Steven Weinberg Quotes

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.

The Big Bang theory is the idea that if we go back early enough in the history of the universe - and we can do this, of course, by looking at starlight coming to us from billions of years ago - we will see a very hot and dense period where the universe was much smaller, denser, and hotter.

If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.

According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a slightly lower density of matter, maybe right where we're sitting right now, caused our galaxy to start collapsing around here.

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

A static universe isn't physically self-consistent.

On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much less the palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms. . . . On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea. Indeed it seems to me in the philosophical sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.

The universe is expanding, and every second that you're alive, the universe is bigger than it was a second before. There's nothing in front of us, exactly, other than the future, and there's no space for the size, the density of the universe to go. Because it's expanding at every point simultaneously.

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

God created two acts of folly. First, He created the Universe in a Big Bang. Second, He was negligent enough to leave behind evidence for this act, in the form of microwave radiation.

If the expansion of the space of the universe is uniform in all directions, an observer located in anyone of the galaxies will see all other galaxies running away from him at velocities proportional to their distances from the observer.

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

If that's how it all started, then we might as well face the fact that what's left out there is a great deal of shrapnel and a whole bunch of cinders (one of which is, fortunately, still hot enough and close enough to be good for tanning). Trying to find some sense and order in this mess may be as futile as trying to ... reconstruct the economy of Iowa from a bowl of popcorn. [On searching for evidence of the Big Bang.]

The Big Bang banged, and for some reason we’re here. And that’s astonishing. And that we can understand that, that’s the most astonishing.

Don't know if it's good or bad that a Google search on “Big Bang Theory” lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe

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 true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we say that science alone is capable of verification.

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.

The origin of galaxies is one of the fundamental questions of astronomy, and that's what I've been studying.

We already have a pretty good knowledge of the universe's mass-energy content, so if we can get a handle on its geometry, then we will be able to work out exactly what the fate of the universe will be.

The Kecks will allow us, like no other telescope in history, to view the evolving universe that gave us birth.

With COBE, we can see things before the lights came on. While we probably will not rewrite the book of cosmology with this mission, we will write another chapter.

The geometry, the content, and the fate of the universe are all intricately linked. If you know two, you can deduce the third.

Hubble has established for the first time that the distant universe looks different from the nearby universe.

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