Quotes About Cosmology

I've always been fascinated by the Norsemen, their lives, history and cosmology. The more we study them the more interesting they become... breaking their own stereotypes. We usually think of them as barbarians, but there were aspects to their society that shows a tremendous level of civilization, sophistication and social advance.

The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to minus 271.3*C - not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.

from cosmology to biology, it is becoming increasingly clear that science's failure to explain matters at the most fundamental level is at least in part due to an institutional prohibition on intelligent design as one of the explanatory options.

You might expect gravity would slow it down, but it's just expanding faster and faster.

My work indicated that if we consider smaller and smaller black holes, at some stage, the properties of black holes become indistinguishable from those of elementary particles.

To understand the universe in the state that it began in, the so-called Big Bang, we need laws of physics that work better than our current set of rules and procedures, which break down when we try to push them back to the beginning.

For the ten-dimensional universe, however, there are apparemtly millions of ways in which to curl up. To calculate which state the ten-dimensional universe prefers, we need to solve the field theory of strings using the theory of phase transitions, the most difficult problem in quantum theory.

First is Epsilon, which equals 0.007, which is the relative amount of hydrogen that converts to helium via fusion in the big bang.

In fact, this spaghettification becomes so severe that even the atoms of your body get pulled apart and eventually disintegrate. To someone watching this remarkable event

According to Einstein, there is no gravitational pull. The earth warps the space-time continuum around our bodies, so space itself pushes us down to the floor. Thus, it is the presence of matter that warps space around it, giving us the illusion that there is a gravitational force pulling on neighboring objects.

Tachyons travel faster than light and have imaginary mass; it's not clear if they fall up or down under gravity. They, too, have not been found in the laboratory.)

So string theory and M-theory are really the same theory, except that string theory is a reduction of eleven-dimensional M-theory to ten dimensions.)

Third is Omega, the relative density of the universe. If Omega were too small, then the universe would have expanded and cooled too fast.

Quantum theory says that there must be quantum corrections to pure blackness, so black holes are actually gray. (And they emit a faint radiation called Hawking radiation.)

So in addition to the Big Freeze and Big Crunch, a third alternative began to emerge from the data, the Big Rip, which is like the Big Freeze on steroids. It is a vastly accelerated time frame for the life cycle of the universe.

I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.

And since, according to the big bang theory, the bang is what is supposed to have happened at the beginning, the big bang leaves out the bang. It tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged, or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all.

Stephen Hawking showed mathematically that the entropy of a black hole equals the number of Planck-sized cells that it takes to cover its event horizon. It's as if each cell carries one bit, one basic unit of information.

Since the familiar particles and the objects they compose—stars, planets, people, etc.—amount to less than 5 percent of the mass of the universe, such a disruption would not affect the vast majority of the universe, at least as measured by mass.

They imply that a region of space the size of a pea would be stretched larger than the observable universe in a time interval so short that the blink of an eye would overestimate it by a factor larger than a million billion billion billion.

Dutifully following the second law, we conclude that today's state derives from yesterday's even lower entropy state. And that state, we envision, derives from the day-before-yesterday's still lower entropy state, and so on, yielding a trail of ever-decreasing entropy taking us ever farther back in time until we finally reach the big bang.

Then, just as two trees are the same age if they have the same number of tree rings, and just as two samples of glacial sediment are the same age if they have the same percentage of radioactive carbon, two locations in space are passing through the same moment in time when they have the same value of the inflaton field. That's how we set and synchronize clocks in our bubble universe.

so, with only finitely many different particle arrangements, the arrangements of particles within patches must be duplicated an infinite number of times. That's the result we've been after.

each of the bubble universes appears to have finite spatial extent when examined from the outside, but infinite spatial extent when examined from the inside.