At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs-as long as no one is watching, anything goes.
Religious leaders need to be held accountable for their ideas.
The really important thing is learning how to sceptically question and rely on empirical evidence.
You shouldn’t be afraid of science. Accepting the reality of nature makes life more exciting and even more precious.
What people believe impacts on what they do. And it’s not as if religion is universally bad. Of course it’s responsible for many peoples doing good actions.
We all trust each other to some extent. We have to rely on experts to some extent, but we should learn to be sceptical.
Reality doesn’t owe us comfort.
Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.