Quotes About Cosmology

The reason the candle is currently in its state is because of something acting upon it. That something, in turn, is dependent on something else. But, Aquinas argues, that chain cannot continue forever; in the end, there must be a final cause, an Unmoved Mover standing behind things as they are.

Neoplatonists also believed that the vast variety of human thought, if traced back to the One Source—what Leonardo da Vinci called the Prime Mover—would lead to spiritual enlightenment and ultimately to God. This and the mystical texts that Ficino was translating led him to attempt a fusion of all mystical beliefs, from Greek gnosticism to Egyptian hermeneutics to Christian cosmology—and to Jewish Kabbalah.

Finding the first seed black holes could help reveal how the relation between black holes and their host galaxies evolved over time.

General relativity predicts that time ends inside black holes because the gravitational collapse squeezes matter to infinite density.

The field equations and the whole history of general relativity have been complicated.

Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.

Baryons don't expand when the universe expands.

bosons—photons, and so on— are in some respects strongly tied to spacetime. Their wavelengths expand as the universe expands.

Hugh Everett's work has been described by many people in terms of many worlds, the idea being that every one of the various alternative histories, branching histories, is assigned some sort of reality.

The scientific-rational mindset is as much a cosmology as the Catholic mindset was in the Middle Ages; scientists are so proud of their mindset and convinced that it's the only reality. I find that worrying.

Are you sure you're not a Boltzmann Brain? Or at least, do you know your local environment didn't recently fluctuate into existence? How do you know you're

Christopher Savage have calculated that in reasonable models, we expect about ten dark-matter particles to interact with the atoms in a typical human body every year. The effects of every individual interaction are pretty negligible, so don't worry about getting a dark matter stomachache.

Then we compare the predicted abundance of such a WIMP with the actual abundance of dark matter.

To a physicist, a "vacuum" is not a machine that cleans your floors, nor does it even necessarily mean "empty space." It's simply "the lowest-energy state of a theory.

Neutrino masses aren't completely understood as yet, so let's pretend that they don't interact with the Higgs, although the jury is still out.)

Extraneous motion decreases the time elapsed between two events in spacetime, whereas it increases the distance traveled between two points in space.

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

From my earliest works written in the 1950s and 1960s, I have claimed that there is such a thing as Islamic science with a twelve-hundred-year tradition of its own and that this science is Islamic not only because it was cultivated by Muslims, but because it is based on a worldview and a cosmology rooted in the Islamic revelation.

The ambivalent nature of light points if anything to a continuous underlying substance, what traditional cosmology calls the ether, which also exhibits a discontinuous aspect by virtue of its being indistinct. The debate in this domain today, if one glances at the principles involved, is not very much different from that of the followers of hylomorphism and atomism in the Middle Ages and in Antiquity.

If ever there were a time there was nothing, there would be nothing now.

Smartass Disciple: Which one was first created, time or things?Master of Stupidity: No things, no changes. No changes, no time.

The question 'What was there before creation?' is meaningless. Time is a property of creation, therefore before creation there was no before creation.

If time were perfectly symmetric, gravity wouldn't exist.

That's what Hubble can do for us. It can tell us whether the universe is expanding forever or if one day it's going to come back together.