Quotes About Cosmology

Some piously record 'In the beginning God', but I say 'In the beginning hydrogen'.

We ourselves are made of Stardust.

The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable.

...in principle, one can predict everything in the universe solely from physical laws. Thus, the long-standing 'first cause' problem intrinsic in cosmology has been finally dispelled.

Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: the multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particular hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life.

The most profound questions seem to have this fascinating aspect: Either they have no answer at all, or all possible answers seem impossible. So, here's one more profound question: Did anything exist before the Big Bang? Was the Big Bang the beginning of time? Or was there something before, some kind of eternal "meta-universe" that spawned our universe and possibly other universes?

Carroll and other physicists believe that order is intimately connected to the "arrow" of time. In particular, the forward direction of time is determined by the movement of order to disorder.

with the behavior of the universe before the Big Bang a nearly mirror image of its behavior after the Big Bang. Until fourteen billion years ago, the universe was contracting. It reached a minimum size at the Big Bang (which we call t = 0) and has been expanding ever since, like a Slinky that falls to the floor, reaches a maximum compression upon impact, and then bounces back to larger dimensions.

Remember that the past fifty years has been the age of the Big Bang cosmology. We have learnt to see all reality as a slow-motion explosion, as pouring itself out and passing away, as dissemination. We live in a postmodern epoch in which there is nothing absolute, nothing permanent and nothing substantial.

Which raises a perplexing question: What about the big bang? Didn't it happen 13 billion 799 million years ago, before any observers?

Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed, because dark energy has no effect on daily life, or even inside our solar system.

In the cosmology of Western Christians, life's challenges provide opportunities to become stronger and to have a closer relationship with God. The burdens God sends to Christians in the Western world are incitements to self-improvement. The comforts that Amina found in her religious belief, by contrast, were not in an encouragement to overcome or learn from hardships. Rather, simply accepting her burdens was a continuous act of penance.

Moreover, since the sun remains stationary, whatever appears as a motion of the sun is really due rather to the motion of the earth.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Our moon was born too small to harbor life. It came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch spun a disk of rocks that condensed into a satellite.

So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.

We look at distant exploding stars called supernovae, and we've developed techniques to measure how far away they are and how fast they're moving away from us.

the fifth force is a repulsive one that operates over extremely long distances.

Surprisingly now, over a half a century later, time symmetric approaches to electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravity, and cosmology might be consonant with the kind of eschatology that a theist such as Pannenberg supports.

If by following Pannenberg we believe that the eschaton, as "now" and "future," has already appeared proleptically in the events of Easter while yet remaining still to come, we might expect that the universe already has a more complex topology than that of ordinary spacetime in which simple worldlines trace out the history of particles. We might even expect to find hints of this more complex topology prefigured within the theories of physics and cosmology.

In 1543, Polish astronomer and priest Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) put our corner of the universe in order, suggesting that the Sun and not Earth was at the center of our planetary system. The idea contradicted the teachings of the Church, but was eventually proved by Galileo.

he divides metaphysics into three parts – rational psychology, concerning the nature of the soul; cosmology, concerning the nature of the universe and our status within it; and theology, concerning the existence of God.

Their mutual gravitational attraction will ultimately cause them to collapse inward, in manifest disagreement with an apparently static universe.

Particle physicists are way ahead of cosmologists. Cosmology has produced one totally mysterious quantity: the energy of empty space, about which we understand virtually nothing. However, particle physics has not understood many more quantities for far longer!