Quotes About Cosmology

If we envision that, somehow, the surface area of a black hole is a measure of the entropy it contains, then the increase in total surface area could be read as an increase in total entropy.

It doesn't seem that something on a hard-to-locate boundary is somehow calling the shots regarding what happens here in the bulk.

by the time the universe was a couple of minutes old, it was filled with a nearly uniform hot gas composed of roughly 75 percent hydrogen, 23 percent helium, and small amounts of deuterium and lithium. The essential point is that this gas filling the universe had extraordinarily low entropy. The big bang started the universe off in a state of low entropy, and that state appears to be the source of the order we currently see. In other words, the current order is a cosmological relic.

Just as important, the energy released by the inflaton field isn't lost-instead, like a cooling vat of steam condensing into water droplets, the inflaton's energy condenses into a uniform bath of particles that fill space. This two-step process-brief but rapid expansion, followed by energy conversion to particles-results in a huge, uniform spatial expanse that's filled with the raw material of familiar structures like stars and galaxies.

As the amount of matter used to create a black hole increases, the required density to which that matter must be crushed decreases.

The mathematical analyses pinned down the quantity of information a given black hole contains, without providing insight into the information itself.

La cosmología tiene la capacidad de llamar nuestra atención a un nivel profundo y visceral, porque comprender cómo comenzó todo es, al menos para algunos, el punto en el que podemos encontrarnos más cerca de comprender por qué empezó.

Based on the composition of the sun—the quantities of various heavy elements it now contains, determined by spectroscopic measurements—solar physicists believe the sun is a grandchild of the universe's first stars, a third-generation arrival.

If entropy has been steadily increasing since the big bang, then the entropy back at the bang must have been much lower than it is today.

The big bang is a theory, partly described in the last two chapters, that delineates cosmic evolution from a split second after whatever happened to bring the universe into existence, but it says nothing at all about time zero itself.

In every collection of 10^10^122 cosmic patches, we thus expect there to be, on average, one patch that looks just like ours. That is, in every region of space that's roughly 10^10^122 meters across, there should be a cosmic patch that replicates ours-one that contains you, the earth, the galaxy, and everything else that inhabits our cosmic horizon.

The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.

if we have several hundred or several thousand cultures, each with its own cosmology, we should not be astounded if, every now and then, purely by chance, one of them proposes an idea that is not only correct but also impossible for them to have deduced.

There are a vast number of stars within our galaxy. The number is not so large as the number of cometary nuclei around the Sun but is nevertheless hardly modest. It's about 400 billion stars, of which the Sun is one.

Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving

An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A'Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.

The cosmology of the ancient world was telling you about the nature of life here and now. Genesis is not about the origins of life. There were many other creation stories current in Israel at that time and no one was required to believe in that one.

I, however, believe that there is at least one philosophical problem, It is the problem of cosmology

If they were right, there was an absence of conflict not only over the specific case of cosmology but, in principle, over anything else in which scientific and biblical statements appeared to be in contradiction. A "conflict thesis" would have seemed untenable because there was nothing to fight about.

The Babylonians called it Tiamat, the Canaanites called it Lotan, the Ugaritic translation for "Leviathan." Hebrews called it Leviathan and sometimes Rahab.[12]

Scholar Michael S. Heiser has pointed out that the Hebrew word Elohim was more of a reference to a plane of existence than to a substance of being. In this way, Yahweh was Elohim, but no other elohim was Yahweh. Yahweh is incomparably THE Elohim of elohim (Deut. 10:17).[2]

Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it's no wonder. We're storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?

If there is a lot of matter, gravity will cause space to curve back on itself, yielding the spherical shape. If there is little matter, space is free to flare outward in the Pringles shape. And if there is just the right amount of matter, space will have zero curvature.*

Roughly 12 billion years ago, a submicroscopic pinpoint of false vacuum arose in the nothingness and expanded at a rate beyond human comprehension, doubling every 10–34 seconds.1 As it whooshed from insignificance to enormity it cooled, allowing quarks, neutrinos, photons, electrons, then the quark triumvirates known as protons and neutrons to precipitate from its energy.