Frank Wilczek - Universe Quotes

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Intelligent creatures [that] evolved to live deep within the atmosphere of a gas giant planet could be deluded, for eons, into thinking that the Universe is an approximately homogeneous expanse of gas, filling a three-dimensional space, but featuring anisotropic laws of motion (which we would ascribe to the planet's gravitational field). Are we human scientists comparably blinkered?

Frank Wilczek
The Copernican Principle or Cosmic Mediocrity... states, basically, that Earth does not occupy a privileged place in the universe. Universality asserts more, namely that there are no privileged places or times.

Frank Wilczek
In the past scientists have repeatedly reached intellectual closure on inadequate pictures of the universe, and underestimated its scale.

Frank Wilczek
If the universe contains everything that exists, what can be outside it? If the answer is Things that don't exist, then multiverse becomes an idea in the domain of psychology, not physics.

Frank Wilczek
In most theoretical embodiments of inflationary cosmology, the currently observed universe appears as a small part of a much larger multiverse. In this framework to hold throughout the universe need not hold through all space. They can be accidents of our local geography, so to speak. If that is so, then it is valid – indeed, necessary – to consider selection effects. It may be that some of the fundamental constants, in particular, cannot be determined by theoretical reasoning, even in principle, because they really are different elsewhere.

Frank Wilczek