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“eschatology,” the study of the end of everything, by reading about religion.
We are a species poised between an awareness of our ultimate insignificance and an ability to reach far beyond our mundane lives, into the void, to solve the most fundamental mysteries of the cosmos.
A galaxy 10 billion light-years away is 10 billion years in the past. Since the universe is only about 13.8 billion years old, that 10-billion-light-year-distant galaxy can tell us about the conditions of our universe when it was still in its youth.
cosmological principle. Simply stated, it’s the idea that for all practical purposes, the universe is basically the same everywhere.
it’s entirely possible, and perhaps probable, that the universe is infinite in size. Which means that it was infinite at the beginning too. Just much denser.
Every point in space is the center of its own sphere of ever deepening time, bounded by a shell of fire.
he knew that he and Wilson had just become the first human beings to see the actual Big Bang.
Gravitational collapse is a powerful thing. If you have a little bit of matter that’s denser than the matter around it, it will pull in more from those less dense places, which increases the contrast, which pulls in more, and so on. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
it’s not that we necessarily can explain everything from the Planck Time on, but that we currently definitely cannot explain anything before it.
the fact that pretty much all the hydrogen in the universe was produced in the first few minutes means that a pretty large fraction of what you and I are made of has been hanging around the universe in one form or another for almost as long as the universe has been here.
All the heavier elements in your body—oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, etc.—were produced later, either in the centers of stars or in stellar explosions. But hydrogen, while the lightest, is also the most abundant element in your body by number. So, yes, you hold within you the dust of ancient generations of stars. But you are also, to a very large fraction, built out of by-products of the actual Big Bang. Carl Sagan’s larger statement still stands, and to an even greater degree: “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
