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour.

Yes, NATO's expansion to the borders of Russia is of great concern to them. But in Russia's eyes, and of course I mean no disrespect, Juergen—but in Russia's eyes, when it sees NATO, it sees America. America, first and foremost, and then its allies.

This chart shows how much various energy sources grew over the course of 60 years, starting from the time they were introduced. Between 1840 and 1900, coal went from 5 percent of the world's energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But in the 60 years from 1930 to 1990, natural gas reached just 20 percent. In short, energy transitions take a long time.

seawater expands when it gets warmer.

And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns... that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn't have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale... that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorientate myself. p.71

If a problem can't be solved easily, make it bigger

I no longer feel quite so alarmed when a nonsensical word in my Journal gives rise to a mental image that I cannot account for. Do not be anxious, I tell Myself. It is the House. It is the House enlarging your understanding.