Quotes About Universe

It's a natural consequence of the capacity of a bookstore or library to contain entire worlds, whole universes, and all contained between the covers of books. In that sense, every library or bookstore is practically infinite.

There's a kind of evil that isn't even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It's a foulness that's right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It's in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind." "And while we're alive?" "We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.

Having once aroused in our mind enough faith in our own will-power to create a universe of contemplation and forget everything else, there are few limitations to the happiness we may enjoy.

Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition: the universe is Time's body.

She wondered whether her head were so big as to be able to contain all this starry universe, or whether the universe were so little that it would fit within the compass of her human head.

infundibulum

There was no 'before' the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.

Since only a narrow range of the allowed values for, say, the fine structure constant will permit observers to exist in the Universe, we must find ourselves in the narrow range of possibilities which permit them, no matter how improbable they are. We must ask for the conditional probability of observing constants to take particular ranges, given that other features of the Universe, like its age, satisfy necessary conditions for life.

Natural units tell us that in a well-defined sense the Universe is very old already, about 1060 Planck times old. Life on Earth didn't appear until after the Universe was 1059 Planck times old. We were a late arrival.

belief in the ultimate simplicity and unity behind the rules that constrain the Universe leads us to expect that there exists a single unchanging pattern behind the appearances. Under different conditions this single pattern will crystallise into superficially distinct patterns that show up as the four separate forces governing the world around us. It has gradually become clear how this patterning probably works.

Universes that expand too slowly will collapse back to a big crunch before galaxies can form; universes that expand too quickly do not allow islands of matter to condense out into galaxies and form stars.

I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.' Freeman Dyson24

For even if we expunged all the matter in the Universe the lambda force could still exist, causing the universe to expand or contract. It was always there, acting on everything but unaffected by anything. It began to look like an omnipresent form of energy that remained when everything that could be removed from a universe had been removed, and that sounds very much like somebody's definition of a vacuum.

If constants like G and ? do not vary in time, then the standard history of our Universe has a simple broad-brush appearance. During the first 300,000 years the dominant energy in the Universe is radiation and the temperature is greater than 3000 degrees and too hot for any atoms or molecules to exist. The Universe is a huge soup of electrons, photons of light and nuclei.

Our brains are the most complicated objects that we have so far encountered in the Universe. We are far from simple. Indeed, were our brains significantly simpler, we would be too simple to know it.

We have seen that the process of stellar alchemy takes time – billions of years of it. And because our Universe is expanding it needs to be billions of light years in size if it is to have enough time to produce the building blocks for living complexity. A universe that was only as big as our Milky Way galaxy, with its 100 billion stars, would be little more than a month old.

Another consequence of an old expanding universe, besides its large size, is that it is cold, dark and lonely. When any ball of gas or radiation is expanded in volume, the temperature of its constituents falls off in proportion to the increase in its size. A universe that is big and old enough to contain the building blocks of complexity will be very cold and the levels of average radiant energy so low that space will everywhere appear dark.

If we were to smooth out all the material in the Universe into a uniform sea of atoms we would see just how little of anything there is. There would be little more than about 1 atom in every cubic metre of space. No laboratory on Earth could produce an artificial vacuum that was anywhere near as empty as that. The best vacuum achievable today contains approximately 1000 billion atoms in a cubic metre.

Science is predicated upon the belief that the Universe is algorithmically compressible and the modern search for a Theory of Everything is the ultimate expression of that belief, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of the logic behind the Universe's properties that can be written down in finite form by human beings.

All we can assert with confidence is a negative: if the constants of Nature were not within one percent or so of their observed values, then the basic buildong blocks of life would not exist in sufficient profusion in the Universe. Moreover, changes like this would affect the very stability of the elements and prevent the existence of the required elements rather than merely suppress their abundance.

The effect of the 'time becomes space' proposal is that there is no definite moment or point of creation. In more conventional quantum mechanical terms we would say that the universe is the result of a quantum mechanical tunneling process, where it must be interpreted as having tunneled from nothing at all. Quantum tunneling processes, which are familiar to physicists and routinely observed, correspond to Transitions which do not have a classical path.

there could be more than three dimensions of space but they had to be small and unchanging if they were to avoid altering the character of the world that we experience.

A condition, like the existence of stars or certain chemical elements, is identified as a necessary condition for the existence of any form of chemical complexity, of which life is the most impressive known example. This does not mean that if this condition is met that life must exist, will never die out if it does exist, or that the fact that this condition holds in our Universe means that it was 'designed' with life in mind.

Since so much of the physical universe, from brain waves to quantum waves, relies upon travelling waves we appreciate the key role played by the dimensionality of our space in rendering its contents intelligible to us.