John D. Barrow Quotes

When we look out into space, we're looking back in time; the light from a galaxy a billion light-years away, for instance, will take a billion years to reach us. It's an amazing thing. The history is there for us to see. It's not mushed up like the geologic record of Earth. You can just see it exactly as it was.

Astronomers can look back in time. We can look at things as they used to be. We have an idea there was a Big Bang explosion 13.7 billion years ago. We have a story of how galaxies and stars were made. It's an amazing story.

In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection.

We are all made up of stars and all of us are billions of years old - that's what I believe, at least.

We've known for a long time that the universe is expanding. But about 15 years ago, my colleagues and I discovered that it is expanding faster and faster. That is, the universe is accelerating, and that was not expected, but it is now attributed to this mysterious stuff called dark energy which seems to make up about 70 percent of the universe.

We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive.

In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.

By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.

Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker. Although the universe doesn’t have an end, it had a beginning in the Big Bang. One might ask what is before that but the answer is that there is nowhere before the Big Bang just as there is nowhere south of the South Pole.

The universe will finally become a ball of radiation, becoming more and more rarified and passing into longer and longer wave-lengths. The longest waves of radiation are Hertzian waves of the kind used in broadcasting. About every 1500 million years this ball of radio waves will double in diameter; and it will go on expanding in geometrical progression for ever. Perhaps then I may describe the end of the physical world as-one stupendous broadcast.

I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, All all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the rim of the farther systems. Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, Outward and outward and forever outward.

I have tried to improve telescopes and practiced continually to see with them. These instruments have play'd me so many tricks that I have at last found them out in many of their humours.

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

We are still too close to the birth of the universe to be certain about its death.

I can feel the universe expanding and making things be further apart.

Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang.

One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!

I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the earth.

Science could predict that the universe must have had a beginning.

I return to problems i can't solve, not because i am an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see. Always a new beginning, a different end.

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.

The Hubbell space telescope, it's first year up after they fixed it, categorized and counted 500 billion galaxies in any one photograph field of view of dark matter. That's like grains of sand at the beach and you've just got a handful. It's massive amounts. I'm sure that of all of the galaxies, and I'm sure the universe is teeming with life.

If the universe is everything, and scientists say that the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?

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.

But I guess you don't see the planets when you're staring at the sun. You just get blinded.