Quotes About Cosmos

The Earth at last had a position in space.

Most star systems in the cosmos are binary (double-starred), which makes our solitary sun a slight oddity.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances 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.

The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, and it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins.

Gravity on this view is no longer so much a thing as an outcome—"not a 'force' but a byproduct of the warping of spacetime," in the words of the physicist Michio Kaku, who goes on: "In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

This is gravity—a product of the bending of spacetime.

In some sense, gravity does not exist28; what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time.

The current best estimate for the Earth's weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes

your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which would have ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)

Not one particle of the heavy stuff so vital to our own being—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the rest—emerged from the gaseous brew of creation. But—and here's the troubling point—to forge these heavy elements, you need the kind of heat and energy of a Big Bang. Yet there has been only one Big Bang and it didn't produce them. So where did they come from? Interestingly

the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere.

There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges.

three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0.

in the words of Carl Sagan.

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

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 the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.

we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.

Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binoculars the number of stars you can see from a single location rises to about 50,000, and with a small two-inch telescope it leaps to 300,000.

what moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time." Of

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.

Astronomers today believe there are perhaps 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe.

there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called the Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging. From

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances 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. And