The Accidental Universe Quotes

“I don’t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone. Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“It [the mind] can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.” In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“But why are we attracted to symmetry? Why do we human beings delight in seeing perfectly round planets through the lens of a telescope and six-sided snowflakes on a cold winter day? The answer must be partly psychological. I would claim that symmetry represents order, and we crave order in this strange universe we find ourselves in. The search for symmetry, and the emotional pleasure we derive when we find it, must help us make sense of the world around us, just as we find satisfaction in the repetition of the seasons and the reliability of friendships. Symmetry is also economy. Symmetry is simplicity. Symmetry is elegance.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God, but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world.

The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“On one thing most physicists agree. If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little larger, and the universe would have accelerated so rapidly that matter in the young universe could never have pulled itself together to form stars and hence complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little smaller and the universe would have decelerated so rapidly that it would have recollapsed before there was time to form even the simplest atoms. Out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. As before, one is compelled to ask the question: Why does such fine-tuning occur?”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“For many years, a family of ospreys lived in a large nest near my summer home in Maine. Each season, I carefully observed their rituals and habits. In mid-April, the parents would arrive, having spent the winter in South America, and lay eggs. In early June, the eggs hatched. The babies slowly grew, as the father brought fish back to the nest, and in early to mid August were large enough to make their first flight. My wife and I recorded all of these comings and goings with cameras and in a notebook. We wrote down the number of chicks each year, usually one or two but sometimes three. We noted when the chicks first began flapping their wings, usually a couple of weeks before flying from the nest. We memorized the different chirps the parents made for danger, for hunger, for the arrival of food. After several years of cataloguing such data, we felt that we knew these ospreys. We could predict the sounds the birds would make in different situations, their flight patterns, their behavior when a storm was brewing. Reading our “osprey journals” on a winter’s night, we felt a sense of pride and satisfaction. We had carefully studied and documented a small part of the universe. Then, one August afternoon, the two baby ospreys of that season took flight for the first time as I stood on the circular deck of my house watching the nest. All summer long, they had watched me on that deck as I watched them. To them, it must have looked like I was in my nest just as they were in theirs. On this particular afternoon, their maiden flight, they did a loop of my house and then headed straight at me with tremendous speed. My immediate impulse was to run for cover, since they could have ripped me apart with their powerful talons. But something held me to my ground. When they were within twenty feet of me, they suddenly veered upward and away. But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about half a second we made eye contact. Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant. It was a look of connectedness, of mutual respect, of recognition that we shared the same land. After they were gone, I found that I was shaking, and in tears. To this day, I do not understand what happened in that half second. But it was one of the most profound moments of my life.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“Einstein once wrote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal.

Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: the multiverse.

A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy.

Our particular hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“Using technology, we have redefined ourselves in such a way that our immediate surroundings and relationships, our immediate sensory perceptions of the world, are much diminished in relevance. We have trained ourselves not to be present. We have extended our bodies, created enhanced selves that might be called our “techno-selves.” Our techno-selves are both bigger and smaller than our former selves. Bigger in that we have tremendous powers to communicate with the invisible world. Smaller in that we have sacrificed some of our contact and experience with the visible, immediate world. We have marginalized our direct sensory experience.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“Some people believe that there is no distinction between the spiritual and physical universes, no distinction between the inner and the outer, between the subjective and the objective, between the miraculous and the rational. I need such distinctions to make sense of my spiritual and scientific lives. For me, there is room for both a spiritual universe and a physical universe, just as there is room for both religion and science. Each universe has its own power. Each has its own beauty, and mystery.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“like Dostoevsky’s character, I cannot bear the thought that I am simply a piano key, thinking and doing what I must when I’m struck. I want some kind of unpredictability in my behavior. I want freedom. I want some kind of “I-ness” in my brain that is more than the sum of neurons and sodium gates and acetylcholine molecules, a captain who can make decisions on the spot—good or bad decisions, it doesn’t matter.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“the architecture of our brains was born from the same trial and error, the same energy principles, the same pure mathematics that happen in flowers and jellyfish and Higgs particles.

Viewed in this way, our human aesthetic is necessarily the aesthetic of nature.

Viewed in this way, it is nonsensical to ask why we find nature beautiful.

Beauty and symmetry and minimum principles are not qualities we ascribe to the cosmos and then marvel at in their perfection.

They are simply what is, just like the particular arrangement of atoms that make up our minds.

We are not observers on the outside looking in. We are on the inside too.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“Most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, subscribe to an interventionist view of God.

...all of these religions, at least in their orthodox expressions, are incompatible with science. This is as far as one gets with a purely logical analysis.

Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other Gods conflict with the assumptions of science.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe.

According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes.

We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“At the beginning of each session, one of us will begin talking about some random idea, another person will chime in or change the subject, and miraculously, after twenty minutes, we find that we have zeroed in on a question that everyone is passionate about. What continues to astonish me is the frequency with which religion slips into the room, unbidden but persistent.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“But the psychological change accompanying these technologies is more subtle, and perhaps more important. Consciously and unconsciously, we have gradually grown accustomed to experiencing the world through disembodied machines and instruments. As I stood in line to board an airplane recently, the young woman in front of me was primping in her mirror—straightening her hair, putting on lipstick, patting her checks with blush—a female ritual that has been repeated for several thousand years. In this case, however, her “mirror” was an iPhone in video mode, pointed at herself, and she was reacting to a digitized image of herself. I take walks in a federally protected wildlife preserve near my home in Massachusetts. A dirt trail winds for a mile around a lake teeming with beavers and fish, wild ducks and geese, aquatic frogs. Bulrushes and cattails wrap the perimeter of the pond, water lilies float here and there, rippling when a fish goes by. In the winter, the air is crisp and sharp, in the summer soft and aromatic. And a thick silence lies across the park, broken only by the honking of geese and the croaking of frogs. It is a place to smell, to see, to feel, to quietly let one’s mind wander where it wants. More and more commonly, I see people here talking on their cell phones as they walk around the trail. Their attention is focused not on the scene in front of them, but on a disembodied voice coming from a small box. And they are disembodied themselves. Where are their minds and bodies? Certainly not present in the park. Nor can they be located in the electromagnetic waves and digital signals flowing through cyberspace. Only their voices can be found at the other end of their conversations, in the offices and boardrooms and homes of the people they are talking to. They are attempting to be several places at once, like quantum waves. But I would argue that they are nowhere.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“man can do what he wants,” said Schopenhauer, “but not want what he wants.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là” (“I have no need for that assumption”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe.

Even though we struggle and howl against the brief flash of our lives, might we find something majestic in that brevity? Could there be a preciousness and value to existence stemming from the very fact of its temporary duration? And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“In some ways, we are like the creatures living in Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novel, Flatland, a world of only two dimensions, a world with length and width but no height. Workmen in Flatland are triangles, professional men squares. Priests are circles. The houses in Flatland are pentagons. Rain slides sideways across the two-dimensional sheet of the world, striking shingled roofs, which are straight lines. Life seems fulfilling and complete to the inhabitants of Flatland. They have no conception of a third dimension. Then one day, a visitor from the third dimension arrives. He explains the beauty and richness of his world. The Flatlanders nod their two-dimensional heads, they listen, but they cannot understand.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“Are the “little red dots” on Illingworth’s space maps part of the same landscape that Wordsworth and Thoreau described, part of the same visceral ethos as mountains and trees, part of the same cycle of birth and demise that orders our lives, part of our personal physical and emotional conception of the world that we live in? Or are such things instead digitized abstractions, silent and untouchable, akin to us only in their (hypothesized) makeup of atoms and molecules? And to what extent are we human beings, living on a small planet orbiting one star among billions of stars, part of that same nature?”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“I don’t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“While challenging the Platonic dream of theoretical physicists, the multiverse idea does explain one aspect of our universe that has unsettled some scientists for years: according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“Is this happy coincidence just good luck, or an act of providence, or what? No, it is simply that we could not live on planets without such properties. Many other planets exist that are not so hospitable to life, such as Uranus, where the temperature is –371 degrees Fahrenheit, or Venus, where the rain is sulfuric acid.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“The deep question is: Why does nature embody so much symmetry? We do not know the full answer to this question.

However, we have some partial answers. Symmetry leads to economy, and nature, like human beings, seems to prefer economy.

If we think of nature as a vast ongoing experiment, constantly trying out different possibilities of design, then those designs that cost the least energy or that require the fewest different parts to come together at the right time will take precedence, just as the principle of natural selection says that organisms with the best ability to survive will dominate over time.

One physical principle that governs nature over and over is the “energy principle”: nature evolves to minimize energy.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“A Presbyterian minister recently said to me that science and religion share a sense of wonder. I agree.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“At the present time... we certainly do not know all the laws of nature, and it is a good bet that most of our current formulations of those laws will be revised in the future.

Yet the great majority of scientists believe that a complete and final set of laws governing all physical phenomena exists, and that we are making continual progress toward discovery of those laws.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

“Our universe is what it is simply because we are here.

The situation can be likened to that of a group of intelligent fish who one day begin wondering why their world is completely filled with water.

Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion.

Then a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe, they suggest, there are many other worlds, some of them completely dry, some wet, and everything in between.”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew