Quotes About Time

Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something - or Someone - beyond itself.

Your whole life boils down to a moment that will take 20-40 seconds. How crazy is that? And it's every four years. I wouldn't tell myself that during the meet, but it's terrifying. A lot of it boils down to a very precise moment in the universe, and that just happens to be the Olympics.

A universe that came from nothing in the big bang will disappear into nothing at the big crunch. Its glorious few zillion years of existence not even a memory.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing.

The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.

Relativity can, for instance, explain that the universe had once been clumped into a dense fireball. But it can never explain how matter actually behaved.

The arrow of time doesn't move forward forever. There's a phase in the history of the universe where you go from low entropy to high entropy. But then, once you reach the locally maximum entropy you can get to, there's no more arrow of time.

I don't have the privilege of time to meet everyone all the time. But, I've always said that my dad is one of the most important people in my universe, and if someone's important to him, I respect that person.

Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.

After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life.

Planet Earth is estimated to have a lifetime of nine billion years. And we're right smack in the middle of our lifetime. We've been in the universe for 4.5 billion years. So, that should mean something. We should sort of take a look at where we came from and where we are going.

If you're going to write time travel stories, you have to sort of figure out how does time travel work in this particular universe that I'm dealing with.

We don't really have a place in the universe, as far as on a timeline. But nothing else does, either. Therefore every moment really is the most important moment that's ever happened, including this moment right now.

There are things that I would say that you could call an instant of time; or better, a now. As we live we seem to move through a succession of instants of time, nows, and the question is, what are they? There are where everything in the universe is at this moment, now.

Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.

And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.

At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space - abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms.

Scientists say, 'There is no such thing as time; gravity is a dust from another universe, and outside our own universe are many, many universes in all directions.' They speculate that attached to these universes are probably 6,000 planets identical to Earth. So are there things living out there? Animals, people, anything?

Sometime in the future, science will be able to create realities that we can't even begin to imagine. As we evolve, we'll be able to construct other information systems that correspond to other realities, universes based on logic completely different from ours and not based on space and time.

The evidence in this universe for design - or, if you will, the fine-tuning that cannot be explained by chance or by 'enough time' - is so compelling that the only way around it is to suggest that our universe is only one of an infinite number of universes.

I really loved all my time at this university and so I hope it's seen how much I appreciate Duke. Not only playing basketball for Duke, but being a student at Duke, and I really am thankful for my time here.