Wonders of the Universe Quotes

“Every carbon atom in every living thing on the planet was produced in the heart of a dying star.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

“Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

“The practice of science happens at the border between the known and the unknown. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we peer into the darkness with eyes opened not in fear but in wonder.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

“The last remaining matter in the universe will reside within black dwarves. We can predict how they will end their days. The last matter of the universe will evaporate away and be carried off into the void as radiation leaving absolutely nothing behind. There won’t be a single atom left; all that’s left will be particles of light and black holes. After an unimaginable period even the black holes will have evaporated; the universe will be nothing but a sea of photons gradually tending to the same temperature as the expansion of the universe cools them towards absolute zero. The story of the universe will come to an end. For the first time in its life the universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy will finally stop increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered. Nothing happens and it keeps not happening for ever. There is no difference between past present and future, nothing changes, arrow of time has simply ceased to exist. It is an inescapable fact written into the laws of physics that entire cosmos will die; all the stars will go out extinguishing possibility of life in the universe.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

“A full explanation of this is beyond the scope of this book, suffice to say that Einstein was forced into this bold move primarily because Maxwell’s equations for electricity and magnetism were incompatible with Newton’s 200-year-old laws of motion. Einstein abandoned the Newtonian ideas of space and time as separate entities and merged them. In Einstein’s theory there is a special speed built into the structure of spacetime itself that everyone must agree on, irrespective of how they are moving relative to each other. This special speed is a universal constant of nature that will always be measured as precisely 299,792,458 metres (983,571,503 feet) per second, at all times and all places in the Universe, no matter what they are doing. This”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

“گفته مي شود ستاره شناسي دانشي است كه در عين شخصيت ساز بودن به انسان درس فروتني مي دهد. شايد براي نشان دادن مسخرگي باورهاي فريب آميز انسان ها راهي بهتر از نگريستن به تصوير دور اين دنياي خرد نباشد. اين نشان مي دهد كه وظيفه داريم نسبت به هم مهربان تر باشيم و زمين مان را حفظ كرده و گرامي بداريم چون تنها منزلي است كه تاكنون شناخته ايم." #كارل_ساگان#برايان_كاكس..
بخشي از كتاب: #شگفتي_هاي_كيهان#انتشارات_مازيار..”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

“The first experimental determination that the speed of light was not infinite was made by the seventeenth-century Danish astronomer, Ole Romer. In 1676, Romer was attempting to solve one of the great scientific and engineering challenges of the age; telling the time at sea. Finding an accurate clock was essential to enable sailors to navigate safely across the oceans, but mechanical clocks based on pendulums or springs were not good at being bounced around on the ocean waves and soon drifted out of sync. In order to pinpoint your position on Earth you need the latitude and longitude. Latitude is easy; in the Northern Hemisphere, the angle of the North Star (Polaris) above the horizon is your latitude. In the Southern Hemisphere, things are more complicated because there is no star directly over the South Pole, but it is still possible with a little astronomical know-how and trigonometry to determine your latitude with sufficient accuracy for safe navigation.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

“I was able to demonstrate this for myself in the Vomit Comet armed with a model of Einstein. When we were weightless, I let a little plastic Albert float beside my head. One way of understanding why we floated next to each other is to simply state that we were both weightless, so we floated, but think about what this looks like from outside the plane. To someone on the ground looking up at us, the plane, myself and plastic Albert are all falling towards the ground under the action of Earth’s gravity, and obviously we are falling at the same rate. If I fell faster than Einstein, he wouldn’t float next to my head. Indeed, if the much more massive plane fell faster than both plastic Albert and myself, we’d both bump into the ceiling! The fact that we all floated around together is a beautiful demonstration of the fact that all objects, no matter what their mass, fall at the same rate in a gravitational field.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

“Care is in order, because the very beginning – by which we mean the events that happened during the Planck epoch – the time period before a million million million million million million millionths of a second after the Big Bang, is currently beyond our understanding. This is because we lack a theory of space and time before this point, and consequently have very little to say about it. Such a theory, known as quantum gravity, is the holy grail of modern theoretical physics and is being energetically searched for by hundreds of scientists across the world. (Albert Einstein spent the last decades of his life searching in vain for it.) Conventional thinking holds that both time and space began at time zero, the beginning of the Planck era. The Big Bang can therefore be regarded as the beginning of time itself, and as such it was the beginning of the Universe.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

“By 1860, a great deal was known about electricity and magnetism. Magnets could be used to make electric currents flow, and flowing electric currents could deflect compass needles in the same way that magnets could. There was clearly a link between these two phenomena, but nobody had come up with a unified description. The breakthrough was made by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who, in a series of papers in 1861 and 1862, developed a single theory of electricity and magnetism that was able to explain all of the experimental work of Faraday, Ampère and others. But Maxwell’s crowning glory came in 1864, when he published a paper that is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. Albert”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe

“most southerly rising point occurs at”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe: A Gorgeously Illustrated Companion Exploring the Cosmos and Natural Phenomena

“The surface gravity is of the order of 100,000,000,000G, which is little more than I experienced in the centrifuge.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe: A Gorgeously Illustrated Companion Exploring the Cosmos and Natural Phenomena

“We still don’t know how the Universe began, but we do have very strong evidence that something interesting happened 13.75 billion years ago that can be interpreted as the beginning of our universe.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe: A Gorgeously Illustrated Companion Exploring the Cosmos and Natural Phenomena

“dwarf galaxies, have as few as ten million stars. The biggest, the giants, have been estimated to contain in the region of 100 trillion.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe: A Gorgeously Illustrated Companion Exploring the Cosmos and Natural Phenomena

“The Universe is always expanding.”
― Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe