From Here to Infinity Quotes

“Astronomers are disclosing insights that New Agers would welcome and be attuned to. Not only do we share a common origin, and many genes, with the entire web of life on Earth, but we are linked to the cosmos. All living things depend on the stars: they are energised by the heat and light from the Sun; they are made of atoms that were forged from pristine hydrogen, billions of years ago, in faraway stars.”
― Martin J. Rees, From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons

“Could some branches of science come to a halt because we bump up against the inherent limits of our understanding, rather than because the subject is exhausted? Humans are more than just another primate species. We are special: our self-awareness and language were a qualitative leap, allowing cultural evolution, and the cumulative diversified expertise that led to science and technology. But some aspects of reality – a unified theory of physics, or a full understanding of consciousness – might elude us simply because they’re beyond human brains, just as surely as Einstein’s ideas would baffle a chimpanzee. Perhaps complex aggregates of atoms, whether brains or machines, can never understand everything about themselves.”
― Martin J. Rees, From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons

“(And it’s often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science – it’s far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.) Indeed”
― Martin J. Rees, From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons

“Complex biospheres like the Earth’s could be rare because of some bottleneck, some key stage in evolution, that is hard to transit. Perhaps it is the transition to multicellular life. (The fact that simple life on Earth seems to have emerged quite quickly, whereas even the most basic multicellular organisms took nearly three billion years, suggests that there may be severe barriers to the emergence of any complex life.)”
― Martin J. Rees, From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons

“Incidentally, if any signs of life were found elsewhere in our solar system – and (an important proviso) if we could be sure that it was based on a different kind of DNA, implying that it had a separate origin from terrestrial life – then we could immediately conclude that life was widespread in the universe. Something that had happened twice around a single star must have happened on millions of planets elsewhere in the Galaxy.”
― Martin J. Rees, From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons

“To confront the overwhelming mystery of what banged and why it banged, Einstein’s theory isn’t enough because it treats space and time as smooth and continuous. Success will require new insights into what might seem the simplest entity of all: ‘mere’ empty space. We know that no material can be chopped into arbitrarily small pieces: eventually you get down to discrete atoms. Likewise, even space and time can’t be divided up indefinitely. There are powerful reasons to suspect that space has a grainy and ‘atomic’ structure – but on a scale a trillion trillion times smaller than atoms. This is key ‘unfinished business’ for twenty-first-century science. According to the most”
― Martin J. Rees, From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons

“Einstein averred that ‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible’.”
― Martin J. Rees, From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons

“Over the last decade, we’ve experienced astonishing advances in communication and in access to information. Our lives have been hugely enriched by consumer electronics and web-based services that we would willingly pay far more for, and which surpass any expectations we had a decade ago. And the impact on the developing world has been dramatic: there are more mobile phones than toilets in India. Mobile”
― Martin J. Rees, From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons

“E. O. Wilson, one of the world’s most distinguished ecologists, certainly its most eloquent: ‘At the heart of the environmentalist world view is the conviction that human physical and spiritual health depends on the planet Earth … Natural ecosystems – forests, coral reefs, marine blue waters – maintain the world as we would wish it to be maintained. Our body and our mind evolved to live in this particular planetary environment and no other.”
― Martin J. Rees, From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons

“It’s a cultural deprivation not to appreciate the panorama offered by modern cosmology and Darwinian evolution – the chain of emergent complexity leading from some still-mysterious beginning to atoms, stars, and planets – and how, on our planet, life emerged, and evolved into a biosphere containing creatures with brains able to ponder the wonder of it all. This common understanding should transcend all national differences – and all faiths too. Science is indeed a global culture. Its universality is specially compelling in my own subject of astronomy. The dark night sky is an inheritance we’ve shared with all humanity, throughout history. All have gazed up in wonder at the same ‘vault of heaven’, but interpreted it in diverse ways. There”
― Martin J. Rees, From Here to Infinity: Scientific Horizons