“According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.”
“Now, why should the universe be constructed in such a way that atoms acquire the ability to be curious about themselves?”
“Nature may reach the same result in many ways. Like a wave in the physical world, in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all, so in the world of organisms, in life, an impulse started proceeds onward, at times, may be, with the speed of light, at times, again, so slowly that for ages and ages it seems to stay, passing through processes of a complexity inconceivable to men, but in all its forms, in all its stages, its energy ever and ever integrally present.
A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature. In no way can we get such an overwhelming idea of the grandeur of Nature than when we consider, that in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, throughout the Infinite, the forces are in a perfect balance, and hence the energy of a single thought may determine the motion of a universe.”
“We’ve discovered that the universe is not a place; it’s a story, a story of an irreversible sequence of emergent events.”
—
Brian Swimme, Ph.D. from the department of mathematics at the University of Oregon for work in singularity theory, he teaches evolutionary cosmology at California Institute of Integral Studies,
The Powers of the Universe
“A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite a lot of millions of light-years from end to end.”
“We are in our ‘now’ can bear witness to that earlier lifeless epoch, which after the event gives it some sort of a reality. We have not been created out of nothing, but from primeval ‘ur-matter’, atoms formed billions of years ago that have for a brief while been gathered into collections that think they are us.”
“After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?”
“If we go back to our checker game, the fundamental laws are rules by which the checkers move. Mathematics may be applied in the complex situation to figure out what in given circumstances is a good move to make. But very little mathematics is needed for the simple fundamental character of the basic laws. They can be simple stated in English for checkers.”
“If you wish to understand the secrets of the Universe, think of energy, frequency, and vibration.”
—
Nikola Tesla, Serbian-American inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer (1856-1943)
