Quotes About Cosmos

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.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.

Travelling faster than a bullet, an incoming meteor would be moving much too swiftly to be seen, much less to provoke alarm. (Credit

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.

For the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner. Tweak the numbers even slightly and we would not be here. Optical

Goldilocks effect"—that everything is just right. (For the record, these three possible universes are known respectively as closed, open and flat.) Now

I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose human beings for the job.

For us, the universe goes only as far as light has travelled in the billions of years since the universe was formed.

Comets develop their distinctive tails when their surface material begins to evaporate as they approach the Sun.

If we were randomly inserted into the universe," Sagan wrote, "the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.

Glance at the night sky and what you see is history and lots of it—not the stars as they are now but as they were when their light left them.

On a cooler sun on a primordial earth: I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun.

As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.

There's something satisfying, I think," Evans said, "about the idea of light travelling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it.

It isn't easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.

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

For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there

we can't see even into the Oort cloud, so we don't actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.1 About

Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts." Martin

Pluto is about 40 AUs from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand. In a word, it is remote. But

Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).

The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can't adequately imagine

Just reaching the centre of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as beings.