“We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know. What is the smallest piece of matter; why we remember the past and not the future and why there is a universe.”
—“Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis - you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory. [...] Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions, the theory survives and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.”
—Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time
(And that’s why I love Physics.)
I think I’m through with being in love with people
though I’ll love mountains as only a flatlander can. To be awed
by something so big and unyielding that your desire
to conquer it never dies, though you know in your heart,
liver, neurons, axons, dendrites and womb, that it will
never happen …
—Shaindel Beers, from “A Brief History of Time” in A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing, 2009)
“If we find the answer answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason--for then we would know the mind of God.”
—Stephen W. Hawking, from A Brief History of Time (thank you, elmeropapi)
“We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend.. few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward... or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know. What is the smallest piece of matter; why we remember the past and not the future; and why there is a universe. ”
—Carl Sagan(From an introduction to “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking)
If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size.
Stephen Hawking
(source: incomprehensibleuniverse)
I understood that reference
OH MY GOSH
TT: That’s just what you need. More splinters of yourself.
TT: Figurative splinters. Literal splinters. Splinters of splinters. It’s splinters all the way down.
TT: Well, no, it’s still probably turtles all the way down. But who do you think is responsible for their extensive training?
TT: SOMEONE needs to teach them rad martial arts. It is yet another crushing burden which we must shoulder.
http://mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=007541
THIS IS A REFERENCE TO STEVEN HAWKINGS “A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME” FIRST PARAGRAPH
“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, ‘What is the tortoise standing on.’ ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it’s turtles all the way down!’”
