Quotes About Cosmology

That looks like a tree, let's call it a tree,' said Coyote to Earthmaker at the beginning, and they walked around the rootdrinker patting their bellies.

In fact, I think when we carry out a complete analysis of time, I think what we're going to discover is that like matter, time is composed of elemental, discrete types.

Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws,' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.

The notion that anyone in the 21st century could take seriously the notion that the sun orbits the Earth, or that the Earth is the center of the universe, is almost unbelievable.

Most of what Einstein said and did has no direct impact on what anybody reads in the Bible. Special relativity, his work in quantum mechanics, nobody even knows or cares. Where Einstein really affects the Bible is the fact that general relativity is the organizing principle for the Big Bang.

People have contemplated the origin and evolution of the universe since before the time of Aristotle. Very recently, the era of speculation has given way to a time of science.

In the beginning, there was physics.

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

It is the destiny of stars to collapse.

Don't know if it's good or bad that a Google search on "Big Bang Theory" lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe

Dark energy is a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that acts in the opposite direction of gravity, forcing the universe to expand faster than it otherwise would.

Dark matter is a mysterious substance that has gravity but does not interact with light in any known way.

If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don't know. Maybe there's nothing wrong with the matter, and it's the gravity we don't understand.

The most accurate measurements to date reveal dark energy as the most prominent thing in town, currently responsible for 68 percent of all the mass-energy in the universe; dark matter comprises 27 percent, with regular matter comprising a mere 5 percent.

The universe today is 13.8 billion years old. By 22 billion years, the Sun will have finished its main-sequence lifetime and will have become a white dwarf. The Andromeda galaxy will have crashed into the Milky Way.

What happened before all this? What happened before the beginning? Astrophysicists have no idea. Or, rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. In response, some religious people assert, with a tinge of righteousness, that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime mover. In the mind of such a person, that something is, of course, God.

The closest anybody has come is to presume dark energy is a quantum effect—where the vacuum of space, instead of being empty, actually seethes with particles and their antimatter counterparts. They pop in and out of existence in pairs, and don't last long enough to be measured.

The Universe was opaque until 380.000 years after the Big Bang.

Dark matter is dark; that means it does not interact with photons

Dark matter particles should be passing through your body right now.

If a particle can fall into a black hole, it can come out of a white hole.

In particular, a quantity known as the fine-structure constant, which controls the basic fingerprinting for every element, must have remained unchanged for billions of years. Of

What our phrenological exam says is that we understand how the universe behaved, but that most of the universe is made of stuff about which we are clueless. Our profound areas of ignorance notwithstanding, today, as never before, cosmology has an anchor, because the CMB reveals the portal through which we all walked. It's a point where interesting physics happened, and where we learned about the universe before and after its light was set free.

So what is the stuff? Nobody knows. The closest anybody has come is to presume dark energy is a quantum effect—where the vacuum of space, instead of being empty, actually seethes with particles and their antimatter counterparts. They pop in and out of existence in pairs, and don't last long enough to be measured.