Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, And The Future Of The Cosmos Quotes
"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose."
"The universe is not bounded in any direction."
"What we humans are looking for in a creation story is a way of experiencing the world."
"The universe is behaving like a driver who slows down approaching a red stoplight and then hits the accelerator when the light turns green."
"Damn the solar system. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better [universe] myself."
"If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest."
"The misfortune of my poor parents, who for so many years have not had a happy moment, weighs most heavily on me."
"From a universe just 100,000 light-years across, the universe suddenly was perhaps billions of light-years across."
"The universe was suddenly populated with millions, perhaps billions, of sister galaxies."
"If a star is moving toward you, its wavelength gets shorter. A yellow star will appear slightly bluish."
"The closer they are to each other, the slower they move apart."
"By analyzing twenty-four galaxies, he found that the farther the galaxy was, the faster it was moving away from Earth."
"The inverse of the Hubble constant gives a rough calculation of the age of the universe."
"My husband does that on the back of an old envelope."
"The evolution of the world can be compared to a display of fireworks that has just ended."
"Every time you buy a balloon, you are getting atoms [some of which] were made in the first few minutes of the big bang."
"What intrigued Hubble was de Sitter's prediction that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it should be moving."
"It takes an enormous amount of self-esteem to listen to things like that and not be demolished."
"In essence, Gamow and Hoyle have given us a complementary picture of nucleosynthesis."
"Literally, our bodies are made of stardust, from stars that died billions of years ago."
"To a physicist, beauty means symmetry and simplicity."
"The essence of its beauty is that it remains the same if we rotate the snowflake by 60 degrees."
"The secret of nature is symmetry, but much of the texture of the world is due to mechanisms of symmetry breaking."
"The universe was beautiful, symmetrical, but rather useless."
"Everything that happens in our world (except for the effects of gravity) results from Standard Model particle interactions."
"If enough alien plutonium-186 enters our universe, then the nuclear force in general will increase in intensity."
"Other universes might have different values of these 19 parameters."
"Life in those universes could be more complex than our own, with more chemical elements out of which to create DNA-like chemicals."
"The signal was so weak it wasn't even detected until 1965, and now they're measuring fluctuations of one part in 100,000."
"The energy associated with Lambda, or dark energy, makes up 73 percent of all matter and energy in the universe."
"In the book, there is an alternate universe separated from ours because of a single pivotal event."
"The United States is eventually cut up into three pieces, with the German Reich controlling the east coast, the Japanese controlling the west coast, and an uneasy buffer, the Rocky Mountain states, in between."
"A mysterious individual writes a book, called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, based on a line in the Bible, which is banned by the Nazis."
"The mission of the heroine in the story is to see if there is any truth in an alternate universe in which democracy and freedom prevail, rather than tyranny and racism."
"The world of The Man in the High Castle and our world are separated by only the tiniest of accidents, a single assassin's bullet."
"Sometimes a single cosmic ray, a single particle from outer space, can strike deep in the DNA within an embryo and cause a mutation that will eventually lead to a miscarriage."
"To slip between these worlds is within the laws of physics."
"In relativity, the stage of life on which we perform may be made of rubber, with the actors traveling in curved paths as they move across the set."
"In a quantum play, the actors suddenly throw away the script and act on their own."
"The puppets cut their strings. Free will has been established."
"John Wheeler is the last of the giants, or 'monster minds,' as his student Richard Feynman once called them, who have grappled with the insane conclusions of the quantum theory."
"It was Wheeler who coined the term 'black hole' in 1967."
"Wheeler was born in 1911 in Jacksonville, Florida."
"Quantum mechanics 'describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment.'"
"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve."
"Quantum mechanics is a set of cookbook rules that yields the right probabilities with uncanny accuracy."
"For example, there are several ways of resolving the Schrodinger cat problem."
"A way to partially resolve some of these thorny philosophical questions is called decoherence."
"These parallel universes are not ghost worlds with an ephemeral existence; within each universe, we have the appearance of solid objects and concrete events as real and as objective as any."
"The mind reels when we realize that, according to this interpretation of quantum mechanics, all possible worlds coexist with us."
"If a theory did not offer a physical picture that even a child could understand, then it was probably useless."
"Music creates order out of chaos; for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent; melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed; and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous."
"Music is the hidden arithmetic exercise of a soul unconscious that it is calculating."
"The universe can now be viewed as a vast symphony of strings."
"The 'harmonies' of the string are the laws of physics."
"The 'melodies' that can be written on strings correspond to the laws of chemistry."
"If Einstein had never discovered relativity, his theory might have been discovered as a by-product of string theory."
"Music and science were [once] identified so profoundly that anyone who suggested that there was any essential difference between them would have been considered an ignoramus."
"The biggest string guys are saying it would take four hundred years to prove strings, but I say they should shut up."
"The presence of the planet Jupiter in our solar system is a fortuitous one for life on Earth."
"If Earth were a bit smaller, its gravity would be so weak that it could not keep its oxygen."
"Astronomers Ward and Brownlee argue that perhaps intelligent life on earth is unique to the galaxy."
"The Greek philosopher Democritus wrote, 'There are worlds infinite in number and different in size.'"
"If the proton were just 1 percent heavier, it would decay into a neutron, and all nuclei would become unstable."
"The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine."
"The universe must have the properties for life to develop at some time within it."
"Imagine a two-dimensional race of flat beings, called Flatlanders, living on a tabletop."
"The apparent fine-tuning on which our existence depends could be a coincidence."
"Our universe is the way it is because of the law of averages over many universes in the multiverse."
"There may be an ice age, similar to the one that buried North America under almost a mile of ice, making human civilization impossible."
"Humans lived like wolves in packs, foraging for scraps of food in small, isolated tribes."
"Humanity was preoccupied with one goal: survival."
"The Ice Age ended, and humans began the rapid rise from the ice to the stars."
"Scientists believe that an extraterrestrial object...plowed into the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, causing freezing temperatures that killed off vegetation and the dinosaurs."
"The Sun is already 30 percent hotter today than it was in its infancy."
"In 3.5 billion years, the Sun will be 40 percent brighter than it is today, meaning that Earth will gradually heat up."
"In about 5 billion years, the Sun's core will exhaust its supply of hydrogen gas and mutate into a red giant star."
"Our descendants could snare a passing star into an orbit around the Sun, then jettison the Earth from its solar orbit into an orbit around the new star."
"The universe is gradually plunged into darkness."
"Any planet circling around a dead star will freeze."
"Earth would have to orbit this star twenty times closer than it currently is from the Sun to receive the same amount of sunlight."
"The only source of energy will be the slow evaporation of energy from black holes."
"The universe drifts slowly toward the ultimate heat death, as the temperature approaches absolute zero."
"Mother Nature wasn't designed to make us happy."
"The cosmos will consist of a few electrons and positrons locked in their ponderous orbits, neutrinos and photons left over from baryon decay."
"Eternity would be a prison, rather than an endlessly receding horizon of creativity and exploration."
"All intelligent life is doomed to perish, according the laws of physics."
"The era when life is able to flourish is concentrated in a very narrow band, a fleeting period in the life of the stars."
"The most beautiful system of the sun, planes, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being."
"Science without religion is lame. But religion without science is blind."
"Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of his kingdom made manifest; he is glorified not in one, but in countless suns."
"The eternal silence of those infinite spaces strikes me with terror."
"If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million, the universe would have recollapsed before it reached its present size."
"The universe, it could be said, exists to celebrate itself and revel in its own beauty."
"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion."
"We are now at the most exciting time in human history, the cusp of some of the greatest cosmic discoveries and technological advances of all time."
"We hold in our hands the future destiny of our species, whether we soar into fulfilling our promise as a type I civilization or fall into the abyss of chaos, pollution, and war."