John D. Barrow - Universe Quotes

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The legacy of the great monotheistic religions is the expectation of a single over-arching explanation for the Universe.... There is no logical reason why the Universe should not contain surds of arbitrary elements that do not relate to the rest.

John D. Barrow
If all the stars and galaxies in the universe today were smoothed out into a uniform sea of atoms, there would only be about one atom in every cubic meter of space.

John D. Barrow
There is no reason that the universe should be designed for our convenience.

John D. Barrow
We can never know the origins of the universe. The deepest secrets are the ones that keep themselves.

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
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
The secret of how galaxies came into being may well be fathomed by the study of the most elementary particles of matter in particle detectors buried deep underground; the identity of those elementary particles may be revealed by observations of distant starlight.... by the coming together of the largest and the smallest aspects of the physical world our appreciation of the unity of the universe becomes more impressive and complete.

John D. Barrow
The spooky ether was persistent. It took an Einstein to remove it from the Universe.... Gradually, over the last twenty years, the vacuum has turned out to be more unusual, more fluid, less empty, and less intangible than even Einstein could have imagined. Its presence is felt on the very smallest and largest dimensions over which the forces of Nature act.

John D. Barrow
Aristotle believed that the world did not come into being at some time in the past; it had always existed and it would always exist, unchanged in essence for ever. He placed a high premium on symmetry and believed that the sphere was the most perfect of all shapes. Hence the universe must be spherical.... An important feature of the spherical shape... was the fact that when a sphere rotates it does not cut into empty space where there is no matter and it leaves no empty space behind.... A vacuum was impossible. It could no more exist than an infinite physical quantity.... Circular motion was the most perfect and natural movement of all.

John D. Barrow
Einstein showed us that the Universe might contain a mysterious form of vacuum energy.... Last year, two teams of astronomers used Earth's most powerful telescopes... to gather persuasive evidence for the reality of the cosmic vacuum energy. Its effects are dramatic. It is accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

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
Einstein had spent the previous thirty years showing how we could understand the behaviour of whole universes with simple maths. Gamow saw that those universes must have had a past that was unimaginably different to the present. What had stopped them both in their tracks was Gamow's suggestion that the laws of physics could describe something being created out of nothing.

John D. Barrow
Where there is life there is a pattern, and where there is a pattern there is mathematics. Once that germ of rationality and order exists to turn a chaos into a cosmos, then so does mathematics. There could not be a non-mathematical Universe containing living observers.

John D. Barrow
Einstein showed us how to find all the possible universes that were consistent with the laws of physics and the character of gravity, how to reconstruct their pasts and predict their futures. But actually finding them was no easy task.

John D. Barrow
Just focusing on what exists now seems a bit exclusive. And if we include everything that has ever existed as part of the universe, why not include the future as well? This seems to leave us with the definition that the universe is everything that has ever existed, does exist, or will ever exist.

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
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
The Universe has imposed aspects of its structure upon us by the inevitability of the forces of Nature... In a world where adapters succeed, but non-adapters fail, one expects to find vestigial remnants... Many of these adaptations... give rise to a suite of curious byproducts, some of which have played a role in determining our aesthetic sense. We are products of a past world where sensitivities to certain things were a matter of life or death.

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
There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history.

John D. Barrow