Monty Python - George Calin - Sam Harris - Albert Einstein - Dara O’Briain’s Science Club TV - Douglas Adams - David Wong - V S Ramachandran - Christopher Hitchens - Carl Sagan - Fred Hoyle - Martin Rees - Michio Kaku - Lawrence Krauss - Mike Disney - Saul Perlmutter - Neil deGrasse Tyson - David Deutsch - Christian Huygens - Stephen Hawking - Steven Weinberg - Horizon TV - Unfolding Universe TV - Universe TV - The Universe TV - Birth of the Universe TV - Death of the Universe TV - Janet Sumner - Jim Al-Khalili TV - Carlos Frenk - Brian Cox TV - Through the Wormhole TV - Michael Shermer - Lawrence M Krauss - Richard Dawkins - James Thomson - Edward Young - Jimmy Carter - Bob Dicke - Beyond the Big Bang TV - George Smoot & Keay Davidson - Martin Rees - Extreme Universe TV - Chris McKay - How the Universe Works TV - Hawking 2004 -
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s revolving, and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour. It’s orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it’s reckoned, the sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see are moving at a million miles a day. In an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles an hour in a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light years thick. And out by us it’s just three thousand light years wide. We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point. We got round every two hundred million years. And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe. The universe itself keeps expanding and expanding in all the directions it can whiz. As fast as it can go the speed of light you know twelve million miles a minutes and that’s the fastest speed there is. So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure how amazing and unlikely is your birth. And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space. ’Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life 1983 starring Terry Jones & John Cleese & Eric Idle & Terry Gilliam & Michael Palin & Graham Chapman & Carol Cleveland & Simon Jones & Patricia Quinn & Judy Loe & Matt Frewer et al, director Terry Jones, song & dance routine
If it’s true that we’re all from the centre of a star, every atom of us from the centre star, then we’re all the same thing ... all been recycled thousands of times ... therefore it’s only me out there. So what is there to be afraid of? What is there that needs solace-seeking? Nothing. There’s nothing to be afraid of because it’s all us. The trouble is, we have been separated by being born and given a name, an identity, being individuated. We’ve been separated from the oneness and that’s what religion exploits – that people have this yearning to be part of the overall one again – so they exploit that, they call it God, they say he has rules, and I think that’s cruel. I think you do it absent religion. George Carlin
Cosmologists are just now beginning to accept the possibility that the big bang was actually caused by a huge explosion in a meth lab. George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?
Every one of the world’s ‘great’ religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain – from cosmology to psychology to economics – has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. Sam Harris
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. Albert Einstein, cited Principles of Research 1918
For every one billion particles of antimatter there were one billion and one particles of matter. And when the mutual annihilation was complete, one billionth remained – and that’s our present universe. Albert Einstein
Our universe seems to be made up of stars and planets and gas that are clumped together with vast gaps in between them. On an atomic level it’s pretty much all space. Dara O’Briain’s Science Club II, BBC 2012
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
The story so far: In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Scientists talk about dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars. Dark matter makes up 99.99 percent of the universe, and they don't know what it is. Well I do. It's apathy. That's the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives a Fuck. David Wong, John Dies at the End
2,689. How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate – your brain – that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all. V S Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest For What Makes Us Human
We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centred or man-centred (let alone God-centred) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge. Christopher Hitchens
The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. Carl Sagan, Cosmos
The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. ibid.
Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to non-existent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centred on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. Carl Sagan
They found that the galaxies were flying away from one another. To the entire astonishment of everyone the universe was expanding. We had begun to plumb the true depths of Time and Space. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean, PBS 1980
Welcome to the planet Earth. A place with blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests, soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective, it is for the moment unique. ibid.
The cosmos is all there is, or ever was or ever will be. Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. ibid.
The same laws of physics apply everywhere throughout the cosmos. ibid.
Why should this modest planet be the only inhabited world? To me it seems far more likely the cosmos is brimming over with life and intelligence. ibid.
The galaxies reveal a universal order, a beauty, but also violence on a scale never before imagined. The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such creatures as we. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: The Edge of Forever
We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering. Carl Sagan
Astronomical distances have the air of a conjuring trick. The vastness of cosmic dimensions fills us with astonishment. Yet like a conjuring trick it all looks very obvious when we see how it was done. Professor Fred Hoyle, Frontiers of Astronomy