Forces of Nature Quotes

“[Real scientist are delighted when they find out they are wrong. And to me that is one of the greatest gifts that a scientific education can bring.] There are too many people in this world who want to be right. And too few who just want to know.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“We must come to terms with being of no cosmic significance, and this means jettisoning our personal and collective egos and valuing what we have. We can no longer assume the platform of gods, or dream of a unique place in their hearts. Science has forced us to look fixedly into an infinite universe, and its volume dilutes special pleading to a vanishingly small and pathetic whimper. And yet what’s left is better. No monument to the gods is as magnificent as the story of our planet; of the origin and evolution of life on the rare Earth and the rise of a fledgling civilisation taking its first steps into the dark. We stand related to every one of Darwin’s endless, most beautiful forms, each of us connected at some branch in the unbroken chain of life stretching back 4 billion years. We share more in common with bacteria than we do with any living things out there amongst the stars, should they exist, and they are more worthy of our attention. Build cathedrals in praise of bacteria; we are on our own, and as the dominant intellect we are responsible for our planet in its magnificent and fragile entirety.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“Science is delighted frustration. It is about asking questions, to which the answers may be unavailable – now, or perhaps ever. It is about noticing regularities, asserting that these regularities must have natural explanations and searching for those explanations.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“[All good research scientists understand that] no position is unassailable. There are no absolute truth in science. Authority counts for nothing when contradicted by nature.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“You have to get old because of the geometry of spacetime.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“Nature is beautiful, deep down, and we want to glimpse that underlying beauty. Let’s not guess. Let’s not make something up. Let’s think, observe, experiment, pay attention, look for similarities and differences across the natural world and try to understand them. Most of all, let’s be comfortable, delighted, exhilarated when faced with the unknown and devote our time to exploring the infinite territory beyond. There are treasures beyond imagination in the simplest things, if we care to look closely.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“The interplay between the laws of Nature, which are simple and deeply symmetric, and history, which is long and messy, produces the complex world we inhabit.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“The entirety of our observable universe is an irrelevant pocket of dust in the wider cosmos, which extends way beyond the visible horizon and is conceivably infinite in extent, and I think society has come to terms with this sort of physical irrelevance. It’s hard to look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image, containing over ten thousand galaxies in a piece of the night sky you’d cover very comfortably with an outstretched thumb, and feel important. Our spiritual demotion, however, is an entirely different matter. By spiritual demotion, I mean the realisation that our very existence has no more significance than our physical location. This is surely the case if life is the inevitable result of the action of the same set of natural laws that formed the stars and planets. Earth must be one of countless billions of living worlds in the Milky Way galaxy alone. This is absolutely not to suggest that our civilisation is not worth celebrating and fighting to preserve – it is my view that civilisations may be extremely rare, even if life is common.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“There are three known planets in the PSR B1257 system, which have been named Draugr, Poltergeist and Phobetor. Poltergeist was the first to be discovered. I know, I was curious about their names as well. Poletrgeist means "pounding ghost". The draugr are the unded in Norse legends who live in their graves. And Phobetor is the personification of nightmares, and the son of Nyx, Greek goddess of the night.
Astronomers are goths.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“There are some questions about Nature that have the answer ‘because that’s the way our Universe is’.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“As a physicist, I have to observe that snowflakes are four-dimensional objects; their structure can only be understood with reference to their history, and their history is encoded visibly into their structure.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“Be a child. Pay attention to small things. Don’t be led by prejudice. Take nobody’s word for anything. Observe and think. Ask simple questions. Seek simple answers. That’s what we’ll do in this book, and hopefully, by the end, you’ll agree with Scott Carpenter.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“Galileo would have been at home on Twitter.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“THE FIRST DAY OR SO WE ALL POINTED TO OUR COUNTRIES. THE THIRD OR FOURTH DAY WE WERE POINTING TO OUR CONTINENTS. BY THE FIFTH DAY WE WERE AWARE OF ONLY ONE EARTH.’ — SULTAN BIN SALMAN BIN ABDULAZIZ AL-SAUD, SPACE SHUTTLE STS-51-G”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature

“There are too many people in this world who want to be right, and too few who just want to know.”
― Brian Cox, Forces of Nature