20th-century Cosmologist Quotes

Stephen Hawking

Carl Sagan

George Smoot

John C. Mather

Martin Rees

Alan Guth

Lee Smolin

There may be no ultimate theory, and even if there is, we may not find it. But it is surely better to strive for a complete understanding than to despair of the human mind.

Stephen Hawking

There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see, but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far away to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.

This is also a book about God ... or perhaps about the absence of God. The word God fills these pages. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein's famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the universe. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do.

Each black hole is a bud that leads to a new universe of moments.

If we are to understand an everyday question like "Where did the atoms we are made of come from?" we must understand the stars.

I am convinced that the story of the universe that has come out of three centuries of modern scientific work will be recognized as a supreme human achievement, the scientific enterprise's central gift to humanity, a revelation having a status equal to that of the great religious revelations of the past.

The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as "strong."

When one studies the properties of atoms one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction.

What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe.... It's like looking at God.

The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe.

Sean M. Carroll

The basic viewpoint taken here is that physical theory must explain not only what happens in carefully controlled laboratory experiments, but also the commonplace features of life around us, for which we have a huge amount of evidence in our daily lives.

George F. R. Ellis

The progress made in our understanding of the universe during the twentieth century is nothing short of stunning.

Michael Turner (cosmologist)

The inflationary model of the universe provides a possible mechanism by which the observed universe could have evolved from an infinitesimal region. It is then tempting to go one step further and speculate that the entire universe evolved from literally nothing.

Paul Steinhardt

"The Big Bang Theory comes out a winner. This is the ultimate in tracing one's cosmic roots." He added, "We are seeing the cold glow still remaining from the initially very hot Big Bang... The closer we examine the Big Bang the simpler the picture gets."

Maybe the problems cosmology has set for itself will turn out to be just too difficult to solve scientifically. After all, we've got a lot of gall to suppose that the universe can be described by some simple theory.

I.reject the argument put forth by many fundamentalists that science has nothing to do with religion because God is not among the things making up the universe in which we live. Surely if a necessity for a god-concept in the universe ever turns up, that necessity will become evident to the scientist.

Ralph Asher Alpher