John D. Barrow Quotations

Apparently, a great deal of dark, unseen material exists, whose gravitational pull is responsible for the motions of the stars and galaxies that we see.

What cannot be known is more revealing than what can.

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

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

History is full of people who thought they were right -- absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And because history never seems like history when you are living through it, it is tempting for us to think the same.

We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past.

When we try to observe things that are very small, the act of observation itself will significantly disturb the state we are seeking to measure.

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.

Some things are as they are regardless of what they were.

Once upon a time there was no Time.

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.

All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is"... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol-all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics.

We are just strings of quarks living in a suburb of the local density maximum of the universe.

Once upon a time when there was no time.

There was no "before" the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.