Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes. I mean the Universe. But we cannot understand it if we do not learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it its written. This book is written in the mathematical language . .
. without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it, without which one wonders in vain through a dark labyrinth. |
| GALILEO GALILEI (1564-1642) |
It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. But space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world. |
| BLAISE PASCAL (1623-1662) |
The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The wall are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not
know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. |
Master Cosmologist ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955) |
Why did the Universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, so that even now, ten thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical
rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the Universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size. |
The 2000's Master Cosmologist STEPHEN W. HAWKING (1942-) |
