Quotes About Cosmology

why there is something rather than nothing: nothing is unstable.

And, just as with inflation, as described in the last chapter, our observable universe is at the threshold of expanding faster than the speed of light.

As Einstein might have put it, only a very malicious (and, therefore, in his mind unimaginable) God would have conspired to have created a universe that so unambiguously points to a Big Bang origin without its having occurred.

Finally, and inevitably, the flat universe will further flatten into a nothingness that mirrors its beginning. Not only will there be no cosmologists to look out on the universe, there will be nothing for them to see even if they could. Nothing at all. Not even atoms. Nothing. If you think that's bleak and cheerless, too bad. Reality doesn't owe us comfort.

see also positrons; virtual particles Aristotle, 172–73 Atkins, Peter, 191 baryons, 76 Big Bang, xvii, 95, 107, 150, 173, 189 CMBR left from, see cosmic microwave background radiation dating of, 3, 15–16, 77, 87 density of protons and neutrons in

T]he declaration of a First Cause still leaves open the question, Who created the creator? After all, what is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one?

Special relativity says nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light. But space itself can do whatever the heck it wants, at least in general relativity. And as space expands, it can carry distant objects, which are at rest in the space where they are sitting

the universe could have expanded during this inflationary period by a factor of more than 1028. While this is an incredible amount, it amazingly could have happened in a fraction of a second in the very early universe.

Everyone (with the exception of certain school boards in the United States) now knows that the universe is not static but is expanding and that the expansion began in an incredibly hot, dense Big Bang approximately 13.72 billion years ago.

Hubble's law: There is a linear relationship between recessional velocity and galaxy distance. Namely, galaxies that are ever more distant are moving away from us with faster velocities!

Some theorists have estimated that there are perhaps 10500 different possible consistent four-dimensional universes that could result from a single ten-dimensional string theory.

Nevertheless, the declaration of a First Cause still leaves open the question, "Who created the creator?" After all, what is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one?

one's universe would appear very different from the vast bulk of space around it, which would still be inflating. In this picture, inflation is eternal. Some regions, indeed most of space, will go on inflating forever.

The dark-matter hypothesis is preferred mostly because the only other possibility—that we are wrong about Newton's laws, and by extension general relativity—is too scary to contemplate.

Take the expansion rate of the universe, which is fine-tuned to one part in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That is, if it were changed by one part in either direction--a little faster, a little slower--we could not have a universe that would be capable of supporting life. ~Stephen C. Meyer, PHD~

In this connection it should be mentioned that in describing the regimes, Socrates does not speak of "ideologies" belonging to them; he is concerned with the character of each kind of regime and with the end which it manifestly and explicitly pursues, as well as with the political justification of the end in question in contradistinction to any transpolitical justification stemming from cosmology, theology, metaphysics, philosophy of history, myth, and the like.

The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics.

Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.

it is not difficult to understand why the general principle of relativity (on the basis of the equivalence principle) has led to a theory of gravitation.

Richard Feynman showed that anti-matter is identical, mathematically, to ordinary matter traveling backward in time. He

there are two trillion galaxies in the known Universe, each with an average of a hundred billion stars. Which comes to two hundred billion trillion stars in total.

Most cosmologists agree that dark matter and dark energy make up ninety-five percent of the universe. The parts we can detect, the hundreds of billions of galaxies filled with hundreds of billions of stars and planets, represent only five percent of the total.

Creation from something is more rational than creation from nothing.

There is no explanation in the Big Bang theory for the seemingly fortuitous fact that the density of matter has just the right value for the evolution of a benign, life supporting universe.