Quotes on Cosmology

The Europeans and the Americans are not throwing $10 billion down this gigantic tube for nothing. We're exploring the very forefront of physics and cosmology with the Large Hadron Collider because we want to have a window on creation, we want to recreate a tiny piece of Genesis to unlock some of the greatest secrets of the universe.

The recent developments in cosmology strongly suggest that the universe may be the ultimate free lunch.

In my studies of astronomy and philosophy I hold this opinion about the universe, that the Sun remains fixed in the centre of the circle of heavenly bodies, without changing its place; and the Earth, turning upon itself, moves round the Sun.

We find, therefore, under this orderly arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a kind that is not possible to obtain in any other way.

Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.

For me, science is already fantastical enough. Unlocking the secrets of nature with fundamental physics or cosmology or astrobiology leads you into a wonderland compared with which beliefs in things like alien abductions pale into insignificance.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

If there is anything that can bind the heavenly mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living,-then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy.

Those who study the stars have God for a teacher.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

So if the worth of the arts were measured by the matter with which they deal, this art-which some call astronomy, others astrology, and many of the ancients the consummation of mathematics-would be by far the most outstanding. This art which is as it were the head of all the liberal arts and the one most worthy of a free man leans upon nearly all the other branches of mathe matics. Arithmetic, geometry, optics, geodesy, mechanics, and whatever others, all offer themselves in its service.

Since I have introduced this term I had always a bad conscience. . . . I cannot help to feel it strongly and I am unable to believe that such an ugly thing should be realized in nature.

Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.

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. Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

There is in the universe neither center nor circumference.

The missing link in cosmology is the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

As a physicist, I've always found cosmology to be a rational elixir; it distances me from ordinary concerns.

The strongest affection and utmost zeal should, I think, promote the studies concerned with the most beautiful objects, most deserving to be known.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.

Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.