Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes

Every time I give a public lecture about what I do, I am asked the same thing: “What was there before the Big Bang?” I resort to the various explanations. There is the “There was no before, no time, before the Big Bang” answer. Or there is my colleague Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s more Zen-like answer: “That is like asking what is north of the North Pole.

There is an alternative understanding of what hope means. It is one that says hope is less about the future and more about the now; it is an attitude, stubborn and persistent, consistently doing what feels to be right and not giving up, even when things are dark. It is about identifying things that are good, and putting effort into them; it's about finding meaning in all forms of existence. It's about believing that through such actions we may bring something to fulfilment. Is this what incarnation means today?

I have recently come to accept that in religion (as indeed in life) there are other ways of knowing - that there are other, different "languages", and they all have validity.

I "know" there is a God, a living, loving God who works through people, prompting, nudging. A God of inspiration, or creativity; a God we can sense in the silence of a gathered Quaker meeting. One who holds a mirror up to us so that we can see our behaviour, keep our standards. One before whom masks, poses and postures drop away; one who knows us as perhaps only our parents knew us; there we are most truly ourselves.

We saw in Chapter 2 how professional scientists spend a lot of time doubting and how certainty (and over-confidence) can de-rail the scientific method. Some consider doubt a weakness, but for me it is far healthier than certainty, although it does need to be seen as something open and flexible, not disabling. As has often been said, certainty rather than doubt is the opposite of faith.