Cosmology Quotes

“Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with.”

“cosmology”

“Why are the heavens not filled with light? Why is the universe plunged into darkness?”

“Wikipedia: Cosmology”

“Every time we get slapped down, we can say, Thank you Mother Nature, because it means we're about to learn something important.”

“Hindu cosmology... gives a time-scale for the earth and the universe which is consonant with that of modern scientific cosmology.”

“Theories Of The Universe by Munitz,Milton K. (1957)”

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”

“One may wonder, What came before? If space-time did not exist then, how could everything appear from nothing?... Explaining this initial singularity—where and when it all began—still remains the most intractable problem of modern cosmology.”

“Dirac spent the autumn term of 1931 at Princeton University, where Robertson was a professor. During his stay they got to know each other well. Most likely they discussed cosmology, a science which at the time was experiencing dramatic changes.”

“Cosmology is peculiar among the sciences for it is both the oldest and the youngest. From the dawn of civilization man has speculated about the nature of the starry heavens and the origin of the world, but only in the present century has physical cosmology split away from general philosophy to become an independent discipline.”

“We should, of course, expect that any universe which expands without limit will approach the empty de Sitter case, and that its ultimate fate is a state in which each physical unit—perhaps each nebula or intimate group of nebulae—is the only thing which exists within its own observable universe.”

“Today’s cosmology faces problems both early and late, models of the early Universe that cannot be tested, and data indicating that the late Universe accelerates. These problems have been previously been explained by a repulsive “inflation” and another repulsive “dark” energy. Recent studies cast doubt upon these speculations. A cosmology described by simple equations may bring light to this darkness.”

“Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. ...The most important thing accomplished by the three-degree radiation background in 1965 was to force us to take seriously the idea that there was an early universe.”

“While in the first quarter of this century physicists and cosmologists were forced to revise the basic notions that govern the natural sciences, in the last quarter of this century biologists will force a revision of the basic notions that govern science itself. After that “first revolution” it was clear that the classical concept of an “ultimate science”, that is an objective description of the world in which there are no subjects (a “subjectless universe”), contains contradictions.”

“In the beginning, the establishment of first ties between general relativity and astronomy was a tedious exercise involving only a small number of bridge builders, most notably Freundlich, Karl Schwarzschild, Willem de Sitter, Arthur Eddington, Georges Lemaître, and Edwin Hubble.”

“Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical — and maybe even experimental — grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we've most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own.”

“Take a look at George Gamow, who is now recognized as one of the great cosmologists of the last hundred years. I speculate that he probably didn't win the Nobel Prize because people could not take him seriously. He wrote children's books. His colleagues have publicly stated his writing children's books on science had an adverse effect on his scientific reputation, and people could not take him seriously when he and his colleagues proposed that there should be a cosmic background radiation, which we now know to be one of the greatest discoveries of 20th-century physics.”

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Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations were just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it.

Let there be cosmology.

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“Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are.”