Quotes About Universe

Death was an existential catastrophe, a rip in the soft upholstery with which humanity padded over a hard uncaring universe, but it turned out there were an amazing number of people whose job it was to deal with it for you, and all they asked in return were huge quantities of time and money.

She swore she could prove it mathematically, but the calculations required were so involved that they would have required a computer the size of the universe, running for a length of time that would have taken them past the projected heat-death of the universe, to work them out. It was pretty much the definition of moot.

Schwarzschild radius,

I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit," Eliot said. "Though that would explain a lot." It

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".

This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again.... God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.

You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.

Sanity ... had it ever been more than a convention -- a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?

The word 'year' is meaningless as applied to a physical system by itself: it is not the stars or the planets that experience years, still less measure them, but man. This very observation is the result of man's attention to recurrent movements, seasonable events, biological rhythms, measurable sequences. When the idea of a year is projected back upon the physical universe, it tells something further that is important to man: otherwise, it is a poetic fiction.

What made the new world picture so potent was that its method of deliberately ignoring the complex reality of organisms was an immense labor-saving device: its pragmatic efficiency counterbalanced its conceptual superficiality. The universe as a whole, the whole that contains all other wholes, is immeasurable and unthinkable in its infinite variety and multi-fold concreteness. Only by samples and abstractions can one put together in the mind a playtoy model.

Paradoxically, then, the greatest gains that have been achieved through command of nuclear reaction have been purely spiritual ones: an enriched conception of cosmic realities: a deeper insight into the nature of the universe and of the place that living organisms, and finally man himself, have come to occupy.

In short, without man's cumulative capacity to give symbolic form to experience, to reflect upon it and re-fashion it and project it, the physical universe would be as empty of meaning as a handless clock: its ticking would tell nothing. The mindfulness of man makes the difference.

Self-blame is usually a way of avoiding something more hideous anyway, something you're willing to be punished for but unwilling to change, or even something terrible in the imperfect structure of the universe.

I get the urge people will have after Trump. 'Look at the chaos and the exhaustion: Wouldn't it be better to go back to something more stable with somebody we know?' But there's no going back to a pre-Trump universe. We can't be saying the system will be fine again just like it was. Because that's not true; it wasn't fine.

With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe. Pursuing 'philosophy of the universe' through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call 'stereotypical repetition.'

One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it - in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them - that's huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us.

Nature hasn't gone anywhere. It is all around us, all the planets, galaxies and so on. We are nothing in comparison.

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.

If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.

I think a scientist's job is to explore the Universe, to explore the cosmos around us. People always want to know - why is that useful? Well, on just pure fundamental grounds, on some level it's like art, it's like umm, music, it's aesthetics, it's like philosophy. You want to know where you are in the Universe.

It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time.

My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.