The Constants of Nature Quotes

“Prior to then it was believed that black holes were just cosmic cookie monsters, swallowing everything that came within their gravitational clutches.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“universal laws prescribe how things will behave not, like human laws, how they ought to behave.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“Einstein argued that the laws of Nature should appear to be the same for all observers in the Universe, no matter where they were or how they were moving. If they were not then there would exist privileged observers for whom the laws of Nature looked simpler than they did for other observers.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“There are three trajectories for an expanding universe to follow (see p. 184). The ‘closed’ universe expands too slowly to overcome the decelerating effects of gravity and eventually it collapses back to high density. The ‘open’ universe has lots more expansion energy than gravitational deceleration and the expansion runs away forever. The in-between world, that is often called the ‘flat’ or ‘critical’ universe, has a perfect balance between expansion energy and gravity and keeps on expanding for ever. Our Universe is tantalisingly close to this critical or ‘flat’ state today.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“If constants like G and α do not vary in time, then the standard history of our Universe has a simple broad-brush appearance. During the first 300,000 years the dominant energy in the Universe is radiation and the temperature is greater than 3000 degrees and too hot for any atoms or molecules to exist. The Universe is a huge soup of electrons, photons of light and nuclei.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“If the constants of Nature are slowly changing then we could be on a one-way slide to extinction. We have learnt that our existence exploits many peculiar coincidences between the values of different constants of Nature, and that the observed values of the constants fall within some very narrow windows of opportunity for the existence of life.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“In recent years astronomers have made newspaper headlines all over the world by mapping this radiation in exquisite detail with receivers carried on balloons and satellites. We know that the radiation has the spectrum of pure heat radiation to very high precision and its temperature is the same in different directions on the sky to an accuracy of about one part in 100,000.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“there could be more than three dimensions of space but they had to be small and unchanging if they were to avoid altering the character of the world that we experience.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“Now step outside spacetime and look in at what happens there. Histories of individuals are paths through the block. If they curve back upon themselves to form closed loops then we would judge time travel to occur. But the paths are what they are. There is no history that is ‘changed’ by doing that. Time travel allows us to be part of the past but not to change the past. The only time-travelling histories that are possible are self-consistent paths. On any closed path there is no well-defined division between the future and the past.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“we might mention that this could explain why there is no evidence of extraterrestrial life in the Universe. If it is truly advanced, even by our standards, it will most likely be very small, down on the molecular scale. All sorts of advantages then accrue. There is lots of room there – huge populations can be sustained. Powerful, intrinsically quantum computation can be harnessed. Little raw material is required and space travel is easier. You can also avoid being detected by civilisations of clumsy bipeds living on bright planets that beam continuous radio noise into interplanetary space.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“Already we see a trend in our own technological societies towards the fabrication of smaller and smaller machines that consume less and less energy and produce almost no waste. Taken to its logical conclusion, we expect advanced life-forms to be as small as the laws of physics allow.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“the values of the constants of Nature are rather bio-friendly. If they are changed by even a small amount the world becomes lifeless and barren instead of a home for interesting complexity”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“The more simultaneous variations of other constants one includes in these considerations, the more restrictive is the region where life, as we know it, can exist. It is very likely that if variations can be made then they are not all independent. Rather, making a small change in one constant might alter one or more of the others as well. This would tend to make the restrictions on most variations become even more tightly constrained.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.’ Freeman Dyson24”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“by means of evolution by natural selection, which showed how living things can become well adapted to their environments over the course of time under a very wide range of circumstances, so long as the environment is not changing too quickly. Complexity could develop from simplicity without direct Divine intervention.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“A change of more than 0.4 per cent in the constants governing the strength of the strong nuclear force or more than 4 per cent in the fine structure constant would destroy almost all carbon or almost all oxygen in every star.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“If the fine structure constant, that governs the strength of electromagnetic forces, were changed by more than 4 per cent or the strong force by more than 0.4 of one per cent then the production of carbon or oxygen would be reduced by factors of between 30 and 1000.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“The specific nuclear reaction that is needed to make carbon is a rather improbable one. It requires three nuclei of helium to come together to fuse into a single nucleus of carbon.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“A condition, like the existence of stars or certain chemical elements, is identified as a necessary condition for the existence of any form of chemical complexity, of which life is the most impressive known example. This does not mean that if this condition is met that life must exist, will never die out if it does exist, or that the fact that this condition holds in our Universe means that it was ‘designed’ with life in mind.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“We can easily imagine worlds in which the constants of Nature take on slightly different numerical values where living beings like ourselves would not be possible. Make the fine structure constant bigger and there can be no atoms, make the strength of gravity greater and stars exhaust their fuel very quickly, reduce the strength of nuclear forces and there can be no biochemistry, and so on.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“For many years it had been claimed that the average achievement by pupils in some South-East Asian countries was significantly higher than in the United Kingdom. Then it came to light that the weakest pupils in that country were removed from the total who were evaluated at an earlier stage in the educational process. Clearly, the effect of their removal is to skew the average attainments to be higher than they would otherwise be.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“In our solar system life first evolved surprisingly soon after the formation of a hospitable terrestrial environment. There is something unusual about this. Suppose the typical time that it takes for life to evolve is called t(bio), then from the evidence of our solar system, which is about 4.6 billion years old, it seems that the time it takes for stars to settle down and create a stable source of heat and light, t(star), is not very different to t(bio) because we have found simple forms of terrestrial bacterial life that are several billion years old.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“Typical stars, like our Sun, emit a wind of electrically-charged particles from their surface which will strip off the atmospheres of orbiting planets unless the wind can be deflected by a planetary magnetic field. In our solar system the Earth's magnetic field has protected its atmosphere from the solar wind but Mars, unprotected by any magnetic field, lost its atmosphere long ago.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“If we were to smooth out all the material in the Universe into a uniform sea of atoms we would see just how little of anything there is. There would be little more than about 1 atom in every cubic metre of space. No laboratory on Earth could produce an artificial vacuum that was anywhere near as empty as that. The best vacuum achievable today contains approximately 1000 billion atoms in a cubic metre.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“Another consequence of an old expanding universe, besides its large size, is that it is cold, dark and lonely. When any ball of gas or radiation is expanded in volume, the temperature of its constituents falls off in proportion to the increase in its size. A universe that is big and old enough to contain the building blocks of complexity will be very cold and the levels of average radiant energy so low that space will everywhere appear dark.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“We have seen that the process of stellar alchemy takes time – billions of years of it. And because our Universe is expanding it needs to be billions of light years in size if it is to have enough time to produce the building blocks for living complexity. A universe that was only as big as our Milky Way galaxy, with its 100 billion stars, would be little more than a month old.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“Others might point to the warning that the most dangerous thing in science is the idea that arrives before its time.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“Whatever the ultimate Theory of Everything is found to be, it will have a limiting form which describes motion at speeds far less than that of light in weak gravity fields where quantum wavelike features of mass are negligible. This form will be the one that Newton found.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“It was the same with the revolutionary quantum theories that were found in the first quarter of this century. They provided a more complete description than Newton of the way the world works when we probe the realm of the very small. Their predictions about the non-Newtonian microworld are stupendously accurate. But again, when they deal with large objects they become more and more like Newton's description of motion. This is how the core of truth within a past theory can remain as a limiting part of a new and better theory. Scientific revolutions don't seem to happen any more.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe

“belief in the ultimate simplicity and unity behind the rules that constrain the Universe leads us to expect that there exists a single unchanging pattern behind the appearances. Under different conditions this single pattern will crystallise into superficially distinct patterns that show up as the four separate forces governing the world around us. It has gradually become clear how this patterning probably works.”
― John D. Barrow, The Constants of Nature: The Numbers That Encode the Deepest Secrets of the Universe