Cosmology

"Similar to a person who is not attached to external pleasures but enjoys happiness in the Atman (soul), the person who perceives Brahman in everything feels everlasting joy."

"Guth... wanted to hear... Alex Vilenkin... describe a new theory of the origin of the universe, of how it could have emerged from nothing. Vilenkin's version of the infant universe... was a kind of metaphysical mole. ...a bubble of universe, space-time, had "tunneled" into a Wheeleresque superspace of possible space-times and then tunneled again into "real" space and time. ...But from where had the universe tunneled into this realm..? In Vilenkin's words, "from nothing." ...Vilenkin's tiny bubble... inflated and went through the standard expansion and evolution of the big bang. ...he, Guth, and Sidney Coleman sat and had a conversation that Lewis Carroll might have enjoyed, about nothing. ..."Nothing," answered Vilenkin... "is no time, no space." ..."There is an epoch without time," [Coleman] said finally as the shadows lengthened. "It is an eternity. So we make a quantum leap from eternity into time." Then, as good physicists did, they repaired to a Chinese restaurant."

"Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with."

"I experience the same sense of absurdity when I listen to a cosmologist like Stephen Hawking telling us that the universe began with a big bang fifteen billion years ago, and that physics will shortly create a 'theory of everything' that will answer every possible question about our universe; this entails the corollary that God is an unnecessary hypothesis. Then I think of the day when I suddenly realized that I did not know where space ended, and it becomes obvious that Hawking is also burying his head in the sand. God may be an unnecessary hypothesis for all I know, and I do not have the least objection to Hawking dispensing with him, but until we can understand why there is existence rather than nonexistence, then we simply have no right to make such statements. It is unscientific. The same applies to the biologist Richard Dawkins, with his belief that strict Darwinism can explain everything, and that life is an accidental product of matter. I feel that he is trying to answer the ultimate question by pretending it does not exist."

"Cosmology is peculiar among the sciences for it is both the oldest and the youngest. From the dawn of civilization man has speculated about the nature of the starry heavens and the origin of the world, but only in the present century has physical cosmology split away from general philosophy to become an independent discipline."

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

"Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. It is always hard to realize that these numbers and equations we play with at our desks have something to do with the real world. ...The most important thing accomplished by the three-degree radiation background in 1965 was to force us to take seriously the idea that there was an early universe."

"Cosmologists have plenty of ego — how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations were just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it.Let there be cosmology."

"The primary challenge of this cosmological transformation of consciousness is the awareness that each being in the universe is an origin of the universe. "The center of the cosmos" refers to that place where the great birth of the universe happened at the beginning of time, but it also refers to the upwelling of the universe as river, as star, as raven, as you, the universe surging into existence anew. The consciousness that learns it is at the origin point of the universe is itself an origin of the universe. The awareness that bubbles up each moment that we identify as ourselves is rooted in the originating activity of the universe. We are all of us arising together at the center of the cosmos."

"Hindu cosmology... gives a time-scale for the earth and the universe which is consonant with that of modern scientific cosmology."

"If the general picture, however, of a Big Bang followed by an expanding Universe is correct, what happened before that? Was the Universe devoid of all matter and then the matter suddenly somehow created? How did that happen? In many cultures, the customary answer is that a God or Gods created the Universe out of nothing. But if we wish to pursue this question courageously, we must of course ask the next question: where did God come from? If we decide that this is an unanswerable question, why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the Universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God always existed, why not save a step, and conclude that the Universe always existed? That there's no need for a creation, it was always here. These are not easy questions. Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries, questions that were once treated only in religion and myth."

"We should, of course, expect that any universe which expands without limit will approach the empty de Sitter case, and that its ultimate fate is a state in which each physical unit—perhaps each nebula or intimate group of nebulae—is the only thing which exists within its own observable universe."

"Today’s cosmology faces problems both early and late, models of the early Universe that cannot be tested, and data indicating that the late Universe accelerates. These problems have been previously been explained by a repulsive “inflation” and another repulsive “dark” energy. Recent studies cast doubt upon these speculations. A cosmology described by simple equations may bring light to this darkness."

"Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical — and maybe even experimental — grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we've most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own."

"Simple rules can have complex consequences. This simple rule has such a wealth of implications that it is worth examining in detail. It is the far from self-evident guiding principle of reductionism and of most modern investigations into cosmic complexity. Reductionism will not be truly successful until physicists and cosmologists demonstrate that the large-scale phenomena of the world arise from fundamental physics alone. This lofty goal is still out of reach. There is uncertainty not only in how physics generates the structures of our world but also in what the truly fundamental rules of physics are."

"If all the properties of the universe, such as charge and momentum, balanced out, as Guth, who was a fan as well as a scholar of theories of nothing, pointed out to me, no laws of physics forbade the spontaneous appearance of the universe—or a quantum piece of one. ...Nothing, some physicist implied, might be the ultimate symmetry, everywhere, everywhen the same... Mostly we knew what nothing was not. It was not anything. But it was the possibility of everything. And perhaps such beauty, nothing, was unstable. And the result was every once in an eternity it twitched. ...The first soul brave enough to suggest the universe was indeed nothing was Ed Tryon... [who] blurted it out during a seminar with Sciama, "Suppose the universe is just a quantum fluctuation." Everybody laughed. ... Tryon eventually published these notions in Nature in 1975 and was mostly ignored. Peebles and Dicke had mentioned his work in their famous 1979 paper about enigmas and conundrums."

"Cosmological observations have entered the era of precision, unlocking its tremendous power as a particle physics laboratory, aiding our search for physics beyond the Standard Model. The great power of cosmology comes from its great range of possibility. Processes far beyond the reach of terrestrial apparatus are possible as the universe scans through orders of magnitude of energy throughout its evolution. On the flip side, the great range of possibility also implies a tremendous difficulty to extract information: without knowing precisely what we are looking for, the cosmological data itself provides little hint of what the underlying might be."

"Dirac spent the autumn term of 1931 at Princeton University, where was a professor. During his stay they got to know each other well. Most likely they discussed cosmology, a science which at the time was experiencing dramatic changes."

"Your accepted conceptions of cosmogony — whether from the theological or scientific standpoints —do not enable you to solve a single anthropological or even ethnical problem and they stand in your way whenever you attempt to solve the problem of the races on this planet. When a man begins to talk about creation and the origin of man, he is butting against the facts incessantly. Go on saying, Our planet and man were created — and you will be fighting against hard facts for ever, analyzing and losing time over trifling details—unable to even grasp the whole. But once admit that our planet and ourselves are no more creations than the ice-berg now before me (in our K.H.'s home) but that both planets and man are—states for a given time; that their present appearance —g eological and anthropological — is transitory and but a condition concomitant of that stage of evolution at which they have arrived in the descending cycle — and all will become plain. You will easily understand what is meant by the one and only element or principle in the universe and that androgynous; the seven-headed serpent Ananda of Vishnu, the Nag around Buddha, the great dragon eternity biting with its active head, its passive tail, from the emanations of which spring worlds, beings and things. You will comprehend the reason why the first philosopher proclaimed all — maya..."

"Take a look at George Gamow, who is now recognized as one of the great cosmologists of the last hundred years. I speculate that he probably didn't win the Nobel Prize because people could not take him seriously. He wrote children's books. His colleagues have publicly stated his writing children's books on science had an adverse effect on his scientific reputation, and people could not take him seriously when he and his colleagues proposed that there should be a cosmic background radiation, which we now know to be one of the greatest discoveries of 20th-century physics."

"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."

"Why are the heavens not filled with light? Why is the universe plunged into darkness?"

"While in the first quarter of this century physicists and cosmologists were forced to revise the basic notions that govern the natural sciences, in the last quarter of this century biologists will force a revision of the basic notions that govern science itself. After that “first revolution” it was clear that the classical concept of an “ultimate science”, that is an objective description of the world in which there are no subjects (a “subjectless universe”), contains contradictions."

"The fine-tuning of the universe, about which cosmologists make such a to-do, is both complex and specified and readily yields design. So too, Michael Behe's irreducibly complex biochemical systems readily yield design. The complexity-specification criterion demonstrates that design pervades cosmology and biology. Moreover, it is a transcendent design, not reducible to the physical world. Indeed, no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life."

"[T]wo rather separate research agendas emerged... [1] investigations of what were to become the three classical tests, envisaged by Einstein as early as 1907. ...[2] investigations of cosmological issues, whose only observational basis was the observations. Of the classical tests, both the bending of light and the remained controversial matters until the renaissance... This research agenda involved a small number of astronomers... not necessarily focused on general relativity. The cosmological research involved a separate group, consisting mostly of mathematicians like Howard Robertson and and astronomers with strong mathematical training such as Eddington, Lemaître, George McVittie, and William McCrea. They were mainly interested in how to apply general relativity to cosmological problems, which involved not only understanding cosmic dynamics but also solving the intricate problem of interpreting cosmological solutions to the Einstein equations, in particular separating time (which determined the evolution of the universe) from space (to which simplified assumptions concerning the structure of the universe, such as homogeneity and , were to be applied)."

"In the beginning, the establishment of first ties between general relativity and astronomy was a tedious exercise involving only a small number of bridge builders, most notably Freundlich, , Willem de Sitter, Arthur Eddington, , and Edwin Hubble."

"Every time we get slapped down, we can say, Thank you Mother Nature, because it means we're about to learn something important."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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.”"

"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."

"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?"

"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."

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

"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 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."

"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."