Billy Graham Quotes

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.

It seemed like my favourite kind of job - a wonderful chance to ask something absolutely fundamental: the fate of the Universe and whether the Universe was infinite or not.

There are lots of ideas which extend the Copernican principle one step further. We went from the solar system to the galaxy to zillions of galaxies and now to realising even that isn't all there is.

The predominant theory of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang.

I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.

In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

First of all, the Big Bang wasn't very big. Second of all, there was no bang. Third, Big Bang Theory doesn't tell you what banged, when it banged, how it banged. It just said it did bang. So the Big Bang theory in some sense is a total misnomer.

There may have been many big bangs, one of which created our universe. The other bangs created other universes.

It may be that we live in an endless universe, both in space and in time. And there've been Bangs in the past, and there will be Bangs in the future.

The success of ordinary cosmology speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

We have never observed infinity in nature. Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that's where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it's instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.

There may be many Big Bangs that happened at various and far-flung locations, each creating its own swelling, spatial expanse, each creating a universe - our universe being the result of only one of those Big Bangs.

Five centuries ago, Copernicus upset humanity's applecart with the news that the Earth is not the center of the cosmos. It could be that, before you've paid off your house, we'll learn that the universe is not the center of the universe, either!

One of the great challenges of modern cosmology is to discover what the geometry of the universe really is.

The Planck satellite may detect the imprint of the gravitational waves predicted by inflation. This would be quantum gravity written across the sky.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.

Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.

Radio Astronomy has added greatly to our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the universe. The cosmic microwave background radiation, considered a relic of the explosion at the beginning of the universe some 18 billion years ago, is one of the most powerful aids in determining these features of the universe.

Gravitational waves, because they are so imperturbable - they go through everything - they will tell you the most information you can get about the earliest instants that go on in the universe.

Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?

We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. That's a challenge for 21st-century science.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

I'm baffled all the time. We don't know what's driving 96% of the universe. Everybody you know and love and heard of and think about and see in the night sky through a telescope: four percent of the universe.