Quotes About Cosmology

Appeals to imagined forces and phenomena have been the basis for all the cosmological models proposed to avoid the big bang implications about God. The disproof of these models and the ongoing appeal by nontheists to more and more bizarre unknowns and unknowables seem to reflect the growing strength of the case for theism.

If the universe is created, then there must be reality beyond the universe...The Creator is the source of life and establishes its meaning and purpose....To study the origin and development of the universe is, in a sense, to investigate the basis for any meaning and purpose to life. Cosmology has deep theological and philosophical ramifications.

Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.

The key shortcoming of the multiverse theory, however, is that it appeals to something outside the universe, namely, a vast ensemble of other universes and a set of meta-laws that exist for no reason (e.g., quantum mechanics, string theory). In this respect, the multiverse theory is little better than a direct theistic explanation where an appeal is made to an external creator/designer.

Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.

I want to know what dark matter and dark energy are comprised of. They remain a mystery, a complete mystery. No one is any closer to solving the problem than when these two things were discovered.

George Gamow

The dark energy is not exactly zero, but the first 122 decimal points are zero. That's crazy. That is really one of the craziest things we've ever discovered.

In Cantor's mind there were an infinite number of infinities-the transfinite numbers-each nested in the other. Aleph 0 is smaller than Aleph 1, which is smaller than Aleph 2, which is smaller than Aleph 3, and so forth. At the top of the chain sits the ultimate infinity that engulfs all other infinities: God, the infinity that defies all comprehension.

When a nation becomes unmoored from reality, it retreats into a world of magic. Facts are accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained cosmology. The search for truth becomes irrelevant.

The missing link in cosmology is the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

With COBE, we can see things before the lights came on. While we probably will not rewrite the book of cosmology with this mission, we will write another chapter.

We don't know what triggered the big bang, nor what, if anything, existed before it. But somehow the universe emerged as a vast sea of ultrahot gas, expanding fast in all directions like the fireball ignited by a nuclear bomb blast or by the explosion of a gas pipeline. Except that the big bang was not destructive (so far as we know). Instead, it created everything in our universe, or rather the seeds for everything.

But it is not only space that curves: time does too. Einstein predicts that time on Earth passes more quickly at higher altitude, and more slowly at lower altitude.

Einstein'?n denklemi uzay?n dura?an olamayaca??n?, geni?lemek zorunda oldu?unu gösterir. (...) Ayn? denklem geni?lemenin minicik ve çok s?cak genç bir evrenin patlamas?yla tetiklendi?ini de öngörür: Bu da Büyük Patlama'd?r.

If we try to put together what we have learned in the twentieth century about the physical world, the clues point toward something profoundly different from our instinctive understanding of matter, space, and time.

The origin of time may be similar to that of heat: it comes from averages of many microscopic variables. Let's see this in detail.

A novel image of the world is taking shape: a world without space and without time. The space where the world "inhabits" and the time "along which" things evolve might soon disappear from our fundamental description of the physical world, in the same manner in which notions such as "the centre of the universe" have disappeared in the past.

the "singularity" that classic general relativity anticipated disappears as soon as we take quantum gravity into account.

Einstein wrote an equation that says that R is equivalent to the energy of matter. That is to say: space curves where there is matter. That is it. The equation fits into half a line, and there is nothing more. A vision—that space curves—became an equation.

Einstein's equation shows that space cannot stand still; it must be expanding. In 1930 the expansion of the universe was actually observed.

More than a hundred years have passed since we learned that the "present of the universe" does not exist.

There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing.

Why is there an "is"? Why is there something rather than nothing? For that answer both science and religion must turn to the metaphysical.