Universal Quotes

“One of the great joys of science is to understand something for the first time–to really understand, which is very different from, and far more satisfying than, knowing the facts.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“In engineering or medical science, a deep understanding of uncertainty can be a matter of life and death. In politics, over-confidence is often the norm; uncertainty is seen as weakness when really it is a vital part of decision making. In this respect, science delivers an important lesson in humility. In”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“questions by doing science. We will observe, measure and think. One of the great joys of science is to understand something for the first time–to really understand, which is very different from, and far more satisfying than, knowing the facts.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“perhaps strangest of all, at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius, there are stars known as the S-stars with extreme orbits around a dense, compact object. Using Newton’s laws, the object is measured to be over 4 million times the mass of our Sun. Astronomers believe this exotic object to be a supermassive black hole, 26,000 light years from Earth, devouring dust and gas from the rich clouds that drift through the dense central regions and spewing radiation out across the galaxy.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, is 1.5 trillion times the mass of the Sun.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“the Sun is about 330,000 times more massive than the Earth.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“Estimating the uncertainty on a result is often as important as the result itself. It is only when we are aware of our ignorance that we can judge best how to use knowledge. In engineering or medical science, a deep understanding of uncertainty can be a matter of life and death. In politics, over-confidence is often the norm; uncertainty is seen as weakness when really it is a vital part of decision making. In this respect, science delivers an important lesson in humility.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“project) is used in smoke detectors.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“The alpha emitter plutonium-238 is used to power heart pacemakers, and americium-241 (which is made inside nuclear reactors and is a by-product of the Manhattan”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“silicon. In the atmosphere they are nitrogen and oxygen, while the core is predominantly made of iron.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“the most abundant atoms in the Earth’s crust are oxygen and silicon.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“hydrogen; over 90% of the atoms in the Sun are hydrogen (the remainder being almost entirely helium).”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“The most commonly occurring type of atom in the Universe is hydrogen;”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“atoms, from the Sun to a lump of rock to the air we breathe, and that there are 98 different types of atom that occur naturally on the Earth (humans have managed to build a further 20 different types). These are all listed in the periodic table,”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“We know that all ordinary matter is made up of”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“all things are made of atoms–”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“These studies indicate that around 4.2% of the Sun’s total mass is helium that has been produced as a result of nuclear fusion.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“Pressure waves in the Sun cause it to ring like a bell, and analysing the way that it vibrates allows for its composition to be deduced.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“can estimate the age of the Sun by calculating how long it would take to make that amount of helium.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“If we can measure the amount of helium in the Sun that has been produced by fusion reactions in its core, and if we know the rate of those reactions, then we”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“The Sun shines by releasing energy through the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. Fusion also took place in the first few minutes in the life of the Universe, creating the primordial helium that constitutes a quarter of the visible matter present in the Universe today (the remaining three quarters being hydrogen).”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“the current best measurement of the age of the Earth is 4.55 billion years,”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“the Moon is 4.53 billion years old.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“The youngest Moon rocks are found to be 3.2 billion years old; the oldest are 4.5 billion years old.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“the radiometric dating of rocks and zircon grains allows us to claim that the Earth is at least 4.4 billion years old.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“the Atlantic, between northern Brazil and northwest Africa, is currently expanding at a rate of 2.5 cm per year, which is the speed at which fingernails grow.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“Quasars are active galactic nuclei that most probably originate as matter accretes onto super-massive black holes in the centres of galaxies, and they are among the brightest objects and therefore the most distant we can see.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“The oldest living tree is a bristlecone pine that lives in the White Mountains in California. It is–as of 2016–5066 years old.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“the Earth is made out of heavy chemical elements like iron, carbon and oxygen: elements that are made inside stars.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos

“The age of our Sun is estimated at 4.6 billion years, and similar stars are predicted to live for around 10 billion years before they die.”
― Brian Cox, Universal: A Guide to the Cosmos