18 Quotes by Jim Al-Khalili

As the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body.

... classical Arabic, being the language of the Qur'an, has not changed at all in fourteen centuries, making the writings of the early Islamic scholars as accessible today as they were then.

Let me first make two important assumptions, which I will discuss in more detail later on, but will now just say that they are both supported strongly by observational evidence: (1) that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in our universe, and (2) that space looks the same in all directions (the same density and distribution of galaxies).

In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain.

However far apart we pull two entagled particles, they remain ‘connected’ through their common wavelength function. Their fates remain intertwined until a measurement is made on one of them, collapsing their common wavelength function.

I find it more comfortable to say I’m an atheist, and for that I probably have someone like Dawkins to thank.

Perhaps death represents the severing of the living organism’s connection with the orderly quantum realm, leaving it powerless to resist the randomizing forces of thermodynamics.

I suspect that if aliens did come to Earth, it would be as researchers: biologists, anthropologists, linguists, keen to understand the peculiar workings of life on Earth, to meet humanity and learn of our art, music, culture, languages, philosophies and religions.

The trustworthiness of science comes not from certainty, but from its very openness about its uncertainty, always calling into question what we currently understand and being prepared to replace that knowledge with a deeper understanding if something better comes along. In other walks of life, this attitude might be regarded as fickle. But not in science. Scientific progress depends on scientists’ unwavering commitment to the qualities of honesty and doubt.