John D. Barrow - Picture Quotes

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The abstractions of Einstein's curved space and time gave rise to analogies and pictures that played a new explanatory role. Space and time gave way to space-time, visible light was augmented by images across the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we realised that we could see back towards the apparent beginnings of time.

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
Scientific pictures are often not just about science. They may... have an undeniable aesthetic quality. They may even have been primarily works of art that possess a scientific message.

John D. Barrow
Images and pictures... have played a key role in shaping our scientific picture of the world.... Carefully constructed families of pictures can act as a calculus all their own. Like any successful systems of symbols, with an appropriate grammar they enlarge the number of things that we can do without consciously thinking.

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

John D. Barrow
The quantum revolution showed us why the old picture of a vacuum as an empty box was untenable.... Gradually, this exotic new picture of quantum nothingness succumbed to experimental exploration... in the form of vacuum tubes, light bulbs and X-rays. Now the 'empty' space itself started to be probed.... There was always something left: a vacuum energy that permeated every fibre of the Universe.

John D. Barrow