Hubble's Law Quotes

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

Scientists - who prefer explanations subject to laboratory tests - figure that everything we see today was as inevitable as wrinkles, once the Big Bang established physics. Stars and planets were cooked up as huge clouds of matter collapsed and coalesced.

The universe is expanding, and every second that you're alive, the universe is bigger than it was a second before. There's nothing in front of us, exactly, other than the future, and there's no space for the size, the density of the universe to go. Because it's expanding at every point simultaneously.

They've discovered that, where all the other galaxies are moving in one direction, ours is going in another. Now, the Big Bang theory says that we're all moving outward.

The Big Bang theory is the idea that if we go back early enough in the history of the universe - and we can do this, of course, by looking at starlight coming to us from billions of years ago - we will see a very hot and dense period where the universe was much smaller, denser, and hotter.

It's everywhere, really. It's between the galaxies. It is in this room. We believe that everywhere that you have space, empty space, that you cannot avoid having some of this dark energy.

It was only about sixty years ago that the expansion of the universe was first observed.

A static universe isn't physically self-consistent.

Now, almost one hundred years later, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much our picture of the universe has changed in the span of a single human lifetime. As far as the scientific community in 1917 was concerned, the universe was static and eternal, and consisted of a one single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by vast, infinite, dark, and empty space. This is, after all, what you would guess by looking up at the night sky with your eyes, or with a small telescope, and at the time there was little reason to suspect otherwise.

I don't know why anyone would want to study the expansion of the universe.

If you take a galaxy and try to make it bigger, it becomes a cluster of galaxies, not a galaxy. If you try to make it smaller than that, it seems to blow itself apart.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

There are lots of ideas which extend the Copernican principle one step further. We went from the solar system to the galaxy to zillions of galaxies and now to realising even that isn't all there is.

We have never observed infinity in nature. Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that's where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it's instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.

According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a slightly lower density of matter, maybe right where we're sitting right now, caused our galaxy to start collapsing around here.

We live inside our universe and cannot get a bird's-eye view of it from outside. And we cannot even see all of our universe. Distant parts of it are expanding away from us so fast that they are invisible; they go faster than the speed of light. Having bigger telescopes to see fainter stars will not help us here: invisible is truly invisible.

There are strong reasons for believing that space goes on beyond the limits of our observational horizon. There are strong reasons because if you look in opposite directions, conditions are the same to within one part in 100,000. So if we are part of some finite structure then, if the gradient is so shallow, it is likely to go on much further.

The outstanding feature, however, is the possibility that the velocity-distance relation may represent the de Sitter effect, and hence that numerical data may be introduced into discussions of the general curvature of space.

The predominant theory of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang.

You might expect gravity would slow it down, but it's just expanding faster and faster.

If the expansion of the space of the universe is uniform in all directions, an observer located in anyone of the galaxies will see all other galaxies running away from him at velocities proportional to their distances from the observer.