Seth Shostak Quotes

Asking what was before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole. It is not a defined question and has no meaning.

Of course, we would love to know more about the exact moment of Big Bang, but interposing an outside intelligence does nothing to add to that knowledge, as we still know nothing about the creation of that intelligence.

Physicists explain creation by telling us that the universe began with the Big Bang, an intense energy singularity that continued expanding. But who created the singularity?

This fact immediately suggested a singular event - that at some time in the distant past the universe began expanding from an extremely small size. To many people this inference was loaded with overtones of a supernatural event - the creation, the beginning of the universe.

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.

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.

They say it all started out with a big bang. But, what I wonder is, was it a big bang or did it just seem big because there wasn't anything else drown it out at the time?

'What was there before the Big Bang?' That's a question that both kids and adults love to pose to anyone who seems sympathetic. After all, if the universe has only been around for roughly 14 billion years, isn't it legitimate to ask what was in existence before the mother-of-all-events cranked up the cosmos?

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

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.

There was no 'before' the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.

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

If we do get a quantum theory of spacetime, it should answer some of the deepest philosophical questions that we have, like what happened before the big bang?

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

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

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.

I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.

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.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?'

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.

For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

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

People have contemplated the origin and evolution of the universe since before the time of Aristotle. Very recently, the era of speculation has given way to a time of science.

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.

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.