John D. Barrow Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

The Greek tradition was a complete contrast to that of the Far East.... the Greeks placed logic at the pinnacle of human thinking. Their sceptical attitude towards the wielding of 'non-being' as some sort of 'something' that could be subject to logical development was exemplified by Parmenides' influential arguments against the concept of empty space.... He maintained that you can only speak about what is: what is not cannot be thought of, and what cannot be thought of cannot be.... more unexpected was the further conclusion that time, motion nor change could exist either.

John D. Barrow
What Hubble discovered was the expansion of the universe.... We are not expanding. Nor is Brooklyn. Nor is earth. Nor is the solar system. Nor, in fact, is the Milky Way galaxy. Nor even those aggregates of thousands of galaxies that we call "galaxy clusters." These collections of matter are bound together by chemical and gravitational forces between their constituents—forces that are stronger than the force of expansion.

John D. Barrow
Assuming the simulators, or at least the early generations of them, have a very advanced knowledge of the laws of Nature, it's likely that they would still have incomplete knowledge of them.... gradually the little flaws will begin to build up.... The only escape is if their creatures intervene to patch up the problems one by one as they arise.

John D. Barrow
... logical contradictions will inevitably arise and the laws of the simulations will appear to break down now and again. The inhabitants of the simulation—especially the simulated scientists—will occasionally be puzzled by the experimental results they obtain. The simulated astronomers, might, for instance, make observations that show that their so-called constants of Nature are very slowly changing.

John D. Barrow
In the spring of 1845, William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse, began observing with his great six-foot telescope... The Earl was excited by what he was the first human to see: spiral patterns of stars, seemingly swirling in great 'spiral convolutions' about the centre of the galaxy.... No one could ever have seen the spiral pattern of stars in a galaxy unless they had looked through Rosse's telescope or seen his drawings.... I believe that Van Gogh would have seen those drawings in the press following the publicity attracted by them, or in Flammarion's book... and gained his astronomical inspiration from them.

John D. Barrow
The physicist's concept of nothing—the vacuum... began as empty space—the void... turned into a stagnant ether through which all the motions of the Universe swam, vanished in Einstein's hands, then re-emerged in the twentieth-century quantum picture of how Nature works.

John D. Barrow
Gods reappear in unlimited numbers in the guise of the simulators who have the power of life and death over the simulated realities that they bring into being. The simulators determine the laws, and can change the laws, that govern their worlds. They can engineer anthropic fine-tunings. They can pull the plug on the simulation at any moment, intervene or distance themselves from their simulation; watch as the simulated creatures argue about whether there is a god who controls or intervenes, work miracles or impose their ethical principles upon the simulated reality.

John D. Barrow
The logic of the Greeks prevents them having the idea at all and it is to the Indian cultures that we must look to find thinkers who are comfortable with the idea that Nothing might be something.

John D. Barrow
History is full of people who thought they were right — absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And because history never seems like history when you are living through it, it is tempting for us to think the same.

John D. Barrow
A scientist who uses only logical reasoning from 'self-evident' principles will soon find himself in a cul-de-sac - like a blind landscape artist.

John D. Barrow
Our sensitivity to changes of pitch... is underused in musical sound. Western music, in particular, is based on scales that use pitch changes that are at least twenty times bigger than the smallest changes that we could perceive. If we used our discriminatory power to full, we could generate an undulating sea of sound that displayed continuously changing frequency rather like the undersea sonic songs of dolphins and whales.

John D. Barrow
Even today, there persists... a feeling that the creation of the Universe out of nothing must violate some basic conservation law that stops one from getting something for nothing. Nevertheless, there is actually no evidence that the Universe as a whole possesses a non-zero value of any such conserved quantity. The total mass-energy of all the constituents of a finite Universe appears to be always equal in magnitude but opposite in sign to the total gravitational potential energies of those particles.... Similarly, there is no evidence that the Universe possesses any overall net rotation or electric charge.

John D. Barrow
It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns.... When viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics.... In many ways the search for a Theory of Everything is a manifestation of a faith that this compression goes all the way down to the bedrock of reality...

John D. Barrow
The advent of small, inexpensive computers with superb graphics has changed the way many sciences are practiced, and the way that all sciences present the results of experiments and calculations.

John D. Barrow
Location is not, as the estate agents say, everything. We must also consider our place in history.

John D. Barrow
Copernicus' picture did more than picture the solar system correctly: it painted a new world picture.

John D. Barrow
Ultimate explanation no longer means only a story that encompasses everything.

John D. Barrow
The goal of science is to make sense of the diversity of Nature.

John D. Barrow
Continual miniaturisation allows resources to be conserved, efficiency to be increased, pollution to be reduced, and the remarkable flexibilities of the quantum world to be tapped. Very advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe may have been force to follow the same technological path. Their nano-scale space probes, their atomic-scale machines and nano-computers, would be imperceptible to our course-grained surveys of the universe.... This may be the low-impact evolutionary path you need to follow in order to survive into the far, far future.

John D. Barrow
While we have no reason to expect that our position in the universe is special in every way, we would be equally misled were we to assume that it could not be special in any way.

John D. Barrow
By interlinking causes, by searching always for unity in the face of superficial diversity, modern scientific explanations prize depth above breadth. A deep and narrow theory can, and often does, graduate to become a deep and broad one. A broad and shallow theory never does.

John D. Barrow
Mathematics became an experimental subject. Individuals could follow previously intractable problems by simply watching what happened when they were programmed into a personal computer.... The PC revolution has made science more visual and more immediate.... by creating films of imaginary experiences of mathematical worlds.... Words are no longer enough.

John D. Barrow
If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.

John D. Barrow
When we try to observe things that are very small, the act of observation itself will significantly disturb the state we are seeking to measure.

John D. Barrow
If one looks at the special problems that were the mainsprings of progress along the oldest and most persistent lines of human inquiry, then one finds Nothing, suitably disguised as something, never far from the centre of things.

John D. Barrow