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
We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the limitations of current scientific understanding regarding the origins of the universe.
Martin Rees points out that while modern science has made significant progress in tracing the origins of the universe back to the Big Bang, fundamental questions about the cause and nature of the Big Bang itself remain unanswered. This reflects the ongoing challenges and mysteries that science faces in its quest to understand the universe.
Themes
Big BangScienceUniverseMysteryUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on cosmology, you might say, 'As Martin Rees pointed out, we can trace the Big Bang, yet the ultimate questions remain unanswered.'
More from Martin Rees
All quotes βLet 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.
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.
Martin ReesRead
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.
Martin ReesRead
Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.
Martin ReesRead
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.
Martin ReesRead
Similar quotes
Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.
Lisa RandallRead
If everything in chemistry is explained in a satisfactory manner without the help of phlogiston, it is by that reason alone infinitely probable that the principle does not exist; that it is a hypothetical body, a gratuitous supposition; indeed, it is in the principles of good logic, not to multiply bodies without necessity.
Antoine LavoisierRead
And as for other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,-sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out into the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! This contributed to the passing of the Pure Food Act of 1906.
Upton SinclairRead
Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they're made. So, for example, scientists didn't go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we're still finding things for a laser to do.
Robert WinstonRead
One can think of any given axiom system as being like a computer with a certain limited amount of memory or processing power. One could switch to a computer with even more storage, but no matter how large an amount of storage space the computer has, there will still exist some tasks that are beyond its ability.
Terence TaoRead
From a genomic perspective, we are all Africans.
Svante PaaboRead