Human Universe Quotes

“We're both clever and stupid in equal measure.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“The division into hundreds of countries whose borders and interests are defined by imagined local differences and arbitrary religious dogma, both of which are utterly irrelevant and meaningless on a galactic scale, must surely be addressed if we are to confront global problems such as mutually assured destruction, asteroid threats, climate change, pandemic disease and who knows what else, and flourish beyond the twenty-first century. The very fact that the preceding sentence sounds hopelessly utopian might provide a plausible answer to the Great Silence.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“It is undoubtedly true that Galileo didn’t intend to challenge the very theological foundations of the Church of Rome by observing the Moon through a telescope. But scientific discoveries, however innocuous they may seem at first sight, have a way of undermining those who don’t much care for facts. Reality catches up with everyone eventually. With”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“United States spends more on pet grooming than it does on fusion research.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil’.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“So if we assume we are not the only civilisation in the galaxy, then at least a few others must have arisen billions of years ahead of us. But where are they?”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams exist on Earth because of electrical activity inside a 1.5-kilogram blob of stuff, which hasn’t changed much since the earliest modern humans began the long journey out of Africa”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“I held a brain for the cameras at St Paul’s teaching hospital in Addis. It is the most complex single object in the known universe, a most intricate example of emergent complexity assembled over 4 billion years by natural selection operating within the constraints placed upon it by the laws of physics and the particular biochemistry of life on Earth. It contains around 85 billion individual neurons, which is of the same order as the number of stars in an average galaxy. But that doesn’t begin to describe its complexity. Each neuron is thought to make between 10,000 and 100,000 connections to other neurons, making the brain a computer way beyond anything our current technology can simulate. When we do manage to simulate one, I have no doubt that sentience will emerge; consciousness is not magic, it is an emergent property consistent with the known laws of nature.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Building on these ideas, my view is that we humans represent an isolated island of meaning in a meaningless universe, and I should immediately clarify what I mean by meaningless. I see no reason for the existence of the universe in a teleological sense; there is surely no final cause or purpose. Rather, I think that meaning is an emergent property; it appeared on Earth when the brains of our ancestors became large enough to allow for primitive culture – probably between 3 and 4 million years ago with the emergence of Australopithecus in the Rift Valley. There are surely other intelligent beings in the billions of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and if the modern theory of eternal inflation is correct, then there is an infinite number of inhabited worlds in the multiverse beyond the horizon.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Science is a time machine, and it goes both ways. We are able to predict our future with increasing certainty. Our ability to act in response to these predictions will ultimately determine our fate. Science and reason make the darkness visible. I worry that lack of investment in science and a retreat from reason may prevent us from seeing further, or delay our reaction to what we see, making a meaningful response impossible. There are no simple fixes. Our civilisation is complex, our global political system is inadequate, our internal differences of opinion are deep-seated. I’d bet you think you’re absolutely right about some things and virtually everyone else is an idiot. Climate Change? Europe? God? America? The Monarchy? Same-sex Marriage? Abortion? Big Business? Nationalism? The United Nations? The Bank Bailout? Tax Rates? Genetically Modified Crops? Eating Meat? Football? X Factor or Strictly? The way forward is to understand and accept that there are many opinions, but only one human civilisation, only one Nature, and only one science. The collective goal of ensuring that there is never less than one human civilisation must surely override our personal prejudices. At least we have come far enough in 40,800 years to be able to state the obvious, and this is a necessary first step.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“ideas are the lifeblood of civilisation, and societies assimilate ideas and become comfortable with their implications through understanding and debate. If eternal inflation is the correct description of our universe, it will be the artists, philosophers, theologians, novelists and musicians, alongside the physicists, who explore its meaning. What does it mean if the existence of our universe is inevitable? What does it mean if we are not special in any way? What does it mean if our observable universe, with all its myriad galaxies and possibilities, is a vanishingly small leaf on an every-expanding fractal tree of universes? What does it mean if you are, because you have to be? I can’t tell you. I can only ask – what does it mean to you?”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“The trick as an educated citizen of the twenty-first century is to realise that Nature is far stranger and more wonderful than human imagination, and the only appropriate response to new discoveries is to enjoy one’s inevitable discomfort, take delight in being shown to be wrong and learn something as a result.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“To me, and to the participants of at the Green Bank conference, the idea that a civilization might destroy itself is both ludicrous and likely. We are pathetically inadequate at long-term planning, idiotically primitive in our destructive urges and pathologically incapable of simply getting along.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Our existence is a ridiculous affront to common sense, beyond any reasonable expectation of the possible based on the simplicity of the laws of nature, and our civilisation is the combination of seven billion individual affronts. This is what my smiling seems to say: Man certainly does delight me. Our existence is necessarily temporary and our spatial reach finite, and this makes us all the more precious. Mahler’s great farewell to life can also be read as a call to value life with all your heart, to use it wisely and to enjoy it while you can.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“They would certainly have been simpler than the earliest known microbial mats, but somewhere in your genome there will be sequences of DNA that have been faithfully passed down across the great sweep of geological time, and if you have children, you’ll pass these four-billion-year-old messages on to them.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“One of the beautiful things about mathematical physics is that equations contain stories.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Common sense is completely worthless and irrelevant when trying to understand reality. This is probably why people who like to boast about their common sense tend to rail against the fact that they share a common ancestor with a monkey.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Take note, politicians, economists and science policy advisors of the twenty-first century; a prerequisite for the creation of the intellectual edifice upon which your spreadsheets, air-conditioned offices and mobile phones rest was the curiosity-driven quest to understand the motions of the planets and the Earth’s place amongst the stars.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“I believe powerfully that we who have the power should strive to extend the gift of education to everyone. Education is the most important investment a developed society can make, and the most effective way of nurturing a developing one.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“I deliberately borrow from Shakespeare; the most precious objects on Earth are not gems or jewels, but ink marks on paper. No single human brain could conceive of Hamlet, Principia Mathematica or Codex Leicester; they were created by and belong to the entire human race, and the library of wonders continues to grow.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“a prerequisite for the creation of the intellectual edifice upon which your spreadsheets, air-conditioned offices and mobile phones rest was the curiosity-driven quest to understand the motions of the planets and the Earth’s place amongst the stars.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“First we guess it. Then we – now don’t laugh, that’s really true – then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what, if this is right, if this law that we guessed is right, to see what it would imply. And then we compare the computation results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Theoretical physicists studying inflationary models have discovered that almost all of them are eternal, in the sense that they stop inflating in patches rather than all at once. This means that the potential for creating universes, in the guise of inflation, is always expanding faster than it is decaying away, and it will therefore never stop. We live in an infinite, eternal, fractal multiverse comprised of an infinite number of universes like ours, alongside an infinite number of universes with different physical laws. We exist because it is inevitable. Almost.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“But as the seventeenth century wore on, precision observations greatly improved due to the invention of the telescope and an increasingly mature application of mathematics to describe the data, and led a host of astronomers and mathematicians – including Johannes Kepler, Galileo and ultimately Isaac Newton – towards an understanding of the workings of the solar system. This theory is good enough even today to send space probes to the outer planets with absolute precision.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Bruno believed that the universe is infinite and filled with an infinite number of habitable worlds. He also believed that although each world exists for a brief moment when compared to the life of the universe, space itself is neither created nor destroyed; the universe is eternal.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Lucy was little more than an upright chimpanzee; an animal, a genetic survival machine. We bring art, science, literature and meaning to the Earth; we are a world away, and yet separated by the blink of an eye.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“This is the current state of our Sun, happily converting 600 million tonnes of hydrogen every second into helium to counteract the inward pull of gravity.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe

“Occam’s razor is an important tool in science. It shouldn’t be oversold; nature can be complex and bizarre. But as a rule of thumb, it is most sensible to adopt the simplest explanation for an observation until the evidence overwhelms it.”
― Brian Cox, Human Universe