Lawrence Krauss Quotes

Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

Forget Jesus, the stars died so you could be born.

A universe without purpose should neither depress us nor suggest that our lives are purposeless. Through an awe-inspiring cosmic history we find ourselves on this remote planet in a remote corner of the universe, endowed with intelligence and self-awareness. We should not despair, but should humbly rejoice in making the most of these gifts, and celebrate our brief moment in the sun.

Lack of comfort means we are on the threshold of new insights.

If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

I like to say that while antimatter may seem strange, it is strange in the sense that Belgians are strange. They are not really strange; it is just that one rarely meets them.

In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.

The universe is the way it is , whether we like it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent of our desires . A world without God or purpose may seem harsh or pointless, but that alone doesn ' t require God to actually exist.

You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

Reality doesn’t owe us comfort.

At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs - as long as no one is watching, anything goes.

No matter where you go, there you are.

every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. and, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. it really is the most poetic thing i know about physics: you are all stardust.

The real thing that physics tell us about the universe is that it's big, rare event happens all the time — including life — and that doesn't mean it's special.

Metaphysical speculation is independent of the physical validity of the Big Bang itself and is irrelevant to our understanding of it.

Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake.

I don’t mind not knowing. It doesn’t scare me. —RICHARD FEYNMAN

A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.

We live at a very special time . . . the only time when we can observationally verify that we live at a very special time!

One of the most poetic facts I know about the universe is that essentially every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded. Moreover, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than did those in your right. We are all, literally, star children, and our bodies made of stardust.

To be scientifically illiterate is to remain essentially uncultured. And the chief virtue of a cultural activity--be it art, music, literature, or science--is the way it enriches our lives.

Edwin Hubble, who continues to give me great faith in humanity, because he started out as a lawyer and then became an astronomer.

nature is more imaginative than we are.

[I]n science we have to be particularly cautious about 'why' questions. When we ask, 'Why?' we usually mean 'How?' If we can answer the latter, that generally suffices for our purposes. For example, we might ask: 'Why is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?' but what we really probably mean is, 'How is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?' That is, we are interested in what physical processes led to the Earth ending up in its present position. 'Why' implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe purpose to it.

Their mutual gravitational attraction will ultimately cause them to collapse inward, in manifest disagreement with an apparently static universe.

Now, almost one hundred years later, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much our picture of the universe has changed in the span of a single human lifetime. As far as the scientific community in 1917 was concerned, the universe was static and eternal, and consisted of a one single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by vast, infinite, dark, and empty space. This is, after all, what you would guess by looking up at the night sky with your eyes, or with a small telescope, and at the time there was little reason to suspect otherwise.

The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent of our desires. A world without God or purpose may seem harsh or pointless, but that alone doesn’t require God to actually exist.

like insects on a rubber sheet, we live in a universe whose true form is hidden from direct view.

At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs— as long as no one is watching, anything goes.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. —DONALD RUMSFELD

أنا غير كفؤ للحديث عن اللاشيء، لأن رجال الدين والفلاسفة هم خبراء في لاشيء!

For, after all, in science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.

an electron accelerated to .9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999999999 times the speed of light would hit you with the same impact as a Mack truck traveling at normal speed.

I should point out, nevertheless, that even though incomplete data can lead to a false picture, this is far different from the (false) picture obtained by those who choose to ignore empirical data to invent a picture of reality (young earthers, for example), or those who instead require the existence of something for which there is no observable evidence whatsoever (like divine intelligence) to reconcile their view of creation with their a priori prejudices, or worse still, those who cling to fairly tales about nature that presume the answers before questions can even be asked.

In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God. Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant.

If the universe doesn't care about us and if we're an accident in a remote corner of the universe, in some sense it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us; we provide our own meaning.

In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God.

I don’t make any claims to answer any questions that science cannot answer, and I have tried very carefully within the text to define what I mean by “nothing” and “something.” If those definitions differ from those you would like to adopt, so be it. Write your own book. But don’t discount the remarkable human adventure that is modern science because it doesn’t console you.

To argue that, in a universe in which there seems to be no purpose, our existence is without meaning or value is unparalleled solipsism, as it suggests that without us the universe is worthless. The greatest gift that science can give us is to allow us to overcome our need to be the center of existence even as we learn to appreciate the wonder of the accident we are privileged to witness.

Particle physicists are way ahead of cosmologists. Cosmology has produced one totally mysterious quantity: the energy of empty space, about which we understand virtually nothing. However, particle physics has not understood many more quantities for far longer!

A physicist, an engineer and a psychologist are called in as consultants to a dairy farm whose production has been below par. Each is given time to inspect the details of the operation before making a report. The first to be called is the engineer, who states: "The size of the stalls for the cattle should be decreased. Efficiency could be improved if the cows were more closely packed, with a net allotment of 275 cubic feet per cow. Also, the diameter of the milking tubes should be increased by 4 percent to allow for a greater average flow rate during the milking periods." The next to report is the psychologist, who proposes: "The inside of the barn should be painted green. This is a more mellow color than brown and should help induce greater milk flow. Also, more trees should be planted in the fields to add diversity to the scenery for the cattle during grazing, to reduce boredom." Finally, the physicist is called upon. He asks for a blackboard and then draws a circle. He begins: "Assume the cow is a sphere....

why there is something rather than nothing: nothing is unstable.

a negative charge moving backward in time is mathematically equivalent to a positive charge moving forward in time!

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place? —LOUISE BOGAN, Journey Around My Room

For those who find it remarkable that we live in a universe of Something, just wait. Nothingness is heading on a collision course right toward us!

More often than you might think, teaching science is inseparable from teaching doubt.

The most remarkable leaps into the unknown are often not fully appreciated,

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes humans objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created to be sick and commanded to be well. —CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Our modern conception of the universe is so foreign to what even scientists generally believed a mere century ago that it is a tribute to the power of the scientific method and the creativity and persistence of humans who want to understand it.

For most people, the central questions of existence ultimately come down to transcendental ones: Why is there a universe at all? Why are we here? Whatever presumptions one might bring to the question "Why?," if we understand the "how" better, "why" will come into sharper focus.

Andromeda was discovered to be another island universe, another spiral galaxy almost identical to our own, and one of the more than 100 billion other galaxies that, we now know, exist in our observable universe.

The date here is very interesting, because, as far as I can determine, the first Star Trek episode to refer to a black hole, which it called a "black star," was aired in 1967 before Wheeler ever used the term in public.

As Einstein might have put it, only a very malicious (and, therefore, in his mind unimaginable) God would have conspired to have created a universe that so unambiguously points to a Big Bang origin without its having occurred.

Whenever one asks “Why?” in science, one actually means “How?”. “Why?” is not really a sensible question in science because it usually implies purpose and, as anyone who has been the parent of a small child knows, one can keep on asking “Why?” forever, no matter what the answer to the previous question. Ultimately, the only way to end the conversation seems to be to say “Because!

The one thing that I want every single child to have experienced at some point in their life, as part of their education, is to have some idea they hold to be true, and at the very basis of their being, proved to be wrong. Because that opens your mind to the realization that the world is different than you thought it would be, and you have to begin to open your mind to the possibilities of existence. And opening your mind frees you, it doesn't constrain you. It makes the world more wonderful, more exciting, and more worth living in.

But common sense is deceptive precisely because it is based on common experience.

The Higgs is like a toilet. It hides all the messy details

Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance.

It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.

Forget Jesus. Stars died so you could live.

We need to live our experience as it is and with our eyes open. The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.

But being uncomfortable is a virtue, not a hindrance.

When you're a theorist, the two most addictive states to be in are excited and confused

And, just as with inflation, as described in the last chapter, our observable universe is at the threshold of expanding faster than the speed of light.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.

the universe is big and old and, as a result, rare events happen all the time. Go out some night into the woods or desert where you can see stars and hold up your hand to the sky, making a tiny circle between your thumb and forefinger about the size of a dime. Hold it up to a dark patch of the sky where there are no visible stars. In that dark patch, with a large enough telescope of the type we now have in service today, you could discern perhaps 100,000 galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Since supernovae explode once per hundred years per, with 100,000 galaxies in view, you should expect to see, on average, about three stars explode on a given night.

People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No, I’m not. I’m just looking to find out more about the world, and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything, so be it. That would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers, and we’re sick and tired of looking at layers, then that’s the way it is . . . My interest in science is to simply find out more about the world, and the more I find out, the better it is. I like to find out.

But plausibility itself, in my view, is a tremendous step forward as we continue to marshal the courage to live meaningful lives in a universe that likely came into existence, and may fade out of existence, without purpose, and certainly without us at its center.

Special relativity says nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light. But space itself can do whatever the heck it wants, at least in general relativity. And as space expands, it can carry distant objects, which are at rest in the space where they are sitting,

I've told you two things : First, you're much more insignificant than you ever imagined and second, the future is miserable. But you should be happy, because we may live in a universe without purpose but that means the purpose in our lives is the purpose we create. And we should consider ourselves fortunate to have evolved in this place in the middle of nowhere and evolved a consciousness so we can understand the universe from the earliest moments of the big bang to the far future. So instead of being depressed, you should enjoy your brief moment in the sun.

When a star explodes, it briefly (over the course of about a month or so) shines in visible light with a brightness of 10 billion stars. Happily for us, stars don't explode that often, about once per hundred years per galaxy. But we are lucky that they do, because if they didn't, we wouldn't be here. One of the most poetic facts I know about the universe is that essentially every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded. Moreover, atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than did those in your right. We are all, literally, star children, and our bodies made of stardust.

Science has been effective at furthering our understanding of nature because the scientific ethos is based on three key principles: (1) follow the evidence wherever it leads; (2) if one has a theory, one needs to be willing to try to prove it wrong as much as one tries to prove that it is right; (3) the ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.

Indeed, in a strange coincidence, we are living in the only era in the history of the universe when the presence of the dark energy permeating empty space is likely to be detectable. It is true that this era is several hundred billion years long, but in an eternally expanding universe it represents the mere blink of a cosmic eye.

Finally, and inevitably, the flat universe will further flatten into a nothingness that mirrors its beginning. Not only will there be no cosmologists to look out on the universe, there will be nothing for them to see even if they could. Nothing at all. Not even atoms. Nothing. If you think that’s bleak and cheerless, too bad. Reality doesn’t owe us comfort.

Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. —Lawrence M. Krauss, physicist

escape the shackles of our prior experience to uncover profound and beautiful simplifications and predictions

one of the dumbest academic decisions ever made (and that is a tough list to top), Maxwell was unceremoniously laid off.

Nevertheless, all of these phenomena imply that, under the right conditions, not only can nothing become something, it is required to.

At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs—as long as no one is watching, anything goes. Systems

While the nature of this radiation will give no information whatsoever on what fell into the black hole,

Indeed, the best answer I have ever heard to the question of what it would be like to be dead (i.e., be nonbeing) is to imagine how it felt to be before you were conceived.

Why is there a universe at all? Why are we here?

CHAPTER 8 A GRAND ACCIDENT? Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes humans objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created to be sick and commanded to be well. —CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS We

Defining away the question by arguing that the buck stops with God may seem to obviate the issue of infinite regression, but here I invoke my mantra: The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. The existence or nonexistence of a creator is independent of our desires. A world without God or purpose may seem harsh or pointless, but that alone doesn’t require God to actually exist.

[...] It is. Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, "those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym." And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't. [the atlantic, Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete? - interview, apr 23 2012]

But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun - the plane of the earth around the sun - the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe. The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is (s)imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales.

children will be able to tell than the story we have told? Surely that is the greatest contribution of science to civilization: to ensure that the greatest books are not those of the past, but of the future.

see also positrons; virtual particles Aristotle, 172–73 Atkins, Peter, 191 baryons, 76 Big Bang, xvii, 95, 107, 150, 173, 189 CMBR left from, see cosmic microwave background radiation dating of, 3, 15–16, 77, 87 density of protons and neutrons in,

The tapestry that science weaves in describing the evolution of our universe is richer and far more fascinating than any revelatory images or imaginative stories that humans have concocted. Nature comes up with surprises that far exceed those that the human imagination can generate.

Curiosity-driven research may seem self-indulgent and far from the immediate public good. However, essentially all of our current quality of life, for people living in the first world, has arisen from the fruits of such research, including all the electric power that drives almost every device we use. Two

I have challenged several theologians to provide evidence contradicting the premise that theology has made no contribution to knowledge in the past five hundred years at least, since the dawn of science. So far no one has provided a counterexample. The most I have ever gotten back was the query, ‘What do you mean by knowledge?’ From an epistemological perspective this may be a thorny issue, but I maintain that, if there were a better alternative, someone would have presented it. Had I presented that same challenge to biologists, or psychologists, or historians, or astronomers, none of them would have been so flummoxed.

One thing is certain, however. The metaphysical 'rule', which is held as an ironclad conviction by those whom I have debated the issue of creation, namely that "out of nothing nothing comes," has no foundation in science. Arguing that it is self-evident, unwavering, and unassailable is like arguing, as Darwin falsely did, when he made the suggestion that the origin of life was beyond the domain of science by building an analogy with the incorrect claim that matter cannot be created or destroyed. All it represents is an unwillingness to recognize the simple fact that nature may be cleverer than philosophers or theologians.

But relying on invisible miracles is the stuff of religion, not science. To ascertain whether this remarkable accident was real, physicists relied on another facet of the quantum world. Associated with every background field is a particle, and if you pick a point in space and hit it hard enough, you may whack out real particles.

It's hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars, and then waited more than 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved an atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again.

К счастью для нас, звезды не взрываются столь часто, примерно раз в сто лет в галактике. Но нам повезло, что они взрываются, потому что, если бы не это, нас бы здесь не было. Один из самых поэтичных фактов, которые я знаю о Вселенной, что, по сути, каждый атом в вашем теле произошел из звезды, которая взорвалась. Более того, атомы в левой руке, возможно, произошли из одной звезды, а в правой — из другой. Мы все, буквально, звездные дети, и наши тела сделаны из звездной пыли.

Does this prove that our universe arose from nothing? Of course not. But it does take us one rather large step closer to the plausibility of such a scenario. And it removes one more of the objections that might have been leveled against the argument of creation from nothing as described in the previous chapter. There, “nothing” meant empty but preexisting space combined with fixed and well-known laws of physics. Now the requirement of space has been removed. But, remarkably, as we shall next discuss, even the laws of physics may not be necessary or required.