Big Bang: The Origin Of The Universe Quotes
"Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths." - Karl Popper
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." - Galileo Galilei
"Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun." - Anonymous
"Physics is not a religion. If it were, we’d have a much easier time raising money." - Leon Lederman
"The word ‘myth’ is derived from the Greek word mythos, which can mean ‘story’, but also means ‘word’, in the sense of ‘the final word’."
"Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house." - Henri Poincaré
"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful." - Henri Poincaré
"The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." - Thomas Huxley
"If thou art bored with this wearisome method of calculation, take pity on me who had to go through with at least seventy repetitions of it, at a very great loss of time." - Johannes Kepler
"He was studying to be a doctor at the time, but this was his one and only contribution to medicine."
"For example, Aristotle used philosophy to deduce that heavy objects fall faster than light objects, but Galileo conducted an experiment to prove that Aristotle was wrong."
"Within a few months of Lippershey’s breakthrough, Galileo noted that ‘a rumour came to our ears that a spyglass had been made by a certain Dutchman’, and he immediately set about building his own telescopes."
"Galileo profited from his commercialisation of the telescope, but he realised that it also had a scientific value."
"Galileo, who was in correspondence with Kepler, was fully aware of the latest Keplerian version of the Copernican model, and he realised that his discovery of Jupiter’s moons was providing further support for the Sun-centred model of the universe."
"The only way to break the impasse would be to find a clear-cut prediction that differentiated between the two competing models."
"Galileo argued: ‘Holy Writ was intended to teach men how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go.’"
"Newton’s law of gravity ruled the cosmos. Scientists assumed that the problem of gravity had been solved and used Newton’s formula to explain everything from the flight of an arrow to the trajectory of a comet."
"In other words, the tennis ball and its dimple raced around the hollow caused by the bowling ball."
"Matter tells space how to bend; space tells matter how to move."
"When I am judging a theory, I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way."
"You must help me or else I’ll go crazy!"
"Working on relativity was like enduring ‘a rain of fire and brimstone’."
"As an older friend I must advise you against it for in the first place you will not succeed, and even if you succeed no one will believe you."
"The less one knows about the universe, the easier it is to explain."
"Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all."
"Theories crumble, but good observations never fade."
"First, get the facts, then you can distort them at your leisure."
"Heaven wheels above you displaying to you her eternal glories and still your eyes are on the ground."
"Lord Rosse completed his gigantic 16.5 metre long telescope, shown in Figure 36, and began making observations."
"He quickly halted his survey of the sky and diverted his time and money towards supporting the local community."
"At the same time, he had to maintain his balance while five labourers worked with mechanical cranks, blocks and pulleys to hoist the telescope to the right elevation."
"Johnstone Stoney, Rosse’s assistant, assessed the telescope’s quality by pointing it at very faint stars."
"The weather here is still vexatious: but not absolutely repulsive."
"Its resemblance to a whirlpool gave M51 its other nickname, the Whirlpool Nebula."
"That such a system should exist, without internal movement, seems to be in the highest degree improbable."
"He began to lobby Yerkes with the slogan ‘Lick the Lick’, because his new telescope would dwarf anything at the Lick Observatory."
"On one occasion the patient lord wrote to his wife, explaining: ‘The weather here is still vexatious: but not absolutely repulsive.’"
"Astronomy is something like the ministry. No one should go into it without a call. I got that unmistakable call, and I knew that even if I were second rate or third rate, it was astronomy that mattered."
"In 1842 Doppler announced that the movement of an object would affect any waves it was emitting, whether they were water waves, sound waves or light waves."
"For a simple illustration of this Doppler effect, picture a frog relaxing on a lily pad and tapping his webbed foot in the water."
"One observer sees a decreased wavelength, the other sees an increased wavelength. This is the Doppler effect."
"When an object emitting waves moves towards an observer, then the observer perceives a decrease in the wavelength."
"The Doppler effect was tested for sound waves in 1845 by the Dutch meteorologist Christoph Buys-Ballot."
"Today we can hear the same effect with an ambulance siren, which seems to have a higher pitch as the ambulance approaches, and then a lower pitch as it moves away."
"The shift in wavelength and pitch is highly predictable thanks to an equation developed by Doppler."
"The police officer fires a pulse of radio waves at an approaching car and then detects it after it has been reflected back from the car."
"Hubble’s observations implied a moment of creation. Diagram (a) represents the universe today, labelled 2 o’clock, with just three other galaxies for simplicity."
"So everything in the universe apparently emerged from a single dense region during a moment of creation."
"In theory, two deuterium nuclei could fuse directly to form a stable helium nucleus. However, deuterium nuclei rarely interact with each other, so the indirect route is more productive."
"By the 1940s it became clear that both of Bethe’s proposed nuclear reactions were taking place in the Sun and were responsible for generating its energy."
"Astrophysicists could envisage exactly how the Sun converted 584 million tonnes of hydrogen into 580 million tonnes of helium each second, transforming the missing mass into sunshine energy."
"Nuclear physicists had proved that they could make a concrete contribution to astronomy by explaining how the stars shone."
"George Gamow was a gregarious Ukrainian-born maverick with a penchant for hard drinking and card tricks."
"In the face of science, the Big Bang seemed to me to be unsatisfactory...On scientific grounds this Big Bang assumption is much the less palatable of the two."
"The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it."
"The Steady State theory opens up the exciting possibility that the laws of physics may indeed determine the contents of the universe."
"The requirement of self-propagation is thus a powerful new principle with whose aid we see for the first time the possibility of answering the question why things are as they are without merely saying: it is because they were as they were."
"In science it does not matter how strange an idea may seem so long as it works—that is to say, so long as an idea can be expressed in a precise form and so long as its consequences are found to be in agreement with observation."
"The Big Bang model earns a question mark on this point because of its partial success."
"The only real prospect for resolving the age paradox was for an error to be discovered in previous measurements of either the distances to the galaxies or their velocities."
"If the distances doubled and the speeds remained the same, then the time taken for all the galaxies to have reached their current distances from a moment of creation would also have to be doubled."
"We have found it possible to explain, in a general way the abundances of practically all the isotopes of the atoms from hydrogen through uranium by synthesis in stars and supernovae."
"The universe in fact is a botched job, but I suppose we shall have to make the best of it."
"The most pressing problem for the Big Bang supporters was the sixth criterion in Table 4—the age of the universe."
"Critics of the Big Bang model pointed out that the stars and galaxies were older than the Earth and therefore probably more ancient than 3.6 billion years, which meant that the universe still seemed to contain objects that were older than the universe itself."
"The definitive study of the herd instincts of astronomers has yet to be written, but there are times when we resemble nothing so much as a herd of antelope, heads down in tight formation, thundering with firm determination in a particular direction across the plain."
"This was Fowler’s first encounter with Hoyle, and he had no real idea what was going on in the Yorkshireman’s mind."
"There is always a battle between signal and noise, and ideally the signal should be much stronger than the noise."
"In radio astronomy, the signals from a distant galaxy are so feeble that the issue of noise is paramount."
"This forced the duo to explore the second category of noise, namely noise that is inherent in the equipment."
"At one point, attention focused on a pair of pigeons that had nested inside the horn antenna."
"After a year of checking, cleaning and rewiring the radio telescope, there was a reduction in the level of noise."
"They were completely oblivious to the fact that the omnipresent noise was actually a remnant of the Big Bang."
"The echo from the Big Bang had transformed itself into radio waves and was being detected as noise by Penzias and Wilson’s radio telescope."
"The existence of the CMB radiation had been clearly predicted back in the 1940s."
"The award of the Nobel prize to Penzias and Wilson marked the point at which the Big Bang model became part of the scientific mainstream."
"For the majority of researchers, the CMB radiation was conclusive evidence in favour of a moment of creation and an evolving universe, as opposed to an eternal universe that was essentially steady."
"American astronomers had been polled back in 1959, at the height of the Big Bang versus Steady State controversy, and then again in 1980 after Penzias and Wilson had won their Nobel prize."
"The obvious lack of this infinite light from space is known as Olbers’ paradox."
"The Big Bang narrative was that the early universe consisted of the most uniform, harmonised, consistent, smooth soup of matter conceivable."
"If there were density variations at this moment in the history of the universe, then they ought to have been imprinted on the CMB radiation we see today."
"When you go out tonight and you take your hat off, you’re getting a little bit of warmth from the Big Bang right on your scalp."