Quotes About Cosmology

There's no verbs before time itself exists, right? There's no popping into existence, there's no fluctuating, there's no quantum mechanical craziness, there is literally nothing.

Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.

The difference between theism and new atheist science is the difference between mystery and certainty. Certainty is a relic, an atavism, a husk we ought to have outgrown. Mystery is openness to possibility, even at the scale now implied by physics and cosmology. The primordial human tropism toward mystery may well have provided the impetus for all that we have learned.

The first set make the underlying body one—either one of the three5 or something else which is denser than fire and rarer than air—then generate everything else from this, (15) and obtain multiplicity by condensation and rarefaction. Now these are contraries, which may be generalized into 'excess and defect'.

I also think we need to maintain distinctions - the doctrine of creation is different from a scientific cosmology, and we should resist the temptation, which sometimes scientists give in to, to try to assimilate the concepts of theology to the concepts of science.

The widespread shamanistic notion of a tiered cosmology – the level on which people live and spirit realms below and above – probably derives from certain universal experiences of altered states. These include sensations, on the one hand, of rising up and flying, and, on the other, of entering a vortex and passing underground and through water.

With no overarching cosmology to guide them, only vestigial formalities, each would have to decide for himself what their friend and neighbor's eternal fate might be.

If we suppose for a moment that space exists, and that God placed the world in it, why did He place it in the spot it occupies instead of any other spot, all space being alike, and no one point being preferable to any other point? God acted without having a reason, for if space is, His choice of a place was arbitrary; but God cannot act irrationally. Therefore space is not.

In 'Cosmicomics,' I came close to science fiction - I was inspired by cosmological subjects and the workings of the universe and invented a character who was a sort of witness to everything that was happening inside the solar system.

Why is there space rather than no space? Why is space three-dimensional? Why is space big? We have a lot of room to move around in. How come it's not tiny? We have no consensus about these things. We're still exploring them.

Nothingness, after all, is simpler than any one particular existing thing ever could be; there is only one nothing, and many kinds of something.

Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. —Stephen Toulmin

A hundred quintillion googols!

Rµv - (1/2)Rgµv = 8?GTµv. This is the equation that a physicist would think of if you said "Einstein's equation"; that E = mc2 business is a minor thing,

The Big Bang model seems like a fairly natural picture, once you believe in an approximately uniform universe that is expanding in time. Just wind the clock backward, and you get a hot, dense beginning. Indeed, the basic framework was put together in the late 1920s by Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest from Belgium

Space itself is not fundamental; it's just a useful way of talking from certain points of view.

If we pretend that the emission of gravitational waves were the only thing affecting the Earth's orbit, it would take over 1023 years for it to crash into the sun. So perhaps the same thing is true for atoms: maybe electron orbits aren't really stable, but they're stable enough.

Or in other words, why does disorder increase in the same direction of time as that in which the universe expands?

In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down.

Asking about a time before the beginning of our spherical spacetime is like asking what lies north of the North Pole. There is no such thing.

a universe implies the existence of a universe maker, and

The Copernican system was not a truly heliocentric one; it was a vacuo-centric system, so to speak.

An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma as a source of answers to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc.

We have finally found something that doesn't have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in.