Heinz R. Pagels Quotes

Nothing is never nothing. It's always something.

We had to understand things like why the top quark was so heavy and the electron is so light. The Higgs is a big, important step.

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

The possibilities that are suggested in quantum physics tell us that everything that we're looking at may not be in fact there, so the underlying nature of being is weird.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

All things in the world come from being. And being comes from non-being.

Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

If there ever was a time when absolutely nothing existed, all there could possibly be now is nothing.

There exists a world. In terms of probability this borders on the impossible. It would have been far more likely if, by chance, there was nothing at all. Then, at least, no one would have began asking why there was nothing.

Rocks are space, and space is illusion.

Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.

Being is born of not being.

Void is when there is absolutely nothing there and the nothing is natural, a complete vacuum. But empty - with empty, you are aware of what's supposed to be there. Empty means something is missing.

According to quantum field theory, fields alone are real. They are the substance of the universe and not 'matter'. Matter is simply the momentary manifestation of interacting fields which, intangible and insubstantial as they are, are the only real things in the universe.

A vacuum can only exist, I imagine, by the things which enclose it.

A thing that has no value does not exist.

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.

All things of the world are born of being; being is born of nonbeing.

If there is existence, there must be non-existence. And if there was a time when nothing existed, there must have been a time before that - when even nothing did not exist. Suddenly, when nothing came into existence, could one really say whether it belonged to the category of existence or non-existence?

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.

Nothingness is the basis of everything.