cosmic complexity Quotes

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

When I think of God I feel like an ant crawling into a computer.

The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study.

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened ' it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.

...she wanted God to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.

There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises

I just became fascinated with how complex and unlikely the universe is and life is and Catholicism gives me an answer to that.

Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe.

…Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed.

The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.

On one planet [earth], and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter.

Once we've learned enough about the universe we will admit to ourselves that we will never know everything.

This life is not man's own show; if he becomes personally and emotionally involved in the very complicated cosmic drama, he reaps inevitable suffering for having distorted the divine 'plot.'

Over time, I started becoming more and more aware of the vastness and complexity of the universe, which led me away from any sort of conventional Christianity.

The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.

There are two things you should remember when dealing with parallel universes. One, they're not really parallel, and two, they're not really universes

We cannot understand what happens in the universe. What is glorious in it is united with what is full of horror. What is full of meaning is united to what is senseless. The spirit of the universe is at once creative and destructive — it creates while it destroys and destroys while it creates, and therefore it remains to us a riddle. And we must inevitably resign ourselves to this.

I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.

Ye ken, we've been robbin' and running aroound on all kinds o' worlds for a lang time, and I'll tell ye this: The universe is a lot more comp-li-cated than it looks from the ooutside.

He had seen too much of the cosmos to have any great faith in man's ability to understand it.

All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.

We have simply arrived too late in the history of the universe to see this primordial simplicity easily... But although the symmetries are hidden from us, we can sense that they are latent in nature, governing everything about us. That's the most exciting idea I know: that nature is much simpler than it looks. Nothing makes me more hopeful that our generation of human beings may actually hold the key to the universe in our hands - that perhaps in our lifetimes we may be able to tell why all of what we see in this immense universe of galaxies and particles is logically inevitable.