Rebel Without a Case 1955 - David Deutsche - Paul Davies - Christiaan Huygens - David Hume - John H Holmes - Jean de la Fontaine - Carl Becker - Brendon Carter - Frank Tipler - Dennis Sciama - Vera Rubin - Carlos Frenk - Big Bang (documentary) - David Spergel - Neil Turok - William Bowen Bonner - Michael Strauss - How The Universe Works TV - Gene Kranz - Mankind: The Story of All of Us TV - Jacob Bronowski TV - Bertrand Russell - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 2005 - Star Trek: The Next Generation TV - Star Trek: Deep Space Nine TV - Star Trek: Voyager TV - Nikola Tesla - Arthur Eddington - Terry Pratchett - 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God TV - Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God TV - Roger Penrose - Independent online - James Woods TV - Brian Greene TV - Unravelling the Cosmos TV - Secrets of the Universe: Great Scientists in Their Own Words TV - Strip the Cosmos TV - Joseph Smith’s Pearl of Great Price - Red Dwarf TV - Eurekalert online - Ancient Aliens TV - Extreme Universe TV - Phil Plait TV - Rachel Carson - Stan Woosley - Perry Hacking - NASA launch of Swift - Michelle Thaller - The Entire History of the Universe 2022 -
We will disappear into the blackness of the space from which we came. Destroyed as we began in a burst of gas and fire. The heavens are still and cold once more. In all the immensity of our universe and the galaxies beyond, the Earth will not be missed. In the infinite reaches of space the problems of man seem trivial indeed. And man existing alone seems himself an episode of little consequence. That’s all. Rebel Without a Cause 1955 starring James Dean & Natalie Wood & Sal Mineo & Jim Backus & Ann Doran & Corey Allen & William Hopper & Rochelle Hudson & Edward Platt & Nick Adams et al, director Nicholas Ray, Planeterium
The extraordinary thing is not that there are laws but that we can understand them. Why should we be able to understand them? David Deutsch
It’s the comprehensibility of the Laws of Physics that makes the Anthropic Principle work. David Deutsch
The universe that we see has to be big in order for us to be here. Paul Davis
The entire universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life. Almost contrived. We might say a put up job. Paul Davies
The nice thing about John Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle is that Time isn’t a barrier. Paul Davies
A universe that came from nothing in the Big Bang will disappear into nothing at the big crunch. Its glorious few zillion years of existence not even a memory. Paul Davies
I belong to the group of scientists who do not subscribe to the conventional religion but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless accident. Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation. Whether one wishes to call that deeper level God is a matter of taste and definition. Furthermore, I have come to the point of view that mind – i.e. conscious awareness of the world – is not a meaningless and incidental quirk of nature, but an absolutely fundamental facet of reality. That is not to say that we are the purpose for which the universe exists. Far from it. I do, however, believe that we human beings are built into the scheme of things in a very basic way. Paul Davies, The Mind of God p16, 1992
What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our wonder and admiration be increased when we consider the prodigious distance and multitude of the Stars? Christiaan Huygens, Cosmotheoros II
The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster. David Hume
This, now, is the judgement of our scientific age – the third reaction of man upon the universe! This universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. John H Holmes, The Sensible Man’s View of Religion, 1932
He knows the universe and does not know himself. Jean de la Fontaine, 1621-95, Fables bk8
The significance of man is that he is part of the universe that asks the question, What is the significance of Man? He alone can stand apart imaginatively and, regarding himself and the universe in their eternal aspects, pronounce a judgment: The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it. Carl Becker, Progress and Power, 1936
The very fact that we are here places restrictions on what the universe can look like. Brendon Carter
I formulated the Strong Anthropic Principle: this says our universe must have those properties that allow intelligent life to develop in it at some stage. Brendon Carter
So far there’s no argument – in the form Carter originally put it the Weak Anthropic Principle merely says that we are observing the universe from the viewpoint of a very particular species – man. Frank Tipler, Tulane University
The starting point of these ideas is to decide how important or unimportant mankind – human beings – are in the scheme of things. And there’s a very remarkable discovery of the last few years which at first sight suggests that human beings are very important. And that’s what we call the Fine Tuning of the universe. Dennis Sciama, Cambridge University
It took us about two years to get velocities of ninety stars in the Andromeda Galaxy and the results were rather startling. We found that all the stars were moving at the same velocity, the same number – two hundred and fifty kilometres per second. Vera Rubin
It is in these clumps of dark matter that galaxies like the Milky Way would have formed ... The dark matter is the skeleton of the universe. Carlos Frenk, University of Durham
The first stars ignited the universe into what must have been the most amazing firework. The universe went from the dark ages to an age of splendour when the first stars began to illuminate the gas in majestic fashion. Carlos Frenk
What is the Universe made of? ... In the beginning there was nothing. No matter. No energy. Not even empty space. Because space itself didn’t exist. No Time passed because there was no such thing as Time. From nowhere appeared a fireball smaller than an atom ten trillion trillion times hotter than the core of the sun ... Time began. In one second the blueprint for the entire cosmos was written. How it happened is the biggest mystery of all. Big Bang
Looking back to the instant of creation is a relatively new idea. The Big Bang theory is widely accepted. But the concept is less than a century old. But all this changed in 1929. At California’s Mount Wilson Observatory Edwin Hubble studied the light from galaxies. He observed that the farther away the galaxy, the longer the wave-lengths of light it emits ... If a galaxy is moving away from us, its light-waves stretch, becoming longer and redder. It’s called red-shifting ... Nearly all galaxies are receding from us at a million miles an hour ... The universe is expanding outward from a single point ... Out of the fireball, the four fundamental forces of nature formed. These forces underpin everything around us. Gravity is the reason stars and planets formed ... Electromagnetism lights our cities, runs our phones and connects our computers. And the two nuclear forces, strong and weak, bind the particles that make up our bodies and power the furnace of our sun ... Without them the universe would be a featureless fog of radiation ... How was mass developed in the first second of the Big Bang? ibid.
The Big Bang theory is not really a theory of how the universe began, it’s really a theory of how the universe evolved. David Spergel
In our picture, there was a universe before the Big Bang, very much like our universe today: a low density of matter and some stuff called dark energy. If you postulate a universe like this, but the dark energy within is actually unstable, then the decay of this dark energy drives the two branes together. These two branes clash and then, having filled with radiation, separate and expand to form galaxies and stars.
Then the dark energy takes over again. It’s the energy of attraction between the two branes: It pulls them back together. You have bang followed by bang followed by bang. You have no beginning of time. It’s always been there. Neil Turok
It may be that we live in an endless universe, both in space and in time. And there’ve been Bangs in the past, and there will be Bangs in the future. Neil Turok
My experience in science has always been that the future always exceeds what we believe is possible. I suspect that we will explore the universe. Neil Turok