Cosmologists

"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..."

"Consider the example of a time capsule... geologists... establish[ed] detailed correlations between the structure of fossils and rocks... They concluded... an immense , vastly longer than the bible-deduced... 6000 years. They explained... a long process... in accordance with... laws of nature. They discovered ... and... present evidence for it extends today... to all branches of science, especially cosmology and genetics."

"[I]n 1898... Henri Poincaré wrote... "On the Measure of Time" and he said... there are two fundamental problems to do with time. One... with the definition of duration... What does it mean to say that a second today is the same... [H]e said there's another issue... [not] so widely recognized. ...[H]ow do you define simultaneity at spatially separated points?"

"There is nothing in between... [NOWs]. Each are separate snapshots. ...These [real photographs] ...are not changed by ...reversing the order ...It may be convenient for ...for the way we think about the world and for ordering our experiences, to suppose that these come in a certain order; but ...the picture is not changed... the snapshot is... self-contained."

"[W]hat we call yesterday is self-contained and has its experience of being yesterday, and today has memories of yesterday; and therefor I say that it's later... but each is completely self-contained, and there's no reason why you should put one... here, and another one there..."

"[A NOW] has no duration. ...[I]t's absolutely instantaneous. There is no thickness to it. Nothing changes. ...So these s, in one sense, are truly eternal, because they never change, and on the other hand, because nothing changes, they are experienced as a flash. ...[It]'s a nice contradiction... [T]he eternal is experienced as a flash, because nothing changes."

"How do you define duration? What does it mean to say that a second today is the same as a second tomorrow? Newton in his... Principia... 1687, gave a... definition of absolute time, which he says flows uniformly without relation to anything external... [H]e says... if nothing... were to happen in the universe... if everything froze... time would still pass uniformly. ...[S]o ...time exists before anything else..."

"[I]f you imagine two NOWs... there will be some difference between them, and if you work out some weighted average of all of that difference... you can call that... the amount of time between them. ...[T]his has nothing to do with some substance... It's just difference between those two things. ...[T]his is the quantity that is... being measured by my watch..."

"[T]his is very different from the Newtonian picture where Newton presupposes there's a river of time flowing, that is there before anything is put into it. ...[T]he things are there first, and the time is deduced from it afterwards."

"[T]he work that I did with... has shown... time that is measured by clocks is... an average of all the changes in the universe."

"[[Time|[T]ime]] is really an illusion... and motion too... [T]hey are not really there in the external world. They are put into the world by us, in the way we interpret it, and by our brains..."

"If you could freeze the camera now and... show me as I am, and all the atoms... and... the whole universe... like a snapshot, the would be... a NOW."

"(quote at 14:08 of 1:54:14)"

"[[wikt:stability#Noun|[S]tability]] of solids, the fossils and rocks... exist... essentially unchanged. ...[T]he configuration carries intrinsic semantic information... different intelligent beings can in principle deduce the law or process.. Support for this is is the independent discovery of evolution by natural selection by Wallis and Darwin."

"Thus, even now, three and a half centuries after Galileo... it is still remarkably difficult to say categorically whether the earth moves..."

"In fact, I once had a discussion with a distinguished astrophysicist who said to me, well, this is what Mach said, and this is what Mach did and what he required. And I said to him, now excuse me, if you don't mind me saying, what you've just told me is your interpretation of Dennis Sciama's interpretation of Einstein's interpretation of Mach. And he said you're quite right. I’ve never read a word of Mach."

"If you could look microscopically... at... my molecules... you would not recognize me from one second to another. In my body, every second, one hundred million million million... hemoglobin molecules... is destroyed, and the same number is created. So... at each split second, I'm really a very different person."

"Richard Feynman... said, "Time is what happens when nothing else does." ...[T]hat's ...not the right way to think about time."

"Shannon-type message sources could not exist if the universe were not subject to laws of nature and far from ."

"Information theory would never have got off the ground if structured things—configurations—did not exist."

"[W]e must distinguish three kinds of information: [1] Shannon’s information, the uncertainty as to which message will be selected from a source; [2] factual information, the content of such a message; and [3] intrinsic semantic information, which distinguishes a random message, or configuration, from one that carries meaning and to some extent explains its... genesis. All... have... underpinning in things."

"[T]ime is not an illusion, but the flow of time is. So is change. In spacetime, the future exists and the past doesn't disappear. When we combine Einstein's classical spacetime with quantum mechanics, we get quantum parallel universes... This means there are many pasts and futures that are all real—but this in no way diminishes the unchanging mathematical nature of the full physical reality. ...[A]lthough this idea of an unchanging reality is venerable and dates back to Einstein, it remains controversial... with scientists I greatly respect expressing a spectrum of views. ...Julian Barbour argues in his book The End of Time not only that change is illusory, but that one can even describe physical reality without introducing the time concept at all."

"Probabilities without things are... nothings."

"If we are to speak about ontology, as opposed to efficient coding in communication channels, the most important symbol in (1) is not p for probability but i for the thing, or configuration, that has the probability p_i."

"A more serene vision of the end comes from Julian Barbour, a philosopher who has collaborated with cosmologists in building a peculiar picture of reality that he calls Platonia. In Platonia, all possible configurations of matter exist. There is no passage of time, merely a set of unconnected instants, or "nows". We experience the illusion of time because many of these nows are arranged as if they had evolved through time. Barbour thinks that the possibilities in Platonia should be infinite, and so the comforting illusion of time should be infinite too."

"[A]t least naively time has completely disappeared from the formalism. This has led to what is called the " in ", which is how to either A) find an interpretation of the theory that restores a role for time or B) provide an interpretation according to which time is not part of a fundamental description of the world, but only reappears in an appropriate classical limit. ...The most well formulated attempt of type B), which is that of Barbour, may very well be logically consistent. But it forces one to swallow quite a radical point of view about the relationship between time and our experience."

"Leon and I used to tease each other, because he's an experimentalist and I'm a theorist. And experimentalists are jealous of theorists, because theorists are smarter."

"In the past few years the search for a consistent quantum theory of gravity and the quest for a unification of gravity with other forces have led to a great deal of interest in theories with extra spatial dimensions. These extra spatial dimensions are unseen because they are compact and small, presumably with typical dimensions of the Planck length, lPl = 1.616 × 10-33 cm. If the “internal” dimensions are static and small compared to the large “external” dimensions the only role they would play in the dynamics of the expansion of the Universe is in determining the structure of the physical laws. However, if the big bang is extrapolated back to the Planck time, then the characteristic size of both internal and external dimensions were the same, and the internal dimensions may have had a more direct role in the dynamics of the evolution of the Universe."

"We live in a hot, expanding Universe. We also live in a Universe that on 'large' scales is homogeneous, the same at every point, and isotropic, the same in every direction. There is an ample (and growing) body of evidence for homogeneity and isotropy. The isotropy and homogeneity of the Universe is the most fundamental principle in modern cosmology. In fact, it is called the Cosmological Principle."

"The precision cosmological measurements have lead to the latest cosmological model, usually called the standard cosmological model, or ΛCDM, where Λ indicates Einstein’s cosmological constant (or more generally, dark energy), and CDM stands for cold dark matter. ... The most remarkable feature of the standard cosmological model is that it seems capable of accounting for all cosmological observations; i.e., it seems to work!"

"Till now consciousness, reason and morality were localised on planet Earth; by resurrecting all the generations who have lived on this Earth, consciousness will be disseminated to all the worlds of the Universe. Resurrection is the transformation of the Universe from that chaos towards which it is moving into cosmos — into the greatness of incorruptibility and indestructibility."

"If the question, 'What has art become?', is synonymous with 'What are the reasons for the unbrotherliness between people and for the rift in the relations between nature and people?' then the question, 'What should art be?' is the same as the problem of establishing brotherly unity in order to transform the blind force of nature into a force guided by the reasoning powers of all the resurrected generations. In other words, what we are talking about is universal resurrection, since it is this that represents the complete restoration of kinship and that will provide art with the appropriate course to follow, and show it its goal. Transforming all the worlds into worlds guided by the reasoning powers of resurrected generations will constitute a complete resolution of the Copernican question and is at the same time identical to the primeval view – that is, the patrification of the heavens (the turning of the heavens into the fathers' abode), or catasterisation (the transferral of the fathers' souls to the stars) – which also finds its expression in church sculpture and painting. For children this primeval view is the most straightforward, an explanation and resolution of the Copernican question. To turn all the worlds into worlds guided by the reasoning powers of resurrected generations is also the most important goal of art."

"Neither the universal return to life, universal resurrection, nor even death itself, have hitherto been the subject of knowledge or well founded judgement. For there would have been full, detailed investigations into the reasons and conditions that have given rise to the phenomenon. For most people, death appears to be an absolute, inevitable phenomenon; but just how unfounded is this conclusion is obvious from the fact that it is considered acceptable to talk about the opposite of death, about immortality, and even about resurrection; and it is talked about as a possibility, in circumstances where all sorts of sins prevail among people, and all sorts of calamities and evils, arising from the folly of nature. But if the coexistence of the one with the other is unthinkable, since the one excludes the other, then can one talk about the possibility of death where there is moral and physical sinlessness, where nature shows such a benign attitude both within and outside man, of the sort that is deemed possible when man's knowledge and control of nature are complete?"

"To solve the question, 'What should art be?' will be to solve the contradiction between rational being and the blind force of nature, to fathom the most abnormal relationship between man and nature, to solve the question of the subordination of rational being to blind force. Will nature always remain blind and, in its blindness, a destructive force, while art remains the creation of nothing but dead imitations? Will this division be temporary, or will it last for ever? Perfection lies in the unity of nature and art."

"Nature, within man, was conscious of the evil of death, of its own imperfection. So the rebellion of the living (the vertical posture) and the resurrection of the dead, in the form of tombstones, are natural acts for a feeling, rational being. It was when the living (who had suffered a loss) rebelled and turned to heaven, and when the dead were resurrected in the form of tombstones, that art began. Prayer was the beginning of art. Prayer and the (vertical) prayer posture constituted the first acts of art; this was theo-anthropurgic art, which consisted of God creating man through man himself. For man is not only a product of nature but also a creation and concern of art. The last act of divine creation was the first act of human art, for man's purpose is to be a free being and consequently self-created, since only a self-created being can be free. In this act of self-creation – that is, in rebelling and turning towards heaven – man discovers God and God reveals himself to man; or, more precisely, on discovering the God of the fathers, the being who has made the discovery becomes not just a man, but a son of man. And only in the abstract sense, forgetting the loss, is it possible to say that the being which has discovered God has become man."

"To abdicate the task of resuscitation leaves the human race only the choice between constitutional debating and despotism. To retain Easter as a feast only and the liturgy as a church service, an expression of an as yet incomplete love for the fathers which does not entail actual resuscitation, or, by abdicating completely brotherhood and filial love, to indulge on the graves of the fathers in bestial orgies followed by savage mutual extermination; to retain the art of dead likenesses or to annihilate any true likenesses; not merely to censure parents for giving life to their offspring without their consent, but to curse one's procreators; to retain academic class science or, rejecting all knowledge, to descend into the hopeless darkness of obscurantism; to remain in the perennial city of brides and bridegrooms, surrounded by toys and trifles, indulging in pleasures and entertainments, or else, rejecting not only fathers and forebears but even progeny, sons (artificially childless marriages), in order to indulge in boundless lechery; to retain will as either lust or mortification of the flesh; to retain sensuousness or to be satisfied by mere grieving for the dead or — the last and greatest evil — to plunge into nirvana, the product of total evil negation — such are the fruits of abdicating the task of resuscitation."

"Negative virginity is not yet a celestial virtue; chastity is not yet active wisdom; not to beget is not yet liberation from death — resurrection. It is essential that unconscious procreation be replaced by the task of resuscitation."

"When external regulation has been achieved, the inner psychophysiological force will tilt the balance away from sexual drive and lust towards love for the parents, and will even replace them, thus transforming the force of procreation into one of re-creation, the lethal into a vivifying force; in other words, childbirth will be replaced by patrification, in fulfilment of the will of the God of the fathers."

"[A]utocracy is the task of the sons which becomes, with the full union of those sons, the return of life to the dust of the fathers – that is to say, struggle not against members of our own species but against the dark force which procreates and destroys life."

"[T]he present generation is too frightened by the magnitude of time and space revealed by geology and astronomy, and has been so conditioned by four centuries of nature worship that it feels only its insignificance, and fears even to contemplate such an endeavour as weather control."

"[M]an has always felt and recognised the imperfection of nature, and has never accepted it as law. He broke this law when he took his first step, because his vertical posture challenged gravity, the most universal law of nature. This upright position is not natural to man – it is supranatural – and he has achieved it artificially, through effort (by swaddling and other methods of adaptation). One cannot say of man that he is the creation of nature. On the contrary, he is the result of under-creation, of deprivation, of a natural pauperism which is shared by rich and poor alike; he is a proletarian, a pariah among living creatures. Yet in this lay the origin of his future greatness; deprived of natural cover and means of defence, he had to create all this himself by his own labour. Therefore man values only that which has been created by working, or which expands the area of application of work; it is not difficult to guess that the culmination of this forward movement must be that everything on which human life depends will ultimately be achieved through work, so that humans will depend solely on their labour. Consequently the entire world, the meteorological, telluric and cosmic processes, will be the responsibility of man, and nature will be his work. Man is driven towards this goal by hunger, disease and every other calamity, so that whenever he delays in expanding the area of work, the scope for disasters expands. Thus nature punishes man by death for his ignorance and sloth, and drives him to ever-expanding labour."

"Before talking about resurrection one must state firmly that, just as death is impossible where there exist sinlessness and knowledge that can control the forces of nature, so resurrection is impossible where there exist sin, ignorance and other misfortunes resulting from man's dependence on the blind forces of nature."

"Only when all men come to participate in knowledge will pure science, which perceives nature as a whole in which the sentient is sacrificed to the insensate, cease to be indifferent to this distorted attitude of the conscious being to the unconscious force."

"To admit an absence of causality for the unbrotherly state leads not to peace and brotherhood but merely to playing at peace, to a comedy of reconciliation which creates a pseudo-peace, a false peace which is worse than open hostility because the latter poses a question whereas the former prolongs enmity by concealing it."

"The problem of the force which brings the two sexes to unite and give birth to a third being is also a problem of death."

"[T]he rural problem is (1) loss of kinship between men who, through ignorance, forget their relatedness, and (2) the hostility of nature to humans, which is felt most acutely if not exclusively in villages, where people confront the blind force directly; whereas townsfolk, being remote from nature, may think that man lives at one with nature."

"The principle of disunion and inactivity informs all three Critiques. The philosophy of art which he embodies in his Critique of Judgement does not teach how to create, but only how to judge the aesthetic aspects of works of art and of nature. It is a philosophy for art critics, not for artists and poets. In the Critique of Judgement, nature is regarded not as an object to be acted upon and transformed from a blind force into one governed by reason, but merely as an object of contemplation to be judged on its aesthetic merits; not from the point of view of morality, which would recognise it as destructive and death-bearing..."

"A truly moral being does not need compulsion and repeated orders to perceive what his duty is – he assigns to himself his task and prescribes what must be done for those from whom he has become separated, because separation (whether voluntary or not) cannot be irreversible. Indeed, it would be criminal to repudiate those from whom one descends and to forget about their welfare. For the learned to behave thus would be to reject their own welfare, to remain prodigal sons for ever and be permanent hirelings and servants of urban caprice. This would lead them to disregard completely the needs of rural communities, that is, real needs, because the needs of such communities, unspoilt by city influences, are limited to those essentials that ensure survival in the face of hunger and illness, which not only destroy life but also displace kinship relations and replace love by enmity and hostility."

"Internal discord reflects external disunion, that is, the separation of the learned and intellectual classes from the people. Intelligence without feeling becomes the knowledge of evil without any desire to root it out, and a knowledge of good without any wish to promote it. It is an admission of lack of kinship and not a plan to re-establish kinship bonds. The consequence of indifference is oblivion for the fathers and discord among the sons. The causes of lack of kinship extend to nature as a whole, for it is a blind force uncontrolled by reason."