Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs Quotes

“We often fail to notice things that we are not expecting.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“you can’t simply compare a hypothesis to a single competing model and treat that one alternative suggestion as a substitute for all the remaining options.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Early in the twentieth century, the physicist Lord Rutherford, best known for his landmark discovery of the atomic nucleus, famously pronounced, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Lots of data gets collected through the latest technology today, and not all of it is about people's consumer preferences.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“One reason I find anthropic reasoning troublesome is that no one yet knows what might be essential to any possible form of life or even to structures such as galaxies that might support it. I am not as confident as others seem to be that any form of life would be similar to ours.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Why should we have perfect senses that can directly perceive everything? The big lesson of physics over the centuries is how much is hidden from our view. From”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Recall that the Milky Way is a disk galaxy, meaning most of the stars and gas lie in a thin disk, about 130,000 light-years across but only roughly 2,000 light-years in thickness. The Sun is located at a distance of about 27,000 light-years from the galactic center, and happens at this moment to be close to the galactic midplane—less than 100 light-years away. It is also at the edge of a spiral arm.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Ordinary matter’s interaction with electromagnetic radiation is responsible for this collapse. An important distinction between ordinary matter and dark matter is that ordinary matter can radiate.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“COBE discovered the quantum fluctuations that were generated when the Universe was roughly the size of a grain of sand, and which are ultimately the origin of you,”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“The supercontinent Pangaea split in the Mesozoic era into the continents we see today, and resulted in extensive land movement over time.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Solar-sized star formation requires extremely cool temperatures—tens of kelvins. Overly high temperature gas never gets sufficiently concentrated to ignite nuclear burning.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“The reason ordinary matter lies in a disk and not a small ball is the matter’s net rotation, which it inherited from the gas clouds that acquired angular momentum (momentum of rotation) in their formation. Cooling lowers resistance to collapse in one direction, but collapse in the two others is prevented or at least lessened by the centrifugal force of the rotation of the gas it contains. Without friction or some other force acting on it, a marble that you set in motion around a circular track will keep rolling forever. Similarly, once matter is rotating, it will keep its angular momentum until some torque acts on it or it can dissipate angular momentum along with energy. Because angular momentum is conserved, gaseous regions cannot collapse as efficiently in the radial direction (as defined by rotation) as in the vertical one. Though matter might collapse in the direction parallel to the axis of rotation, it won’t collapse in the radial direction unless angular momentum is somehow removed. This differential collapse is what gives rise to the relatively flat disk of the Milky Way, which we observe stretching across the sky. It is also what gives rise to the disks of most spiral galaxies.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“calculations”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Given that they’ve never seen (or felt or smelled) it, many people I’ve spoken to are surprised at the existence of dark matter and find it quite mysterious—or even wonder if it’s some sort of mistake. People ask how it can possibly be that most matter—about five times the amount of ordinary matter—cannot be detected with conventional telescopes. Personally, I would expect quite the opposite (though admittedly not everyone sees it this way). It would be even more mysterious to me if the matter we can see with our eyes is all the matter that exists. Why should we have perfect senses that can directly perceive everything? The big lesson of physics over the centuries is how much is hidden from our view. From this perspective, the question is really why the stuff we do know about should constitute as much of the energy density of the Universe as it does.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Nothing about our world is inconsistent with the existence of a multiverse.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“But the Universe is by definition a single entity and in principle its components interact. This book explores”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“see it. Dinosaurs, on the other hand . . . I doubt I need to explain dinosaurs. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates from 231 to 66 million years ago. Though both dark matter and dinosaurs are independently fascinating, you might reasonably assume that this unseen physical substance and this popular biological icon are entirely unrelated. And this might well be the case. But the Universe is by definition a single entity and in principle its components interact.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“I was awestruck and enchanted not only by our current knowledge of our environment — local, solar, galactic, and universal — but also by how much we ultimately hope to understand from our random tiny perch here on Earth. I was also overwhelmed by the many connections among the pieces that ultimately allow us to exist. To be clear, mine is a deeply unreligious viewpoint. I don’t feel the need to assign a purpose or meaning, yet I can’t help but feel the emotions we tend to call religious as we come to understand the immensity of the universe, our past, and how it all fits together. It offers anyone some perspective when dealing with the foolishness of everyday life.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“When a species can’t adapt or relocate to a suitable habitat, it doesn’t stand a chance. In our rapidly changing environment, people would do well to take this into consideration. Technological advances notwithstanding, the lesson is probably relevant when evaluating the likely geopolitical implications of today’s changing environment.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“if there is a conventional explanation for an observation, it is almost always the right one. Radical departures should be accepted only when they explain phenomena that older ideas fail to accommodate. In”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Although we might experience the illusion of a self-contained environment, every day at sunrise and every night when the Moon and the far more distant stars come into view, we are reminded that our planet is not alone. Stars and nebulae are further evidence that we exist in a galaxy that resides within a far larger Universe. We orbit within a Solar System where the seasons remind us further of our orientation and placement within it. Our very measurement of time in terms of days and years signifies the relevance of our surroundings.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“In fact, essentially most of the great movie disaster scenarios (with the exception of a zombie apocalypse) follow in the wake of a sufficiently big impact.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“So, in a sense, looking under the lamppost for dark matter is appropriate.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“My second concern about Occam’s Razor is just a matter of fact. The world is more complicated than any of us would have been likely to conceive. Some particles and properties don’t seem necessary to any physical processes that matter—at least according to what we’ve deduced so far. Yet they exist. Sometimes the simplest model just isn’t the correct one.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“Perhaps a quarter of meteoroid impacts have led to potentially profitable deposits—at least half of which have already been exploited.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“we currently live in a region—300 light-years across—called the Local Bubble, which is a vacuum-like domain with very low hydrogen density within the interstellar medium in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“the continuously habitable zone, which is the region that could have supported liquid water over the lifetime of the planet. According to current climate models, the continuous habitable zone is a more restricted region within fifteen percent of the Earth-Sun distance.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“the young Sun’s energy output was probably about 70 percent of what it is today. With the Sun’s initially lower luminosity, even the water that did form wouldn’t have been in a liquid phase without some other explanation—a quandary known as “The Faint Sun Paradox.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“The Arizona team named the crater after an unfortunately hard-to-pronounce small nearby fishing harbor, Chicxulub Puerto, which is located above the center of the structure. The term, which is pronounced CHICK-shuh-lube, is sometimes translated as the devil’s tail—appropriately enough for the imposing feature that Walter Alvarez dubbed the “crater of doom.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

“it was not scientists, but a reporter—Carlos Byars of the Houston Chronicle—who first made the connection. After listening to Hildebrand present the Arizona group’s research at a scientific meeting, Byars told him about Penfield’s earlier discovery of a potential impact crater—helping the scientists bring the mystery of the missing crater to its remarkably satisfying conclusion.”
― Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe