Martin Rees Quotes

The question not many ask is: why are the laws of physics like they are?

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There's not much personal about the laws of physics.

I think I'm a little more daunted by when the machinery of the play is really huge.

If we move away from either/or thinking, and if we think, okay, every day of my life that I walk out of my house I am a combination of race, gender, class, sexual preference and religion or what have you, what gets foregrounded?

An automobile has about 10,000 moving parts, right? An airplane has two million, and it has to stay up in the air.

So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, like Newton's equations, are reversible.

People are storytelling creatures. We like stories that go somewhere, and therefore we like trends - because trends are things that either get better or get worse, so we can either rejoice or lament. But we mistakenly depict many things as trends moving in some direction. We take the "full house" of variation in a system and try to represent it as a single number, when in fact what we should be doing is studying the variation as it expands and contracts. If you look at the history of the variation in all its complexity, then you see there's no trend.

...the laws of physics, carefully constructed after thousands of years of experimentation, are nothing but the laws of harmony one can write down for strings and membranes. The laws of chemistry are the melodies that one can play on these strings. the universe is a symphony of strings. And the "Mind of God," which Einstein wrote eloquently about, is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace.

One can't prove that God doesn't exist. But science makes God unnecessary. The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a creator.

When things are baffling they usually don't unbaffle themselves.There's just, you know, a certain amount of baffling stuff that always, like, really baffles you, and I've found that it's best to accept bafflement whenever it comes along, and then move on.

For something that is static, fixed, dead, there can be a way or a definite path; but not for anything that is moving and living.

UN is made even more complex by the constant interplay of politics and bureaucracy and can certainly be bewildering for a novice.

Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.

To me Donnie Darko was about adolescence. And about how, as soon as you start to grow up and you sort of move out into the world, you realize everything is so trippy. That anything can be anything.

We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.

real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness to understand it.

Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.

We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.

What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.

And so began something that had not quite begun and would not soon end, with many people in many places moving off in directions and on missions which they all mistakenly thought they understood. That was just as well. The future was too fearful for contemplation, and beyond the expected, illusory finish lines were things fated by the decisions made this morning -- and, once decided, best unseen.

I could as easily bail out the Potomac River with a teaspoon as attend to all the details of the army.

If the laws of physics be for us, who can be against us?!

When you can dump a load of bricks on a corner lot, and let me watch them arrange themselves into a house - when you can empty a handful of springs and wheels and screws on my desk, and let me see them gather themselves together into a watch - it will be easier for me to believe that all these thousands of worlds could have been created, balanced, and set to moving in their separate orbits, all without any directing intelligence at all.

When you organize your work and look back at your entire production, it may feel like you're looking at a straight line, but in fact it's nothing like that. The work is very experimental and most of the time it develops like branches. I usually see a capillary, like a tree shape where there are... branches that sort of move because you're not tending to them.