Cosmologists

"[T]he probability of the evolution of creatures with the technological capability of interstellar communication within five billion years after the development of life on an Earth-like planet is less than 10-10, and thus we are the only intelligent species now existing in this Galaxy."

"The biologists argue that the number of evolutionary pathways leading from one-celled organisms to intelligent beings is minuscule when compared with the total number of evolutionary pathways, and thus even if we grant the existence of life on 109 to 1010 planets in our Galaxy, the probability that intelligence has arisen... [there] on any planet but our own is still very small. I agree..."

"[I]s the God (...Person ...) the God? ...the uncreated Creator of the ...universe ...Who exists necessarily ... i.e., the Person's nonexistence would be a logical contradiction."

"[T]he eternal life assumption... implies... there must exist in this future (but in two precise mathematical senses, also in the present and the past) a Person Who is simultaneously transcendent to yet immanent in the physical universe of space, time, and matter. In the Person's immanent temporal aspect... changing (forever growing in knowledge and power), but in the... transcendent eternal aspect, forever complete and unchanging. How this comes about as a matter of physics will be described..."

"Only if God is not in any sense contingent can one avoid regress posed in the query, who created God?"

"The Omega Point is in essence the Tillich-Pannenberg God: Being itself, but the mode of Being is futurity. This establishes the Omega Point as the God... there cannot be more being than all Being..."

"Wolfhart Pannenberg... suggested... there may exist a... universal physical field (analogous to Teilhard's "radial energy")... as the source of all life, and... identified with the Holy Spirit. ...[T]he universal wave function... is a... field with the essential features of Pannenberg's... "energy" field. ...If this identification is made ...as a matter of physics ...God is in the world, everywhere... with us... at all times."

"One avoids... contradiction between contingency and necessity by avoiding... sharp distinction between God and... reality. This... distinction... leads to gnostic heresy: ...a wholly other God... divorced from our ...world. It also leads... to the Problem of Evil... naturally resolved in the Omega Point Theory."

"The in its counts as a person because, at any time in our future, the collective information processing system will have generated, or will be able to generate, subprograms which will be able to pass the ; high intelligence will be required at least collectively in order to survive in the increasingly complex environment near the final state."

"We talk about how diversity will open up new possibilities, and she’s a prime example of that. She thinks of stuff that no one has done and does it—pulls it off."

"The link between art and science for me is my love of color and my love of light."

"Now, most astronomers hate dust; dust can dim the light from background stars and galaxies that we're trying to observe. But I love dust. Stellar nurseries are dusty. And we can use our knowledge of dust to understand the structure of molecular clouds. Stellar nurseries are threaded by these long, dense noodlelike structures called filaments. Embedded within filaments are these compact knots of gas called cores — the final stage before star formation."

"One strong motivation [for painting portraits] has been wanting to portray Black people in all the beauty that I see in them...I take a lot of joy in that."

"Everyone’s captivated by astronomy, by the stars, what’s out there in the universe...And so I made a conscious choice a long time ago that I wanted to share my work with the community, with Black folks and other people of color, especially."

"It’s frustrating for me, when people just talk about things at a superficial level and then try to solve the problem through diversity programs."

"I grew up in an environment where love for my people and for our culture was expressed all around me. I was raised to identify with Black people around the globe."

"Pursue your love. Stay hopeful. You’re needed. (Responding to the question "If there was a word you could give to other young people of color who want to be scientists, what would you tell them?")"

"Astronomers are experts on understanding what light is. We can’t touch or sense most of the objects that we study, other than from the light that we receive from them."

"We can never make assumptions about the entire universe based on what’s happening in our own backyard...we don’t want to have a theory of star formation just for the Milky Way — we want a universal theory."

"I paint mostly black people because I am black...I think it’s a cultural crisis in America, how people see themselves, and I think that should be an ambition in any art form to uplift people in some way."

"Love is the ultimate thing, I want that to be the connection between everything I do: science, art, or otherwise."

"It’s the strangeness of the universe that has always been my favorite part of physics."

"We know that molecular clouds are elaborate, and that their complex geometry is tied to star formation. But the images we have of them are flat — they’re inherently two-dimensional."

"Astronomers are masters of light; light we can see and most of which we can’t see."

"Imagination is a huge part of what it means to do science, and I often imagine what it would be like to be up close to these environments."

"... part of the challenge with astronomy is that images are inherently flat... 3-D models uniquely tap into the human brain’s ability to detect patterns. And so that was the idea behind the 3D printing was to have a new way of visualizing stellar nurseries — visual."

"The University of Texas in Dallas has kept me at the nearest possible level to nothing."

"Pure math is rather a farce … physics is really super."

"... We live for a while in some state which is called ... there is no preferable coordinate system ... there is no preferable choice of time ..."

"Many scientists are still ashamed of using the . Just as the friends of were afraid of using the name , the opponents of the anthropic principle often say that they do not want to use the 'A' in their research."

"Friedman had suffered health problems over the years. But news of his death stunned friends and colleagues, including UCSD physicist Brian Keating, who recruited him to , and physicist-science fiction author of . The trio made up “The Three Physicists,” an informal group that periodically met to give public talks on science and philosophy. ... With Brin and Keating, he also dove into esoterica, tackling subjects such as the physics of free will."

"The best available explanation of the observed uniformity of the universe is provided by inflation. However, as soon as this mechanism was proposed, it was realized that inflation, while explaining why our part of the world is so uniform, does not predict that this uniformity must extend to the whole universe ..."

"We should be agnostic as to what the might be."

"Each year, on December tenth, thousands of worshippers convene in to commemorate the passing of an arms dealt known as the merchant of death. The eschatological ritual features all the rites and incantations befitting a 's funeral. Haunting dirges play as the worshippers, bedecked in mandatory regalia, mourn the merchant. He is eerily present; his visage looms over the congregants as they feast on exotic game, surrounded by fresh-cut flowers imported from the merchant's . The event culminates with the presentation of gilded, graven images bearing his likeness. This ritual is the annual award ceremony, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was an occult sacrament."

"I'm an experimentalist. I like to look at hard data. And there — string theory is a distant second to because it doesn't make any observable predictions. ... As an experimentalist, I like when a theory makes a prediction. My job is to not prove theorists right — it's to disprove everybody else."

"The theory of the inflationary multiverse changes the way we think about our place in the world. According to its most popular version, our world may consist of infinitely many exponentially large parts, exhibiting different sets of low-energy laws of physics. Since these parts are extremely large, the interior of each of them behaves as if it were a separate universe, practically unaffected by the rest of the world. This picture, combined with the theory of eternal inflation and anthropic considerations, may help to solve many difficult problems of modern physics, including the cosmological constant problem."

"Why is our universe so homogeneous? Why is it not exactly homogeneous? Why is it isotropic (same in all directions)? Why all of its parts started expanding simultaneously? Why is if flat (Ω = 1)? Why is it so large? Answered by inflation"

"[[Symbols|[S]ymbols]] have no meaning if divorced from the entities that they represent."

"The concepts of message and probability enable one, for a definite source of N messages, to define Shannon’s information. If p_i,\quad i = 1, 2, ..., N, is the relative probability of message i and \log p_i is its base-2 logarithm, then the information I of the given source is(1) \quad I = - \sum_{k=1}^N p_i \log p_i.The minus sign makes I positive because all probabilities, which are necessarily greater than or equal zero, are less than unity (their sum being\textstyle \sum_{i}^N p_i = 1, so that their logarithms are all negative."

"It is a mistake to believe that the digits 0 and 1, being abstract, represent the immaterial. Quite... the contrary... they stand for something quintessentially concrete."

"I find no reason to reverse the standard assumption of physics... what we experience can be explained by the assumption of an external world governed by law."

"Greek astronomers observed intricate motions of the sun, moon, and planets on the two-dimensional sky. They explained them—saved the appearances—by positing simple regular motions... in three dimensions. The success... [was] brought to a triumphant conclusion by Kepler..."

"I argue... this weakens but not necessarily destroys the argument that nature is fundamentally digital and continuity an illusion."

"Ontological primacy should not be given to information but to things, as has always been the standpoint of realists."

"Shannon information... [which] he also called entropy or ... involves things (...Shannon ...messages) and probabilities for those things."

"and variety are central to my critique of 'it from bit'. For we can only talk meaningfully about a thing, including a , if it has distinguishing attributes. The way that they are knit together, as in the taste, shape and colour of an apple, defines the structure of the thing."

"Poincaré clearly posed these two problems and... seven years later... independently... Einstein and Poincaré... solved... the problem of defining definition at spatially separated points..."

"Einstein... revealed... extraordinary things... [H]is space and time seem to be knit together in a way you can't pull them apart... [S]omeone moving relative to me at any speed would... divide space and time in different ways... [T]he huge excitement about simultaneity meant that the... issue of duration has... been forgotten..."

"Wheeler argued that anything physical... derives its... existence... from discrete detector-elicited information-theoretic answers to yes or no quantum binary choices: bits."

"[T]hings, not information, are primary. ... 'bit' derives from 'it'."