Richard Dawkins Quotes

The Universe in a Nutshell

It’s hard to build models of inflation that don't lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [the idea of a] multiverse seriously.

The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.

'Eternal inflation,' as it's called - the endless generation of new universes - may be a hyper-cosmic imperative. It seems that it must happen.

I flipped back through the pad of paper while I thought about what Stephen Hawking would do next.

Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned.

If I have questions about the universe on my mind when I go to bed, I can't turn off. I dream equations all night.

When I was in high school, I was really into string theory and superstring theory and read 'Scientific American.' It's fascinating.

I've always really been into science, and in the last five years I've gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.

We'll have four different gravitational wave windows open within the next 20 years, and each of them will see something different. We'll be probing the birth of the universe with this. The so-called 'inflationary era' of the universe. We'll be probing the birth of the fundamental forces and how they came into being.

What I do for living, working on something called string theory which we think may answer the fundamental question: Are there other universes? Can you go through a black hole? Can you warp the fabric of space and time and meet your mother before you were born? These are all questions that in principle string theory should be able to answer.

Physics as we know it will be over in six months.

Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

To become a theoretical physicist ... you need to have a passionate love affair with the universe.

Physics has entered a remarkable era. Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction are now entering our theoretical — and maybe even experimental — grasp. Brand-new theoretical discoveries about extra dimensions have irreversibly changed how particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists now think about the world. The sheer number and pace of discoveries tells us that we've most likely only scratched the surface of the wondrous possibilities that lie in store. Ideas have taken on a life of their own.

As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees’s dog.

We get the exciting result that the total energy of the universe is zero. Why this should be so is one of the great mysteries - and therefore one of the important questions of physics. After all, what would be the use of studying physics if the mysteries were not the most important things to investigate?

Is the universe 'elegant,' as Brian Greene tells us? Not as far as I can tell, not the usual laws of particle physics, anyway. I think I might find the universal principles of String Theory most elegant - if I only knew what they were.

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.

As scientists, we track down all promising leads, and there's reason to suspect that our universe may be one of many - a single bubble in a huge bubble bath of other universes.

To the extent that we even understand string theory, it may imply a massive number of possible different universes with different laws of physics in each universe, and there may be no way of distinguishing between them or saying why the laws of physics are the way they are. And if I can predict anything, then I haven't explained anything.

The idea that there could be other universes out there is really one that stretches the mind in a great way.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.