97 Quotes About Astrophysics

The answer to the question - why does the universe exist? - is Love. Love is the purpose, there is no purpose but Love. You see, the universe is not the universe, the Universe is Self. Self experiences itself as itself but perceives itself as diversified To Love and Be Loved in return. All that is here is Self. All this for Love. Love is Law.

Forget about the E=mc2 equation. Why? It's an abstraction. Energy (E) is Oneself. Mass (M) is Oneself. Speed of Light (c2) is Oneself. In fact, everything is Oneself. Oneself upholds itself. "E=I"? Yes, but it remains an abstraction for all there is, is "I". The equation is simply "I". Or, to make it needlessly complicated: "I=I". Oneself is I. Oneself is reality; everything else including energy is an abstraction of sorts.

And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We’re tiny. We don’t matter. We’re here for a second and then gone the next. We’re a sneeze in the life of the universe.

Far from disproving the existence of God, astronomers may be finding more circumstantial evidence that God exists.

When I worked in astronomy, I routinely observed young college and university students working with liquid nitrogen and breathing nitrogen gas as they discharged it into the indoor environment at high altitude.

There were no witnesses to what was about to happen. 'Happen' didn't yet exist. Reality was timeless. Space also didn't exist. The distance between two points was immeasurable. The points themselves could be anywhere, hovering and bouncing. Infinity tangled into itself. There was no here and now. Only Being.

Since only a narrow range of the allowed values for, say, the fine structure constant will permit observers to exist in the Universe, we must find ourselves in the narrow range of possibilities which permit them, no matter how improbable they are. We must ask for the conditional probability of observing constants to take particular ranges, given that other features of the Universe, like its age, satisfy necessary conditions for life.

All high mathematics serves to do is to beget higher mathematics.

But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.