Galaxy Quest Quotes

Stomach full of jitters, little beasts that were second cousins to guacamolians—little green monsters that wreaked havoc in your stomach.

Never give up - never surrender!

Sometimes, parody or pastiche shows a deeper love for the original source material than a hundred official sequels ever could. In forty years, has there really ever been a better Star Trek movie than Galaxy Quest--or a better Fantastic Four movie than The Incredibles?

What do you mean you live someplace where there aren’t any humans? (Danger) In a realm far away from here. (Alexion) Is that like in star Wars? A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away? Want to tell me where your Tatooine is located? Is it anywhere in this universe? Near Toledo maybe? The one in Ohio or Spain? I’m not picky. Can I MapQuest it? (Danger)

Dare to be as great as the people who love you mistakenly think you are.

We all love a good story. We all love a tantalizing mystery. We all love the underdog pressing onward against seemingly insurmountable odds. We all, in one form or another, are trying to make sense of the world around us. And all of these elements lie at the core of modern physics. The story is among the grandest -- the unfolding of the entire universe; the mystery is among the toughest -- finding out how the cosmos came to be; the odds are among the most daunting -- bipeds, newly arrived by cosmic time scales trying to reveal the secrets of the ages; and the quest is among the deepest -- the search for fundamental laws to explain all we see and beyond, from the tiniest particles to the most distant galaxies.

My feeling is that the concept of superrationality is one whose truth will come to dominate among intelligent beings in the universe simply because its adherents will survive certain kinds of situations where its opponents will perish. Let’s wait a few spins of the galaxy and see. After all, healthy logic is whatever remains after evolution’s merciless pruning.

The stories that science tells about the world filter out into the wider culture, changing the way that we look at the world around us and our place in it. The discovery that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the Big Bang and an expanding universe nearly 14 billion years old, containing hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars—these ideas have radically altered humanity’s conception of itself.

We’re not alone because we’re not separate from the swirl of a galaxy’s arms or the way wind catches dust in a gyre. We’re no more an anomaly than an atom is.

Never give up. Never surrender!

Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t we?

Never Give up Never surrender

Never give up, never surrender!

mundane things are composed of a galaxy of the unfamiliar.

I'm just jazzed about being on the show, man.

You want to check your legal position, you do, mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t we? I mean, what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?

That was a hell of a thing.

Creation offers proof (for those willing to accept it) of a powerful “Someone” behind the natural world. The astronomical odds against this world happening merely by chance provide insurmountable evidence for a Creator. The intricate beauty and complex design of the creation—from subatomic particles and the molecular building blocks of life to galaxies and the expanses of the universe—demonstrate that a “Designer” planned it all.

The all-consuming selves we take for granted today are “merely empty receptacles of desire.” Infinitely plastic and decentered, the modern citizen of the republic of consumption lives on slippery terrain, journeying to nowhere in particular. So too, nothing could be more corrosive of the kinds of social sympathy and connectedness that constitute the emotional substructure of collective resistance and rebellion. Instead, consumer culture cultivates a politics of style and identity focused on the rights and inner psychic freedom of the individual, one not comfortable with an older ethos of social rather than individual liberation. On the contrary, it tends to infantilize, encouraging insatiable cravings for more and more novel forms of a faux self-expression. The individuality it promises is a kind of perpetual tease, nowadays generating, for example, an ever-expanding galaxy of internet apps leaving in their wake a residue of chronic anticipation. Hibernating inside this “material girl” quest for more stuff and self-improvement is a sacramental quest for transcendence, reveries of what might be, a “transubstantiation of goods, using products and gear to create a magical realm in which all is harmony, happiness, and contentment… in which their best and most admirable self will emerge at last.” The privatization of utopia! Still, what else is there?

You just let the machines get on with the adding up,” warned Majikthise, “and we’ll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much. You want to check your legal position, you do, mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we’re straight out of a job, aren’t we? I mean, what’s the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?

As long as there have been humans, we have searched for our place in the Cosmos. In the childhood of our species (when our ancestors gazed a little idly at the stars), among the Ionian scientists of ancient Greece, and in our own age, we have been transfixed by this question: Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy which is a member of a sparse cluster of galaxies, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night. Since Aristarchus, every step in our quest has moved us farther from center stage in the cosmic drama. There has not been much time to assimilate these new findings. The discoveries of Shapley and Hubble were made within the lifetimes of many people still alive today. There are those who secretly deplore these great discoveries, who consider every step a demotion, who in their heart of hearts still pine for a universe whose center, focus and fulcrum is the Earth. But if we are to deal with the Cosmos we must first understand it, even if our hopes for some unearned preferential status are, in the process, contravened. Understanding where we live is an essential precondition for improving the neighborhood. Knowing what other neighborhoods are like also helps. If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. We embarked on our cosmic voyage with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

I have led an extraordinary life on this planet, while at the same time travelling across the universe by using my mind and the laws of physics. I have been to the furthest reaches of our galaxy, travelled into a black hole and gone back to the beginning of time. On Earth, I have experienced highs and lows, turbulence and peace, success and suffering. I have been rich and poor, I have been able-bodied and disabled. I have been praised and criticised, but never ignored. I have been enormously privileged, through my work, in being able to contribute to our understanding of the universe. But it would be an empty universe indeed if it were not for the people I love, and who love me. Without them, the wonder of it all would be lost on me. And at the end of all this, the fact that we humans, who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature, have been able to come to an understanding of the laws governing us, and our universe, is a great triumph. I want to share my excitement about these big questions and my enthusiasm about this quest.

Questo pianeta ha – o aveva – un problema, e il problema era che la maggior parte dei suoi abitanti era quasi costantemente infelice. Per rimediare al guaio furono suggerite varie proposte, ma queste perlopiù’ concernevano lo scambio continuo di pezzetti di carta verde, un fatto indubbiamente strano, visto che tutto sommato non erano i pezzetti di carta verde a essere infelici. E così il problema restava inalterato: un sacco di persone erano meschine e la maggior parte erano anche infelici, persino quelle fornite di orologi digitali.

People—human-type people, my own people—are constantly on a quest for an identity. Some lucky ones find the thing they want to be already inside themselves, or in a healthy family or community. Far too many of us, however, latch onto a simplified externality that seems to offer all the answers and invest our sense of meaning in it. We make some half-baked philosophy our driving force. Something we picked up reading the sort of novels and graphic stuff where first-person narrators opine bombastically about how the galaxy really works and what makes people really tick and How You Ought To Be.

Lhasa The sage blue sky awakens before the earth which slumbers a bit longer to still the chill of her bones and dream until the sun peeks hot through her cragged peaks bestirring weary monks to the swirl of their yak butter tea. Monks meditate upon this whorl which echoes the birth of galaxies, the twist of DNA, the curlicue of hair at the back of an infant’s head, eddying clockwise like Buddha’s journey, winding like a prayer wheel, in the resonance ofinterconnection. Bells tinkle, bowls sing, incense suffuses hints of heaven, rainbows of Jingfan prayer flags clap wildly in the wind, waving me to my quest, to surge forward, to trek to higher and higher ground -- to the rarefied air that is my mind.

Tibetan Dreams The sage blue sky awakens before the earth which slumbers a bit longer to still the chill of her bones and dream until the sun peeks hot through her cragged peaks bestirring weary monks to the swirl of their yak butter tea. Monks meditate upon this whorl which echoes the birth of galaxies, the twist of DNA, the curlicue of hair at the back of an infant’s head, eddying clockwise like Buddha’s journey, winding like a prayer wheel, in the resonance ofinterconnection. Bells tinkle, bowls sing, incense suffuses hints of heaven, rainbows of Jingfan prayer flags clap wildly in the wind, waving me to my quest, to surge forward, to trek to higher and higher ground -- to the rarefied air that is my mind.

In the early 1930s a Swiss astronomer called Fritz Zwicky was studying galaxy clusters through the telescopes of the California Institute of Technology when he noticed an anomaly of extraordinary implications. Clusters are groups of gravitationally bound galaxies, and Zwicky’s work involved measuring the speeds of revolution of individual galaxies in their orbits around the core of the cluster, in order to weigh the cluster as a whole. What Zwicky observed was that the galaxies were revolving much faster than expected, especially towards the outer reaches of the cluster. At such speeds, individual galaxies should have broken their gravitational hold on one another, dispersing the cluster. There was, Zwicky determined, only one possible explanation. There had to be another source of gravity, powerful enough to hold the cluster together given the speeds of revolution of the observable bodies. But what could supply such huge gravitational field strength, sufficient to tether whole galaxies – and why could he not see this ‘missing mass’? Zwicky found no answers to his questions, but in asking them he began a hunt that continues today. His ‘missing mass’ is now known as ‘dark matter’ – and proving its existence and determining its qualities is one of the grail-quests of modern physics

As long as there have been humans, we have searched for our place in the Cosmos. In the childhood of our species (when our ancestors gazed a little idly at the stars), among the Ionian scientists of ancient Greece, and in our own age, we have been transfixed by this question: Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy which is a member of a sparse cluster of galaxies, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night. Since Aristarchus, every step in our quest has moved us farther from center stage in the cosmic drama. There has not been much time to assimilate these new findings. The discoveries of Shapley and Hubble were made within the lifetimes of many people still alive today. There are those who secretly deplore these great discoveries, who consider every step a demotion, who in their heart of hearts still pine for a universe whose center, focus and fulcrum is the Earth. But if we are to deal with the Cosmos we must first understand it, even if our hopes for some unearned preferential status are, in the process, contravened. Understanding where we live is an essential precondition for improving the neighborhood. Knowing what other neighborhoods are like also helps. If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. We embarked on our cosmic voyage with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

One possibility is that many of these universes are unstable and decay to our familiar universe. We recall that the vacuum, instead of being a boring, featureless thing, is actually teeming with bubble universes popping in and out of existence, like in a bubble bath. Hawking called this the space-time foam. Most of these tiny bubble universes are unstable, jumping out of the vacuum and then jumping back in. In the same way, once the final formulation of the theory is found, one might be able to show that most of these alternate universes are unstable and decay down to our universe. For example, the natural time scale for these bubble universes is the Planck time, which is 10−43 seconds, an incredibly short amount of time. Most universes only live for this brief instant. Yet the age of our universe, by comparison, is 13.8 billion years, which is astronomically longer than the lifespan of most universes in this formulation. In other words, perhaps our universe is special among the infinity of universes in the landscape. Ours has outlasted them all, and that is why we are here today to discuss this question. But what do we do if the final equation turns out to be so complex that it cannot be solved by hand? Then it seems impossible to show that our universe is special among the universes in the landscape. At that point I think we should put it in a computer. This is the path taken for the quark theory. We recall that the Yang-Mills particle acts like a glue to bind quarks into a proton. But after fifty years, no one has been able to rigorously prove this mathematically. In fact, many physicists have pretty much given up hope of ever accomplishing it. Instead, the Yang-Mills equations are solved on a computer. This is done by approximating space-time as a series of lattice points. Normally, we think of space-time being a smooth surface, with an infinite number of points. When objects move, they pass through this infinite sequence. But we can approximate this smooth surface with a grid or lattice, like a mesh. As we let the spacing between lattice points get smaller and smaller, it becomes ordinary space-time, and the final theory begins to emerge. Similarly, once we have the final equation for M-theory, we can put it on a lattice and do the computation on a computer. In this scenario, our universe emerges from the output of a supercomputer. (However, I am reminded of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when a gigantic supercomputer is built to find the meaning of life. After eons doing the calculation, the computer finally concluded that the meaning of the universe was “forty-two.”)

Similarly, we look for echoes from the tenth and eleventh dimension. Perhaps evidence for string theory is hidden all around us, but we have to listen for its echoes, rather than try to observe it directly. For example, one possible signal from hyperspace is the existence of dark matter. Until recently, it was widely believed that the universe is mainly made of atoms. Astronomers have been shocked to find that only 4.9 percent of the universe is made of atoms like hydrogen and helium. Actually, most of the universe is hidden from us, in the form of dark matter and dark energy. (We recall that dark matter and dark energy are two distinct things. Twenty-six point eight percent of the universe is made of dark matter, which is invisible matter that surrounds the galaxies and keep them from flying apart. And 68.3 percent of the universe is made of dark energy, which is even more mysterious, the energy of empty space that is driving the galaxies apart.) Perhaps evidence for the theory of everything lies hidden in this invisible universe. Search for Dark Matter Dark matter is strange, it is invisible, yet it holds the Milky Way galaxy together. But since it has weight and no charge, if you tried to hold dark matter in your hand it would sift through your fingers as if they weren’t there. It would fall right through the floor, through the core of the Earth, and then to the other side of the Earth, where gravity would eventually cause it to reverse course and fall back to your location. It would then oscillate between you and the other side of the planet, as if the Earth weren’t there. As strange as dark matter is, we know it must exist. If we analyze the spin of the Milky Way galaxy and use Newton’s laws, we find that there is not enough mass to counteract the centrifugal force. Given the amount of mass we see, the galaxies in the universe should be unstable and they should fly apart, but they have been stable for billions of years. So we have two choices: either Newton’s equations are incorrect when applied to galaxies, or else there is an unseen object that is keeping the galaxies intact. (We recall that the planet Neptune was found in the same way, by postulating a new planet that explained Uranus’s deviations from a perfect ellipse.) At present, one leading candidate for dark matter is called the weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Among them, one likely possibility is the photino, the supersymmetric partner of the photon. The photino is stable, has mass, is invisible, and has no charge, which fits precisely the characteristics of dark matter. Physicists believe the Earth moves in an invisible wind of dark matter that is probably passing through your body right now. If a photino collides with a proton, it may cause the proton to shatter into a shower of subatomic particles that can then be detected.

For the moment I want to focus on why we aren’t aware of ‘everything that is happening everywhere in the universe’ more often. The basic reason is the one that Huxley points out: we simply don’t need to be. ‘To make biological survival possible,’ Huxley writes, ‘Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.’ And ‘what comes out … is the measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet’.35 If I am trying to cross a busy street, being aware of what is happening on some planet in a galaxy many light years away is of no immediate use to me. Being overwhelmed by cosmic consciousness will not help me in the day-to-day struggle for survival, and so I — or who or whatever is responsible for human evolution — edit it out.

The discovery of eternal inflation has radically transformed our understanding of what's out there in space on the largest scales. Now I can't help but feel that our old story sounds like a fairy tale, with its single narrative in a simple sequence: "Once upon a time, there was inflation. Inflation made our Big Bang. Our Big Bang made galaxies." Figure 5.7 illustrates why this story is too naive: it yet again repeats our human mistake of assuming that all we know of so far is all that exists. We see that even our Big Bang is just a small part of something much grander, a treelike structure that's still growing. In other words, what we've called our Big Bang wasn't the ultimate beginning, but rather the end-of inflation in our part of space.

The apparent incompatibility between the abundance of habitable planets in our Galaxy and the lack of extraterrestrial visitors, known as the Fermi paradox, suggest the existence of what Hanson calls a "Great Filter," an evolutionary/technological roadblock somewhere along the developmental path from nonliving matter to space-colonizing life. If we discover independently evolved primitive life in our Solar System, this would suggest that primitive life is not rare, and that the roadblock lies after our current human stage of development-perhaps because assumption 1 is false, or because almost all advanced civilizations self-destruct before they are able to colonize. I'm therefore crossing my fingers that all searches for life on Mars and elsewhere find nothing: this is consistent with the scenario where primitive life is rare but we humans got lucky, so that we have the roadblock behind us and have extraordinary future potential.

Tibet The sage blue sky awakens before the earth which slumbers a bit longer to still the chill of her bones and dream until the sun peeks hot through her cragged peaks bestirring weary monks to the swirl of their yak butter tea. Monks meditate upon this whorl which echoes the birth of galaxies, the twist of DNA, the curlicue of hair at the back of an infant’s head, eddying clockwise like Buddha’s journey, winding like a prayer wheel, in the resonance ofinterconnection. Bells tinkle, bowls sing, incense suffuses hints of heaven, rainbows of Jingfan prayer flags clap wildly in the wind, waving me to my quest, to surge forward, to trek to higher and higher ground -- to the rarefied air that is my mind.

Figure 3.3: Since it takes time for distant light to reach us, looking farther away means looking farther back in time. Beyond the most distant galaxies, we see an opaque wall of glowing hydrogen plasma, whose glow has taken about 14 billion years to reach us. This is because the same hydrogen that fills space today was hot enough to be plasma about 14 billion years ago, when our Universe was only about 400,000 years old. (Credit: Adapted from NASA/WMAP team)

He listed The Lord of the Rings, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as some of his favorites, alongside The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

As you remember, we encountered parallel universes in Chapter 6 as well, but of a different kind. To avoid confusing ourselves with an overdose of parallel universes, let's review the terminology we agreed on in Chapter 6. By our Universe, we mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us during the 14 billion years since our Big Bang, with its classical observed properties (which galaxies are where, what the history books say, etc.). In Chapter 6, we called other such spherical regions far way in our large or infinite space Level I parallel universes or Level II parallel universes, depending on whether they had our effective laws of physics or not. Let's call the quantum parallel universes that Everett discovered Level III parallel universes, and the collection of all of them the Level III multiverse. Where are these parallel universes? Whereas the Level I and Level II kinds are far away in our good old three-dimensional space, the Level III ones can be right here as far as these three-dimensions are concerned, but separated from us in what mathematicians call Hilbert space, an abstract space with infinitely many dimensions where the wavefunction lives.

How could space not be infinite? How could an infinite space get created in a finite time? What’s our Universe expanding into? Where in space did our Big Bang explosion happen? Did our Big Bang happen at a single point? If our Universe is only 14 billion years old, how can we see objects that are 30 billion light-years away? Don’t galaxies receding faster than the speed of light violate relativity theory? Are galaxies really moving away from us, or is space just expanding? Is the Milky Way expanding? Do we have evidence for a Big Bang singularity? Doesn’t creation of the matter around us from almost nothing by inflation violate energy conservation? What caused our Big Bang? What came before our Big Bang? What’s the ultimate fate of our Universe? What are dark matter and dark energy? Are we insignificant?

it can start with something smaller than an atom and create an infinite space inside of it, containing infinitely many galaxies, without affecting the exterior space.

It is generally agreed by modern cosmologist that we have established the general framework of how the universe behaved from when it was just one second old until the present, some fifteen billion years later. This is not to claim that we understand everything that occurred. We do not understand the detailed process by which galaxies formed, but such processes actually exert a negligible influence upon the course of the overall expansion. Prior to one second after the apparent beginning, we are on all together shakier ground. We no longer have direct fossil remnants from the early Universe against which to check the accuracy of our reconstruction of its history. In order to reconstruct the history of the universe in these first instants we require knowledge of the behavior of matter at far higher energies than are accessible to us by terrestrial experiments.

A true standard requires us to find some way of defining what we mean by one unit of time which is the same for everyone no matter where or when they are observing. This desire for universality naturally moves us to seek some time standard that is determined by the constants of Nature alone. And this is indeed how modern absolute time standards are defined. They avoid the use of any characterisitic of the Earth or its gravitational field and focus instead upon the natural oscillation frequencies of certain atomic transitions between states of different energy. The time for one of these transitions to occur in an atom of caesium is determined by the velocity of light in a vacuum, the masses of the electron and proton, Planck's constant, and the charge on a single electron. All these quantities are taken to be constants of Nature. A time interval of one second is then defined to be a certain number of these oscillations. Despite the esoteric nature of this definition of time, it is a powerful one. It should allow us to communicate precisely what length of time we were talking about to the inhabitants of a distant galaxy.

The great unanswered question is whether there exists some undiscovered organizing principle which complements the known laws of Nature and dictates the overall evolution of the Universe. To be a true addition to what we know of Nature's laws, this principle would need to differ from any laws of gravitation and particle physics that might emerge in final form from some Theory of Everything. It would not be specific to Universes but would govern the evolution of any complex system. True, its general notions ought to be tailored in some way to the notions which characterize the specific things that go on in an evolving universe-the clustering of matter into stars and galaxies, the conversion of matter into radiation-but it would also need to govern the invisible ways in which the gravitational field of the Universe can change. Any such discovery would be profoundly interesting because the Universe appears to be far more orderly than we have any right to expect. It has a tiny entropy level compared with the largest value that we could conceive of it possessing if we were to reorganize the observed matter into other configurations. This implies that the entropy level at the beginning of the expansion of the Universe must have been staggeringly small, which implies that the initial conditions were very special indeed.

In a galaxy far, far away, at a time when the Earth hosted nothing bigger than a simple bacterium, two monster black holes, locked in a death-spiral, swung around each other one last time. As they kissed and coalesced, three whole solar masses vanished, reappearing instantly as a tsunami of a warped space-time, which raced outwards at the speed of light. For an instant its power was fifty times greater than that of all the stars in the Universe put together.

The Godfather, A Place in the Sun, Dodsworth, Galaxy Quest--these are perfect films. They start with a simple premise and proceed logically, and inevitably, toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable. [From the chapter "The Script."]

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as some of his favorites, alongside The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Barry noticed a problem with the popular theory of how galaxies and solar systems were supposedly formed,” CHET explains. “It occurred to him that if all of the planets in our solar system had been formed from the same swirling cloud of dust and gas, then their axis of spin should be uniform, but that is not at all what he found in our solar system.

Don’t galaxies receding faster than the speed of light violate relativity theory? Hubble’s law v = Hd implies that galaxies will move away from us faster than the speed of light c if their distance from us is greater than c/H ≈ 14 billion light-years, and we have no reason to doubt that such galaxies exist, so doesn’t this violate Einstein’s claim that nothing can go faster than light? The answer is yes and no: it violates Einstein’s special relativity theory from 1905 but not his general relativity theory from 1915, and the latter is Einstein’s final word on the subject, so we’re okay.

The inflationary period of expansion does not smooth out irregularity by entropy-producing processes like those explored by the cosmologies of the seventies. Rather it sweeps the irregularity out beyond the Horizon of our visible Universe, where we cannot see it . The entire universe of stars and galaxies on view to us. , on this hypothesis, is but the reflection of a minute, perhaps infinitesimal, portion of the universe's initial conditions, whose ultimate extent and structure must remain forever unknowable to us. A theory of everything does not help here. The information contained in the observable part of the universe derives from the evolution of a tiny part of the initial conditions for the entire universe. The sum total of all the observations we could possibly make can only tell us about a minuscule portion of the whole.

We can be more specific about what the universe would look like if it were an eternal system fluctuating around equilibrium. Boltzmann invoked the anthropic principle (although he didn’t call it that) to explain why we wouldn’t find ourselves in one of the very common equilibrium phases: In equilibrium, life cannot exist. Clearly, what we want to do is find the most common conditions within such a universe that are hospitable to life. Or, if we want to be a bit more careful, perhaps we should look for conditions that are not only hospitable to life, but hospitable to the particular kind of intelligent and self-aware life that we like to think we are. Maybe this is a way out? Maybe, we might reason, in order for an advanced scientific civilization such as ours to arise, we require a “support system” in the form of an entire universe filled with stars and galaxies, originating in some sort of super-low-entropy early condition. Maybe that could explain why we find such a profligate universe around us. No. Here is how the game should be played: You tell me the particular thing you insist must exist in the universe, for anthropic reasons. A solar system, a planet, a particular ecosystem, a type of complex life, the room you are sitting in now, whatever you like. And then we ask, “Given that requirement, what is the most likely state of the rest of the universe in the Boltzmann-Lucretius scenario, in addition to the particular thing we are asking for?” And the answer is always the same: The most likely state of the rest of the universe is to be in equilibrium. If we ask, “What is the most likely way for an infinite box of gas in equilibrium to fluctuate into a state containing a pumpkin pie?,” the answer is “By fluctuating into a state that consists of a pumpkin pie floating by itself in an otherwise homogeneous box of gas.” Adding anything else to the picture, either in space or in time—an oven, a baker, a previously existing pumpkin patch—only makes the scenario less likely, because the entropy would have to dip lower to make that happen. By far the easiest way to get a pumpkin pie in this context is for it to gradually fluctuate all by itself out of the surrounding chaos.