Quotes About Universe

The universe has been expanding for over thirteen billion years, and we never stop being invited to expand along with it.

Surrender allows recovering Nice Guys to see each life experience as a gift from the universe to stimulate growth, healing and learning. Instead of asking, Why is this happening to me? the recovering Nice Guy can respond to life's challenges by pondering, What do I need to learn from this situation?

Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe---in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.

I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith—it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.

Robert A. Heinlein

Mike did not seem to grasp the idea of Creation itself. Well, Jubal wasn't sure that he did, either--he had long ago made a pact with himself to postulate a Created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days--since each hypothesis, while equally paradoxical, neatly avoided the paradoxes of the other--with, of course, a day off each year for sheer solipsist debauchery.

The verdict to be passed on the third planet around Sol was never in doubt.

For millennia philosophers and saints have tried to reason out a logical scheme for the universe... until Hilda came along and demonstrated that the universe is not logical but whimsical, its structure depending solely on the dreams and nightmares of non-logical dreamers.

The universe will let us know—later—whether or not Man has any "right" to expand through it. In

Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability against all competition...The Universe will let us know-later-whether Man has any right to expand through it.

ago he had made a pact with himself to postulate a created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days—since each hypothesis, whole paradoxical, avoided the paradoxes of the other—with a day off each leap year for sheer solipsist debauchery.

No, he could not swallow the "just-happened" theory, popular as it was with men who called themselves scientists. Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe—random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.

Was there any basis for preferring any one sufficient hypothesis over another? When you simply did not understand a thing: No! And Jubal readily admitted to himself that a long lifetime had left him completely and totally not understanding the basic problems of the Universe.

Mike did not seem to grasp the idea of Creation itself. Well, Jubal wasn't sure that he did, either—he had long ago made a pact with himself to postulate a Created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days—since each hypothesis, while equally paradoxical, neatly avoided the paradoxes of the other—with, of course, a day off each leap year for sheer solipsist debauchery.

The Universe was a silly place at best . . . but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.

There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to see a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's science. Three: Awareness that you live in a malevolent universe controlled by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, My current model -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised. In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.

Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence....

Thus, we can name our two heads — we have a real head outside the perceived universe and a perceived head inside the perceived universe, and our real head now appears, not only much bigger than our perceived head, but bigger than our perceived universe.

A labyrinth -- that's Joyce's metaphor, too. Somebody could write a good Ph.D. dissertation on the metaphor of the labyrinth in James Joyce, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson. We all regard the universe as a maze that we're running around in and trying to figure out.

Tentative Model #1: The perceived universe is a mixture of the "real universe" and our own "Thinker" — proving its pet beliefs.

And that reminded me--as everything in the universe does--of Finnegans Wake. Now, I'm sure in an educated audience like this, you're all thoroughly familiar with Finnegans Wake, and I don't have to explain its deep structure or its polylinguistic meanings.

Please remember that Dr. Mermin's position differs from my claim, which holds that the moon does not appear in our observed universe until somebody looks, but I do not assert we can make meaningful assertions about either existence or non-existence in the real universe and can only make meaningful utterances after somebody looks at the observed universe.

Dr. Herbert sensibly asks how taking a measurement can have this magic power. I don't think it can. I think we need a model with backward causality, at this point, until we find a better model, because otherwise we contradict the facts of quantum experiments. But I do not think the model is the universe. When the model gets this peculiar, we need to build a better model.