Probable Impossibilities Quotes

“Now it is well known in the science of order and disorder that, other things being equal, larger spaces allow for more disorder, essentially because there are more places to scatter things. Equivalently, smaller spaces have more order. As a consequence, in the Carroll-Guth picture, the order of the universe was at a maximum at the Big Bang, with order decreasing both before and after. Recall that the forward direction of time is the movement of order to disorder. Thus the future points away from the Big Bang in both directions of time. A person living in the contracting phase of the universe sees the Big Bang in her past, just as we do. When she dies, the universe is larger than when she was born, just as it will be for us.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“the birth of our universe was a one-performance event, and we weren’t there in the audience.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“My granddaughter asked me how far away the Sun is. That question I couldn’t answer with apples and oranges. But if you traveled to the Sun on a high-speed train, say at two hundred miles per hour, it would take about fifty years. She nodded. To get to the nearest star beyond the Sun on the same train would take about fifteen million years.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“Man] is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“energy”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“with the behavior of the universe before the Big Bang a nearly mirror image of its behavior after the Big Bang. Until fourteen billion years ago, the universe was contracting. It reached a minimum size at the Big Bang (which we call t = 0) and has been expanding ever since, like a Slinky that falls to the floor, reaches a maximum compression upon impact, and then bounces back to larger dimensions.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“What we call the “future” is the condition of increasing mess; what we call the “past” is increasing tidiness.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“Carroll and other physicists believe that order is intimately connected to the “arrow” of time. In particular, the forward direction of time is determined by the movement of order to disorder.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“Physicists believe that in this quantum era, the entire universe we see today was far smaller than a single atom—roughly a million billion billion times smaller (assuming the universe went through an inflationary epoch). The temperature was nearly a million billion billion billion degrees. And time and space churned like boiling water. Of course, such things are unimaginable. But theoretical physicists try to imagine them with pencil and paper and mathematics. Somehow, time as we know it emerged in that fantastically dense nugget. Or perhaps time already existed, but what appeared was the arrow of time, the direction toward the future.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“Because of the hazy, nondefinite character of quantum physics (called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), at the dimensions of the Planck length, space and time churn and seethe, with the distance between any two points wildly fluctuating from moment to moment, and time randomly speeding and slowing, perhaps even going backward and forward. In such a situation, time and space no longer exist in a way that has meaning to us.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“The universe could be infinite in extent, but we cannot see beyond a certain distance because there hasn’t been enough time since the Big Bang for light to have traveled from there to here.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“I would suggest adding one more category at the very top of the pyramid, even above self-actualization: imagination and exploration. The need to imagine new possibilities, the need to reach out beyond ourselves and understand the world around us. Wasn’t that need part of what propelled Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama and Einstein? Not only to help ourselves with physical survival or personal relationships or self-discovery, but to know and comprehend this strange cosmos we find ourselves in. The need to explore the really big questions asked by the quantum cosmologists. How did it all begin? Far beyond our own lives, far beyond our community or our nation or planet Earth or even our solar system. How did the universe begin? It is a luxury to be able to ask such questions. It is also a human necessity.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“Most of us aim in our short century or less to create a comfortable existence within the tiny rooms of our lives. We eat, we sleep, we get jobs, we pay the bills, we have lovers and children. Some of us build cities or make art. But with the luxury of true freedom of mind, there are larger concerns. Look at the sky. Does space go on forever, to infinity? Or is it finite but without boundary or edge, like the surface of a sphere? Either answer is disturbing, and unfathomable. Where did our Sun and Earth come from? Where did we come from? Quickly, we realize how limited we are in our experience of the world. What we see and feel with our bodies, caught midway between atoms and stars, is but a small swath of the spectrum, a sliver of reality.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“Decision making is such a delicate and complex mental process. If causality is only approximate, we don’t know where the tipping point lies, where the decision is so fragile that it appears without definite cause.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“Causality within the universe is not fundamental,” says Page. “It is an approximate concept derived from our experience with the world.” Strict causality could be an illusion, a way for our brains, and our science, to make sense of the world.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“As Vilenkin said to me, quantum physics can produce a universe without cause—just as quantum physics shows how electrons can change orbits in atoms without cause. There are no definite cause-and-effect relationships in the quantum world, only probabilities”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“It is a mystery to me,” he told me, “why we have quantum mechanics when there is only one state of the universe.” In other words, why should there be probabilities of alternative conditions of our universes when we inhabit only one condition? And do those other potential conditions actually exist in other universes somewhere?”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“Says Carroll: “When I came to understand that the reason I can remember the past but not the future is ultimately related to conditions at the Big Bang, that was a startling epiphany.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“The boundary between the known and the unknown constantly shifts. The other side is the “mysterious.” That other side intrigues us, it stimulates us, it provokes us, it haunts us. And it produces new science, and new art.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings

“By the “mysterious,” I do not think Einstein was referring to something fearful or supernatural. I believe he was speaking about the boundary between the known and the unknown. Standing at that boundary is an exhilarating experience. And it is a deeply human experience—concerning what the human mind understands and what that mind does not yet understand.”
― Alan Lightman, Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings