216 Quotes About Cosmology

We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering.

The full cosmos consists of the physical stuff and consciousness. Take away consciousness and it's only dust; add consciousness and you get things, ideas, and time.

and when you love. you let it go. you put it down. you show your shoulders what to do with sky. and love is how. and love is when. and love is why.

A lack of “external” objective meaning may be unsatisfying to many—caught forever in endless cycles of relativism, a morass of unbearable responsibility for our own meaning and purpose, and perhaps ultimately for that of the universe. But it looks like choice is inescapable. And while choice can sometimes be oppressive and debilitating, it is also liberating and empowering[.]

The key shortcoming of the multiverse theory, however, is that it appeals to something outside the universe, namely, a vast ensemble of other universes and a set of meta-laws that exist for no reason (e.g., quantum mechanics, string theory). In this respect, the multiverse theory is little better than a direct theistic explanation where an appeal is made to an external creator/designer.

Indeed, we humans bear witness to the process of evolution in the very composition of our bodies. The calcium that gives solidity to our bones, the iron that lets our blood carry oxygen to our brains, the sodium and potassium that make possible the transmission of impulses along our nerves, all of these elements were formed inside a star that had its own birth and life and death, hurling its remains outward in a supernova explosion billions of years ago.

Yes, we humans are more than merely biological creatures. We appreciate beauty, we struggle with ethical conflicts, and we strive to make sense of our purpose in the universe, asking questions that science cannot answer. And yet, our sense of aesthetics, our moral sensibilities, and our search for meaning may themselves be intricately connected to the fabric of the cosmos.

Without knowing the full extent of the past, we have no idea whether the events we can see are typical of larger patterns or simply contingent products of particular eras, societies, or conjunctures. A statistician might say that the sample from which historians generalize is seriously skewed for the simple reason that we have no idea how or by how much it is skewed! If that is true, it makes all the larger generalizations of historians suspect.

Emergent properties can seem magical because they do not seem to arise from the component parts of a structure. [...] Thought [...] seems to be an emergent property of the organization of neurons in brains. [...] “Emergent properties” arise from a particular arrangement of components—they do not appear within the component parts themselves.