The End of Everything Quotes

“Everything you see is in the past, as far as you’re concerned. If you look up at the Moon, you’re seeing a little over a second ago. The Sun is more than eight minutes in the past. And the stars you see in the night sky are deep in the past, from just a few years to millennia.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“In fact, it’s possible that the only reason we can remember the past and not the future is that “things can only get worse” is a truth so universal that it shapes reality as we know it.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“We are a species poised between an awareness of our ultimate insignificance and an ability to reach far beyond our mundane lives, into the void, to solve the most fundamental mysteries of the cosmos.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“You may have heard that "we are made of stardust" (or "star stuff" if you're Sagan), and this is absolutely true if we measure by mass. All the heavier elements in your body—oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, etc.—were produced later, either in the centers of stars or in stellar explosions. But hydrogen, while the lightest, is also the most abundant element in your body by number. So, yes, you hold within you the dust of ancient generations of stars. But you are also, to a very large fraction, built out of by-products of the actual Big Bang. Carl Sagan's larger statement still stands, and to an even larger degree: "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“There is simply no easy way to hold infinite space in a finite brain.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“It also means that cosmology doesn’t really have a well-defined concept of “now.” Or rather, the “now” you experience is highly specific to you, to where you are and to what you are doing. What does it mean to say “that supernova is going off now” if we see the light of it now, and we can watch the star explode now, but that light has been traveling for millions of years? The thing we’re watching is essentially fully in the past, but the “now” for that exploded star is unobservable to us, and we won’t receive any knowledge of it for millions of years, which makes it, to us, not “now,” but the future.
When we think of the universe as existing in spacetime—a kind of all-encompassing universal grid in which space is three axes and time is a fourth—we can just think of the past and the future as distant points on the same fabric, stretching across the cosmos from its infancy to its end. To someone sitting at a different point on this fabric, an event that is part of the future to us might be the distant past to them. And the light (or any information) from an event that we won’t see for millennia is already streaming across spacetime toward us “now.” Is that event in the future, or the past, or, perhaps, both? It all depends on perspective.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Every attempt to bend some part of the world to our will creates disorder somewhere else, often in the form of heat.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“In the meantime, we'll continue on, making new pathc through the woods to see what we might find hiding there. Someday, deep in the unknown wilderness of the distant future, the Sun will expand, the Earth will die, and the cosmos itself will come to an end. In the meantime, we have the entire universe to explore, pushing our creativity to its limits to find new ways of knowing our cosmic home. We can learn and create extraordinary things, and we can share them with each other. And as long as we are thinking creatures, we will never stop asking: "What comes next?”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Whether or not we subscribe to any particular religion or philosophy, it would be hard to deny that knowing our cosmic destiny must have some impact on how we think about our existence, or even how we live our lives. If we want to know whether what we do here ultimately matters, the first thing we ask is: how will it come out in the end? If we find the answer to that question, it leads immediately to the next: what does this mean for us now? Do we still have to take the trash out next Tuesday if the universe is going to die someday?
I’ve done my own scouring of theological and philosophical texts, and while I learned many fascinating things from my studies, unfortunately the meaning of existence wasn’t one of them. I may just not have been cut out for it. The questions and answers that have always drawn me in most strongly are the ones that can be answered with scientific observation, mathematics, and physical evidence. As appealing as it sometimes seemed to have the whole story and meaning of life written down for me once and for all in a book, I knew I would only ever really be able to accept the kind of truth I could rederive mathematically.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“It’s not that it can’t be true, but that if it is, nothing makes sense, and we might as well give up on trying to understand the universe at all.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“We know it had a beginning. About 13.8 billion years ago, the universe went from a state of unimaginable density, to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball, to a cooling, humming fluid of matter and energy, which laid down the seeds for the stars and galaxies we see around us today. Planets formed, galaxies collided, light filled the cosmos. A rocky planet orbiting an ordinary star near the edge of a spiral galaxy developed life, computers, political science, and spindly bipedal mammals who read physics books for fun.
But what’s next? What happens at the end of the story? The death of a planet, or even a star, might in principle be survivable. In billions of years, humanity could still conceivably exist, in some perhaps unrecognizable form, venturing out to distant reaches of space, finding new homes and building new civilizations. The death of the universe, though, is final. What does it mean for us, for everything, if it will all eventually come to an end?”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything:

“And from time to time, the fluctuation doesn’t produce a Big Bang, it just re-creates last Tuesday—specifically, that moment when you stubbed your toe on the kitchen table and spilled an entire cup of coffee on the floor. That moment. And every other moment of your life. And everyone else’s.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“The thing we’re watching is essentially fully in the past, but the “now” for that exploded star is unobservable to us, and we won’t receive any knowledge of it for millions of years, which makes it, to us, not “now,” but the future.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Many other physicists get a little blasé about the vastness of the cosmos and forces too powerful to comprehend. You can reduce it all to mathematics, tweak some equations, and get on with your day. But the shock and vertigo of the recognition of the fragility of everything, and my own powerlessness in it, has left its mark on me. There’s something about taking the opportunity to wade into that cosmic perspective that is both terrifying and hopeful, like holding a newborn infant and feeling the delicate balance of the tenuousness of life and the potential for not-yet-imagined greatness. It is said that astronauts returning from space carry with them a changed perspective on the world, the “overview effect,” in which, having seen the Earth from above, they can fully perceive how fragile our little oasis is and how unified we ought to be as a species, as perhaps the only thinking beings in the cosmos.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“What therefore gravity hath joined together, let not a cosmological constant put asunder.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“As an aside, the fact that pretty much all the hydrogen in the universe was produced in the first few minutes means that a pretty large fraction of what you and I are made of has been hanging around the universe in one form or another for almost as long as the universe has been here.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Acknowledging an ultimate end gives us context, meaning, even hope, and allows us, paradoxically, to step back from our petty day-to-day concerns and simultaneously live more fully in the moment.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Today, we are finding that the particle physics models we’ve developed through decades of rigorous testing in the best Earthly laboratories are incomplete, and we’re getting these clues from the sky. Studying the motions and distributions of other galaxies—cosmic conglomerations like our own Milky Way that contain billions or trillions of stars—has pointed us to major gaps in our theories of particle physics.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Perhaps the promise of a final judgment serves to somehow make up for the unfortunate fact that our imperfect, unfair, arbitrary physical world cannot be relied upon to make existence good and worthwhile for those who live right. In the same way a novel can be redeemed or retroactively ruined by its concluding chapter, many religious philosophies seem to need the world to end, and to end “justly,” for it to have had meaning in the first place.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“So how do we see so many things that are so far away that they’re receding from us at more than the speed of light, and, in fact, always have been? If something is moving away at more than the speed of light, a light beam emitted from it is getting farther away from us, not closer. The trick is that the light we’re picking up left the source long ago, when the universe was smaller and the expansion was actually slowing. So a light beam that started out being carried by the expansion of space away from us (even though it was emitted in our direction) eventually was able to “catch up” as the expansion slowed and it reached a part of the universe that was close enough for the recession speed to be less than the speed of light. It entered our Hubble radius from the outside.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Do we still have to take the trash out next Tuesday if the universe is going to die someday?”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“As for me, I love it all. I first learned cosmology was a thing when I was about ten years old, through encounters with books and lectures by Stephen Hawking. He was talking about black holes and warped spacetime and the Big Bang and all sorts of stuff that made me feel like my brain was doing backflips. I could not get enough. When I found out that Hawking described himself as a cosmologist, I knew that was what I wanted to be.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“If every state the universe has ever been in could be revisited through random fluctuations, that means this moment right now could happen again, exactly the same in every detail. Not only could it happen again, it could happen again infinitely many times.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“But the shock and vertigo of the recognition of the fragility of everything, and my own powerlessness in it, has left its mark on me.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“In some ways, this is the ultimate goal of theoretical physics: to find a way to take all the complicated messy stuff we see around us and rearrange it into something pretty and compact and simple that just looks complicated because of our weird low-energy perspective.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“As appealing as it sometimes seemed to have the whole story and meaning of life written down for me once and for all in a book, I knew I would only ever really be able to accept the kind of truth I could rederive mathematically. LOOKING UP Over the millennia since humanity’s first ponderings of its mortality, the philosophical implications of the question haven’t changed, but the tools we have to answer it have.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Unfortunately, as far as observations are concerned, dark energy doesn’t give us a lot to hold on to. It is, as far as we can tell, invisible, undetectable in laboratory experiments, completely uniformly distributed through space, and only really noticeable at all by its indirect effects over scales much larger than our galaxy.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“The alternative to recollapse is eternal expansion, which, like immortality, only sounds good until you really think about it.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“It can stay tucked in there for a long time - plenty long enough for the growth of galaxies, the birth of stars, the evolution of life, and the production and distribution of more superhero movies than anyone could ever really want [...]”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“Fortunately, if we need weirdness in physics, we can always rely on the quantum realm to serve us up something good.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything