Time

"Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor."

"You win in battles with the timing in the Void born of the timing of cunning by knowing the enemies' timing, and this using a timing which the enemy does not expect. All the five books are chiefly concerned with timing. You must train sufficiently to appreciate all this."

"On the Plains of Hesitation bleach the bones of countless millions who, at the Dawn of Victory, sat down to wait, and waiting—died!"

"Things are stuck now."

"积水之激，至于漂石者，势也。鸷鸟之疾，至于毁折者，节也。"

"We are privileged to be part of the first generation who can claim to have a respectable, rational, and coherent description for the creation and evolution of the universe. The Big Bang model offers an elegant explanation of the origin of everything we see in the night sky, making it one of the greatest achievements of the human intellect and spirit. It is the consequence of an insatiable curiosity, a fabulous imagination, acute observation and ruthless logic. Even more wonderful is that the Big Bang model can be understood by everyone."

"The big bang and the steady state debate in some ways echoed that between the ideas of Anaximander and Anaxagoras from two and a half millennia earlier. Anaxagoras had envisaged that at one time "all things were together" and that the motive force for the universe originated at a single point... Anaximander on the other hand wanted a universe determined by "the infinite" and needed an "eternal motion" to explain the balancing process of things coming into being and passing away in an eternal universe... ancient philosophy was debating the alternatives of a creation event starting the universe from a single point versus a continuous creation in an eternal universe."

"The big bang was not an explosion in space; it was more like an explosion of space."

"I'll say only this: if we're going to throw the idea of the Big Bang overboard, we won't have much left of current astrophysics and cosmology"

"The big bang theory does not describe the birth of the universe … Another theory describing even earlier times will be needed to explain the original creation of the universe."

"There are some questions that scientists can never answer, “It may be that the Big Bang happened 12 billion years ago. But why did it happen? . . . How did the particles get there in the first place? What was there before?” Utley concludes: “It seems . . . clearer than ever that science will never satisfy the human hunger for answers.”"

"The big bang happened everywhere. It was not a bomb going off at a particular spot that we can identify as the center of the explosion."

"[Big Bang theory] suggested that matter and motion originated rather as Genesis [in the Bible] suggests, ex nihilo, out of nothing, in a stupendous explosion of light and energy."

"One may wonder, What came before? If space-time did not exist then, how could everything appear from nothing? . . . Explaining this initial singularity—where and when it all began—still remains the most intractable problem of modern cosmology."

"The forces loosed were—are—remarkably (miraculously?) balanced: If the Big Bang had been slightly less violent, the expansion of the universe would have been less rapid, and would soon (in a few million years, or a few minutes—in any case, soon) have collapsed back on itself. If the explosion had been slightly more violent, the universe might have dispersed into a soup too thin to aggregate into stars. The odds against us were—this is just the right word—astronomical. The ratio of matter and energy to the volume of space at the Big Bang must have been within about one quadrillionth of 1 percent of ideal."

"Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs—in time, in space, and in potential—the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions."

"The ideas that prove to be of lasting interest are likely to build on the framework of the now standard world picture, the hot big bang model of the expanding universe. The full extent and richness of this picture is not as well understood as I think it ought to be, even among those making some of the most stimulating contributions to the flow of ideas."

"The first, and main, problem is the very existence of the big bang."

"Take but degree away (see above, the one quadrillionth of 1 percent margin for error), . . . and what follows is not just discord but eternal entropy and ice. So, what—who?—was the great Tuner?"

"I am convinced that the race backwards in space and time, to the origins of the Big Bang and the elementary structure of matter, is infinite; logically and spatially inaccessible. I therefore believe that the quarks that make up electrons and protons are not the most elementary particles at all; similarly, there is no single chain of events that led from the Big Bang to us, but an infinity of equally plausible possibilities. Mine is still a faith, because I have no proof of anything."

"To admit such possibilities seems senseless to me."

"This circumstance of an expanding universe is irritating."

"Bothers science because it clashes with scientific religion—the religion of cause and effect, the belief that every effect has a cause. Now we find that the biggest effect of all, the birth of the universe, violates this article of faith. . . . what came before the Big Bang is the most interesting question of all."

"In vain would one expect an answer from natural science, which indeed loyally declares that it is faced with an insoluble enigma. It is very true that one would demand too much from natural science as such; but it I salso certain that more deeply penetrates the problem the human spirit poured into philosophical meditation." The problem of the radical origin of the universe, then, is a philosophical problem, not a scientific one. The discourse now proceeds with a passage that is of close interest to us. The Pope argues that a personal subject, a mind enriched today by scientific knowledge, would judge compatible with the present view of the cosmos the idea of a creation of the universe from nothing, by a Creator God. The subject of this recognition - it is worth emphasizing - is not science or the scientific method, but man enriched by scientific knowledge, together with his philosophical and existential reflection. Here are the words of Pius XII: "A mind enlightened and enriched by modern scientific knowledge, which serenely evaluates this problem, is led to break the circle of an entirely independent and autochthonous matter, either because it is uncreated, or because it is self-created, and to trace it back to a Creator Spirit. With the same clear and critical gaze with which it examines and judges facts, it glimpses and recognizes therein the work of creative omnipotence, whose virtue, stirred by the powerful “fiat” uttered billions of years ago by the Creator Spirit, unfolded in the universe, calling into existence with a generous gesture of love matter exuberant with energy. It really seems that today's science, suddenly going back millions of centuries, has succeeded in witnessing that primordial “Fiat lux,” when out of nothingness burst with matter a sea of light and radiation, as the particles of the chemical elements split off and came together in millions of galaxies."

"In the beginning there was an explosion. Not an explosion like those familiar on earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning, with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle. ‘All space’ in this context may mean either all of an infinite universe, or all of a finite universe which curves back on itself like the surface of a sphere. Neither possibility is easy to comprehend, but this will not get in our way; it matters hardly at all in the early universe whether space is finite or infinite. At about one-hundredth of a second, the earliest time about which we can speak with any confidence, the temperature of the universe was about a hundred thousand million (1011) degrees Centigrade. This is much hotter than in the center of even the hottest star, so hot, in fact, that none of the components of ordinary matter, molecules, or atoms, or even the nuclei of atoms, could have held together. Instead, the matter rushing apart in this explosion consisted of various types of the so-called elementary particles, which are the subject of modern high­energy nuclear physics."

"Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened—the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery... That it happened is reasonably clear. All the matter in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density—a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures—perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimensions at all."

"The discovery of the Big Bang and the recession of the galaxies came from a commonplace of nature called the Doppler effect. ...An object approaching us at very high velocities is perceive to have the color of its spectral lines blue-shifted. An object receding from us at very high velocities has its spectral lines red-shifted. ...Following a lead by the astronomer V. M. Slipher... Humason and Hubble found, to their amazement, that the spectra of all distant galaxies are red-shifted."

"The hot big bang standard theory is undoubtedly very impressive and probably true as far as it goes. The big bang is no longer a matter of debate, but one needs to keep in mind that the big bang is not the same as the creation or absolute beginning of the universe. While the standard model is reliable I am much less convinced by its extensions to the time regimes even closer to the magical moment t = 0. Inflation is not yet proved and pre-inflation scenarios seem very speculative. The same is the case with various theories of a universe before the big bang, although such theories cannot be ruled out. It is too early to say with certainty that the age of the universe is finite."

"The Big Bang understood as the event that created the hot, dense gas of cosmic matter was not an explosion starting from a point in space. If it had been, we could detect traces of that initial point today. Instead, astronomical observations teach us that the primordial matter gas was incredibly uniform and homogeneous. This indicates that the universe in its infancy was like a giant pot of well-mixed soup. The Big Bang is the event in which this soup was created, not at any special point, but homogeneously everywhere in the pot. It is a uniform transition that involved a very large, perhaps even infinite, region of space that was suddenly filled with matter. Understanding the Big Bang means understanding what caused this transition."{{NDR|And before the Big Bang, what was there?} Today it is thought that before the Big Bang there was only empty space. A very special empty space, however. There was no matter, but the fabric of space was imbued with a form of energy called precisely vacuum energy capable of exerting repulsive gravity. The effect is quite amazing because it is the exact opposite of the force of gravity we are used to, which can only attract material bodies."

"When it comes to the Big Bang, many believe that simply evoking that primordial explosion is enough to explain the origin of the world. But the issue is much deeper than that. Before the Big Bang, the fundamental laws of Nature had to be created: space, time, mass, energy, charges."

"... et al. (2003) ... say “The remarkable agreement between the density inferred from / values and our measurements is an important triumph for the basic big bang model.” This was certainly true given the size of the s on both and the at the time."

"The Big Bang theory, which is proposed today as the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of a divine creator but depends on it. Evolution in nature does not conflict with the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings who evolve."

"I have little hesitation in saying that as a result a sickly pall now hangs over the big bang theory. As I have mentioned earlier, when a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that it rarely recovers."

"These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past."

"The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over contradictions in the big bang theory, to build up an idea which has become ever more complex and cumbersome."

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

"The successes of modern control theory in the design of highly accurate space navigation systems have stimulated its use in the theoretical analyses of economic and biological systems. Similarly, the effectiveness of computer simulation techniques in the macroscopic analyses of physical systems has brought into vogue the use of computer-based econometric models for purposes of forecasting, economic planning, and management."

"The intellectually aggressive hedgehogs knew one big thing and sought, under the banner of parsimony, to expand the explanatory power of that big thing to “cover” new cases; the more eclectic foxes knew many little things and were content to improvise ad hoc solutions to keep pace with a rapidly changing world."

"This led me to the thought that it might be easy to pretend to be a Seer. After all, if one pretended to have visions of the far distant future, how would anyone know if they came true or not?"

"It is my hope that in such a way we may again, as Marx claimed, find scientific arguments in the competition between various systems, but up-to-date scientific arguments rather than obsolete ones. This more fundamental research in economics deserves relatively more attention and resources than the more superficial versions of economic research directed at forecasting or analysing very short-term fluctuations in market prices, on which quite some money is being spent to-day."

"Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they're designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways."

"A forecast can only be based on a diagnosis about current trends if it is to be based on something other than wishful thinking. This is why I was never a strong supporter of the distinction between forecasts and projections: our best forecasts are intelligent projections. Moreover, it turns out that learning about the diagnosis that underlies a forecast is often much more rewarding than learning about the forecast itself."

"I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular."

"Question 8. Is There a Measurable, Qualitatively Distinctive Prediction of String Theory? String theories can, in principle, make many "s" (such as the calculation of the mass ratios of s and s, Higgs masses and couplings, s, etc.). They can also make many new predictions (such as the masses of the supersymmetric partners of the observed particles, new gauge interactions, etc.). These would be sufficient to establish the validity of the theory, however in each case one can imagine (although with some difficulty) conventinal field theories coming up with similar pre or post dictions. It would be nice to predict a phenomenon, which would be accessible at observable energies and is uniquely characteristic of string theory."

"If you make a great number of predictions, the ones that were wrong will soon be forgotten, and the ones that turn out to be true will make you famous."

"I have always believed that people have misjudged the accuracy of economic forecasting... During the 1980s and 1990s, I researched and applied methods of high frequency economic forecasting, to be used by themselves, and for objective establishment of initial conditions for longer range forecasts from structural dynamic models that carry forward the pioneering contributions of Jan Tinbergen."

"Without precise predictability, control is impotent and almost meaningless. In other words, the lesser the predictability, the harder the entity or system is to control, and vice versa. If our universe actually operated on linear causality, with no surprises, uncertainty, or abrupt changes, all future events would be absolutely predictable in a sort of waveless orderliness."

"[Engineering concerns] the creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property.""

"As with anything else, there are good and bad ways to forecast."

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."