Quotes About Cosmology

the six realms of samsara: hell, hungry ghost, animal, human, demigod, and god realms, respectively.

My main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can't understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don't seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics. I'd be very happy just to understand the last singularity and leave the other ones to future generations.

When you buy a jacket, you pick the size to ensure it fits. Similarly, we live in a universe in which the amount of dark energy fits our biological make-up. If the amount of dark energy were substantially different from what we've measured, the environmental conditions would be inhospitable to our form of life.

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.

In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium.

There is actually a certain value in not finding anything," he said. "It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving.

This is one reason why some experts believe that there may have been many other big bangs, perhaps trillions and trillions of them, spread through the mighty span of eternity, and that the reason we exist in this particular one is that this is one that we could exist in.

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.

The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn't tell us how far away they are to begin with.

MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects—really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs and other very dim stars).

WIMPs (for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which is to say specks of invisible matter left over from the Big

As the Bhagavad Gita says, 'There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.' Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang attest – the Bhagavad Gita has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.

It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial

The ekpyrotic process begins far in the indefinite past with a pair of flat empty branes sitting parallel to each other in a warped five-dimensional space … The two branes, which form the walls of the fifth dimension, could have popped out of nothingness as a quantum fluctuation in the even more distant past and then drifted apart.

where was God before the universe existed—fades away into the inconsiderable question: what created thing was being held in existence by the power of God before there was any created thing?

Virgin Birth. Abiogenesis. Resurrection from the dead. Random mutations producing the raw material for new organs. Intelligent creation ex nihilo. Eternal matter. Eternal mind. Heaven. Multiverses. Speciation by unguided, natural selection. Hell. Natural DNA information generation. Adam. Panspermia. Angels. No immaterial soul. Miracles. Space aliens. God. No God."[11] That's how blogger Roddy Bullock began a post called, "Everyone Believes Something Unbelievable.

I believe in the Big Bang. I just know who banged it.

Zoroastrianism;

We know that the difference between a heliocentric theory and a geocentric theory is one of relative motion only, and that such a difference has no physical significance. [Astronomy and Cosmology - A Modern Course. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co]

We've known for a long time that the universe is expanding. But about 15 years ago, my colleagues and I discovered that it is expanding faster and faster. That is, the universe is accelerating, and that was not expected, but it is now attributed to this mysterious stuff called dark energy which seems to make up about 70 percent of the universe.

There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

It was only about sixty years ago that the expansion of the universe was first observed.

I'm trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it's interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It's all because of entropy increasing.