Venus is in the grip of a runaway greenhouse effect. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey XII: The World Set Free
We might be tipping the climate past the point of no return into an unpredictable slide ... Global warming is really happening. ibid.
Alexandra Library: What will happen the next time the Mob comes? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey XIII: Unafraid of the Dark
There’s a bigger unsolved mystery than Dark Matter – Dark Energy. ibid.
That detector, a horn, looking like an old-fashioned ear trumpet for a hard of hearing giant, sits on its hilltop in Holmdel, New Jersey. Among all the listening ears in the world it was this one that caught the crucial whisper back in 1975, the lucky start to today’s technology ... The Holmdel Whisper was no less than an echo of the origin of the universe. Horizon, A Whisper from Space, BBC 1978
The Hubble Space Telescope will see much further into the universe than has ever been possible before. Freed from the obscuring effects of the atmosphere the optical system at the heart of the spacecraft will enable the telescope’s mirror to resolve details ten times better than any instrument on the ground. When it’s installed in the space telescope this mirror is set to revolutionise our vision of the universe. Horizon: Beyond the Moon, BBC 1984
Mathematics seem to permeate Nature ... almost as if God is a master mathematician who has constructed the universe in mathematical forms. Horizon: A Mathematical Problem, BBC 1984
This universe we live in: scientists have discovered some remarkably strange things about it. So strange they are having to use the most disturbing principles to describe what’s going on. Horizon: The Anthropic Principle, BBC 1987
The Anthropic Principle: The universe was anthropicentric – the hub of all creation was man. ibid.
Galileo’s masterstroke was to discover that what goes on around us depends on mathematical laws. ibid.
So what are we? A statistical accident. Where are we? Nowhere special. Where are we going? Into oblivion. A meaningless hiccup in the blank procession of matter through time. It’s a tatty destiny. ibid.
The Anthropic Principle seems well named – forget other intelligences; the universe may well have given rise to man alone. ibid.
Weak Anthropic Principle: a universe remarkably in sympathy with our existence. Strong Anthropic Principle: a universe that gave birth to man. Participatory Anthropic Principle: a universe that man helps to create by his observations and understanding. Final Anthropic Principle: A universe in while life will never die out and where knowledge will increase for ever. ibid.
The [Hubble] telescope will tell us how far away such objects are; just how far back in time, and so measure the age of the universe. Horizon: The Sharpest Show of the Universe, BBC 1990
Most astronomers believe that the universe is expanding and was created at one instant in a hot Big Bang some fifteen thousand million years ago ... Hubble’s Law was the first convincing support for an expanding universe and a Big Bang. Horizon: Of Big Bangs, Stick Men and Galactic Holes, BBC 1991
Hubble had found that the universe was expanding. Penzias and Wilson had heard the echo of the fireball. ibid.
And then there is the problem of lumpy galaxies: how did they form from such smooth beginnings? ibid.
Hot dark matter makes the clusters of galaxies far too big to match the observable universe. It was bad news. The other alternatives weren’t as attractive as the already observed neutrinos. So if hot dark matter wasn’t the answer, what was? 1984 was the year of cold dark matter. ibid.
The Cosmic Background Explorer – Cobi – sent up by NASA a few months before Space Telescope was launched. Its mission to search for the earliest signs of structure in the echoes of the Big Bang. Horizon: Here Be Monsters, BBC 1993
Science is often not the tiny progress towards truth that people think. The past frontiers of science are strewn with half-formed ideas and temporary lash-ups of equipment. These graduate students are Phds and they are building apparatus that could lead to a revolution in our understanding of science ... To pick up radiation from the edges of space. Horizon: Whispers of Creation, BBC 1994
The history of the universe is written by cosmologists. And one of these biggest question marks at the moment is what happened just after the Big Bang. ibid.
For the cosmologists Cobi signalled a revolution. ibid.
The idea is that at the beginning there was just a soup of mass and energy existing at a single point. Then sub-atomic particles separated out from the energy. There was now a universe with tiny irregularities of mass called quantum fluctuations. Scientists believe that somehow these fluctuations grew to become the ripples on the background radiation. And it was those ripples that allowed gravity to get to work to form the galaxies. ibid.
In billions of years’ time if you look out into the night sky you may see nothing. Absolute darkness. A new discovery about the fate of the universe has sent scientists in turmoil and challenged our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics. Horizon: From Here to Infinity, BBC 1999
Whether the universe goes on expanding for ever or re-collapses depends on only one thing: Gravity. ibid.
Supernovae would be the key to measuring the expansion of the universe and reveal how it would all end. ibid.
They could not believe what they were seeing. They knew the universe should be slowing down in its expansion, that gravity should be tugging on it, pulling it in. But they were seeing something that defied the known laws of Physics, and all their expectations. The universe was speeding up not slowing down. ibid.
There had to be some unknown and mysterious energy out there in the cosmos pushing everything apart, fighting against Gravity. What could this powerful energy be? Why had it never been seen before? What generates it, and where was it hiding? The theorists’ extraordinary conclusion was that this unknown energy came from the very vacuum of space. ibid.
In March 2000 two astronomers made an extraordinary discovery. One that is set to overturn our understanding of how the universe formed. What they discovered was a very simple relationship – a relationship between the galaxy we live in and the most destructive force in the universe – a supermassive black hole; it set the world of cosmology alight. Horizon: Super-Massive Black Holes, BBC 2000
Supermassive black holes could exist in two states: when it’s feeding, a giant black hole creates a bright burning gas disk around it. And then for some reason it stops feeding, leaving a dark deadly core lurking menacingly in the centre of the galaxy. ibid.
Perhaps black holes are an essential part of what galaxies are and how they work. ibid.
The size of the black hole in the end depends on how fast the stars are moving in the newly formed galaxy around it ... All giant black holes and their galaxies are connected from birth. ibid.
If our black hole has started feeding again, could this affect the Earth? ibid.
Imagine if you could find an explanation for everything in the universe … The universe we live in is not the only one. Horizon: Parallel Universe, BBC 2002
They’d be even stranger than Elvis being alive. ibid.
The physicists found a second version of it. And then a third. Soon they had found five different string theories. That wasn’t single and it didn’t sound very definitive. String theory had begun to unravel. It seemed as if the dream of a theory of everything was as far away as ever. But just as the scientists were about to give up hope, a new and startling discovery would be made. This would inspire them to begin their quest again and force them at last to confront their least popular idea: parallel universes. ibid.
Super-Gravity: String Theory had displaced it. ibid.
Super-Gravity though had been convinced there were exactly eleven dimensions. ibid.
String Theory was in trouble. Its five different versions meant it couldn’t be the all-embracing theory Physics was looking for. Everything it seemed had been tried to save String Theory. Well, almost everything. In a final desperate move, the String Theorists tried adding one last thing to their cherished idea: they added the very thing they had spent a decade rubbishing – the 11th dimension. ibid.
The tiny invisible strings of String Theory were supposed to be the fundamental building blocks of all the matter in the universe. But now with the addition of the eleventh dimension they changed: they stretched and they combined. The astonishing conclusion was that all the matter in the universe was connected to one vast structure: an M-brane. In effect our entire universe is an M-brane. ibid.
When M Theory emerged, [Lisa] Randall and her colleagues wondered if it might provide the explanation – could gravity be leaking from our universe into the empty space of the eleventh dimension? Randall tried to calculate how gravity could leak from our M-brane universe into empty space. But she couldn’t make it work. Then she heard the theory that there might be another M-brane in the eleventh dimension. Now she had a really strange thought: what if gravity wasn’t leaking from our universe but to it? What if it came from that other universe? ibid.
Einstein believed that the rules of the universe could always be explained by elegant mathematics. In effect he thought that science could lead to an understanding of God’s design of the universe. Horizon: Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony, BBC 2005