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Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics,
If you watch a car drive away at night, the brightness of its taillights drops as the inverse square of its distance (twice as far means four times dimmer).
just wait 200 million years, and days will be twenty-five hours long!
Galaxies sometimes collide with one another in huge cosmic traffic accidents. This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, as their stars mostly miss each other;
Remarkably, things will look the same whichever chocolate chip or galaxy you’re observing from, so if the distribution of galaxies has no end, then the expansion has no center—it looks the same from everywhere.
more volume can be created in a particular region between some galaxies without this new volume expanding into other regions
The darkness behind the galaxies is the epoch before the first galaxies had time to form.
No matter how emphatically we scientists claim to be rational seekers of truth, we’re as prone as anyone to human foibles such as prejudice, peer pressure and herd mentality. Overcoming these shortcomings clearly takes more than just talent for calculating.
Friedmann’s work allows for the possibility that our Universe was once contracting, and that all the material moving toward us gently slowed down, stopped and started accelerating away from us.
Although his book merely states that they “eliminated” the pigeons when they returned, I got him to reveal the grim truth after some wine: it involved a shotgun.…
our entire Universe was once as hot as a star,