The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.
Martin ReesRead
It's becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics.
Interpretation
The cosmos serves as a unique laboratory for exploring fundamental physics under extreme conditions.
In this quote, Martin Rees emphasizes the importance of cosmic events, such as the Big Bang and neutron stars, as essential for advancing our understanding of fundamental physics. He points out that the extreme conditions present in these cosmic phenomena are unparalleled on Earth, allowing scientists to test and explore theories in particle physics that would otherwise remain unexamined.
In practice
During a lecture on astrophysics, this quote can illustrate the significance of cosmic studies.
The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.
Let me say that I don't see any conflict between science and religion. I go to church as many other scientists do. I share with most religious people a sense of mystery and wonder at the universe and I want to participate in religious ritual and practices because they're something that all humans can share.
In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.
Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.
It is astonishing that human brains, which evolved to cope with the everyday world, have been able to grasp the counterintuitive mysteries of the cosmos and the quantum.
The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science's great 'open frontiers.' These are parts of the intellectual map where we're still groping for the truth - where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe 'here be dragons.'
I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don't know.
Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.
And there is a lot of idiosyncrasy. But there are also regularities and phenomena. And what the data is going to be able to do - if there's enough of it - is uncover, in the mess and the noise of the world, some lines of music that actually have harmony. It's there, somewhere.
Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.
The stars are laboratories in which the evolution of matter proceeds in the direction of large molecules.
Theory attracts practice as the magnet attracts iron.
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