Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we're the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine.

Ancient stars in their death throes spat out atoms like iron which this universe had never known. ... Now the iron of old nova coughings vivifies the redness of our blood.

We can trace the elements. They were forged in the centers of high-mass stars that went unstable at the ends of their lives, they exploded, scattered their enriched contents across the galaxy, sprinkled into gas clouds that then collapsed and formed stars and planets and life.

Even your chin is made up of exploded stars.

Big Bang gave us hydrogen and helium. We couldn't make people out of hydrogen and helium. So we're made out of exploding stars.

The helium which we handle must have been put together at some time and some place. We do not argue with the critic who urges that the stars are not hot enough for this process; we tell him to go and find a hotter place.

Iron is the final peal of a star’s natural life.

Every carbon atom in every living thing on the planet was produced in the heart of a dying star.

Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe.

We are 'nuclear waste' from the fuel that makes stars shine; indeed, each of us contains atoms whose provenance can be traced back to thousands of different stars spread through our Milky Way.

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

The objects that are of moderate energy, like our sun or most of the stars that we see in the night sky with the naked eye, are objects in which relatively moderate energy processes are taking place.

After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life.

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.

I dreamt of being an astronomer; I had a series of 'How and Why' books on the planets and the stars. At that stage, there were only 14 galaxies; now there are multiverses, dark matter, the nano-microscopic world of the interior of atomic structure.

I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that make up ninety-nine per cent of our living substance were cooked in the deep interiors of earlier generations of dying stars. Gathered up from the ends of the universe, over billions of years, eventually they came to form, in part, the substance of our sun, its planets, and ourselves. Three billion years ago, life arose upon the earth. It is the only life in the solar system.

Scientists estimate the universe unfolded from its state of infinite destiny* - a moment commonly referred to as "the big bang" - approximately 1.3-2 x 10^10 years ago. *Typo: "destiny" should read "density.

Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded.

Stars have their moments then they die.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.

Many billions of years will elapse before the smallest, youngest stars complete their nuclear burning and shrink into white dwarfs. But with slow, agonizing finality perpetual night will surely fall.

If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star ... They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

Humans are made from nuclear ash of dead stars

This entire process of stellar evolution is by natural process alone. We do not have to invoke Divine intervention at any stage in the history of the life-cycle of the stars that we observe.