Carl Sagan Quotes

Scientists estimate the universe unfolded from its state of infinite destiny* - a moment commonly referred to as "the big bang" - approximately 1.3-2 x 10^10 years ago. *Typo: "destiny" should read "density.

A hydrogen bomb, for me, was puny compared to the Big Bang - the creation of the universe. That's what I really wanted to work on - the nature of the universe itself, and that's what I do for a living.

They say the Universe started with a big bang. I hope everybody stood well back.

The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over contradictions in the big bang theory, to build up an idea which has become ever more complex and cumbersome.

The Big Bang theory says nothing about what banged, why it banged, or what happened before it banged.

The History Of The Universe In Three Words CHAPTER ONE Bang! CHAPTER TWO sssss CHAPTER THREE crunch. THE END

When we try to look farther into the universe we come to what appears to be the end of space but actually it's the beginning of time.

Science could predict that the universe must have had a beginning.

If the universe is everything, and scientists say that the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?

We people of the Earth exist because our potential was there in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, as the universe exploded into being.

They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.

I think it's amazing that the entire community of astronomy has done what it's done. We've been able to deduce the nature of time and space and where we all came from. It's the most amazing detective story in history.

Earlier theories ... were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past. [Coining the "big bang" expression.]

I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaître first proposed this [Big Bang] theory. ... There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. .... It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

I have never thought that you could obtain the extremely clumpy, heterogeneous universe we have today, strongly affected by plasma processes, from the smooth, homogeneous one of the Big Bang, dominated by gravitation.

The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it.

In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe

I have a much easier time imagining how we would understand the big bang, even though we can't do it yet, than I can imagine understanding consciousness.

Astronomers say the universe is finite, which is a comforting thought for those people who can't remember where they leave things.

There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing.

Astronomers still can't decide what the shape of our universe is. Is it closed and finite, which is to say, is there a countable tally of all the galaxies that exist, even beyond the ones we can see? Or is it infinite? The latter possibility is still on the table.

And what we know, or think we know, about the universe of space and time is changing very quickly.

To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.

It was only about sixty years ago that the expansion of the universe was first observed.

From a scientific point of view, our mission is to seek answers to the fundamental questions about the universe. Many are open - we don't know about dark matter, which accounts for a quarter of the universe's matter, nor do we know why there's antimatter.