Quotes About Mystery

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand. And

appears that at least 90 percent of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99 percent, is composed of Fritz Zwicky's "dark matter"—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us.

two-thirds of the universe is still missing from the balance sheet

It appears that the universe may not only be filled with dark matter, but with dark energy.

Alpha Centauri

The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don't actually know what is in our own solar system. Now

dark matter," which is invisible to us and yet is believed to account for 90 per cent, or more, of all the matter in the universe. Dark matter was first theorized in the 1930s by Fritz Zwicky

WIMPs (for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which is to say specks of invisible matter left over from the Big

certainly have some wonders yet to find.

One of the reasons the Mona Lisa looks enigmatic is that she has no eyebrows.

We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare—Susanna in May 1583 and the twins, Judith and Hamnet, in early February 1585—but all the rest is darkness. We know nothing about the couple's relationship—whether they bickered constantly or were eternally doting.

Childe would almost certainly have been fascinated with Çatalhöyük because almost nothing about the place made sense.

Miraculously, Pitka survived. "I don't know why I set that durn gun against the tree," he said later. (Actually, what he said was, "Mrffff mmmpg nnnmmm mffffffn," on account of having no lips, teeth, nose, tongue, or other vocal apparatus.)

The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.

and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of "gone" and "all gone.

Shakespeare] è una sorta di equivalente letterario dell'elettrone: è lì ma non è lì.

I also learned that about ten thousand containers fall off ships each year. Sometimes after a period of years the container doors pop open and the contents float to the surface.

WHEN I was brand new to Britain and everything was still a mystery to me, I went with an English friend to Brighton for the day, and there I saw my first seaside pier. The idea of constructing a runway to nowhere was one that would never have occurred to me.

Silbury Hill in Wiltshire

The author says the earliest Australian aborigines devoted extraordinary amounts of energy to enterprises no one now can understand.

Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare.

puckerstoppled

It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he'd had some training, but it is quite workaday and not well lighted. The main thing is that if it is Shakespeare, it is the only portrait known that might have been done from life, so this would be what William Shakespeare really looked like—if it is William Shakespeare.

the trail just disappeared: smooshed into nonexistence by what seemed to have been a large herd of elephants suddenly deciding to take a group nap.