Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

Enjoy the top 117 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Lawrence M. Krauss.

“Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you cant even measure them.”
— Lawrence M. Krauss —

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe ... We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Lack of comfort means we are on the threshold of new insights.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“[I]n science we have to be particularly cautious about 'why' questions. When we ask, 'Why?' we usually mean 'How?' If we can answer the latter, that generally suffices for our purposes. For example, we might ask: 'Why is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?' but what we really probably mean is, 'How is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun?' That is, we are interested in what physical processes led to the Earth ending up in its present position. 'Why' implicitly suggests purpose, and when we try to understand the solar system in scientific terms, we do not generally ascribe purpose to it.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“The real thing that physics tell us about the universe is that it's big, rare event happens all the time - including life - and that doesn't mean it's special.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“One of the most poetic facts I know about the universe is that essentially every atom in your body was once inside a star that exploded. Moreover, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than did those in your right. We are all, literally, star children, and our bodies made of stardust.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

I should point out, nevertheless, that even though incomplete data can lead to a false picture, this is far different from the (false) picture obtained by those who choose to ignore empirical data to invent a picture of reality (young earthers, for example), or those who instead require the existence of something for which there is no observable evidence whatsoever (like divine intelligence) to reconcile their view of creation with their a priori prejudices, or worse still, those who cling to fairly tales about nature that presume the answers before questions can even be asked.

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“No one intuitively understands quantum mechanics because all of our experience involves a world of classical phenomena where, for example, a baseball thrown from pitcher to catcher seems to take just one path, the one described by Newton's laws of motion. Yet at a microscopic level, the universe behaves quite differently.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

It never ceases to amaze me that every second of every day, more than 6,000 billion neutrinos coming from nuclear reactions inside the sun whiz through my body, almost all of which will travel right through the earth without interruption.

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“The root cause of the looming energy problem - and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health - is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“The Bible is full of dubious scientific impossibilities, from Jonah living inside a whale, to the sun standing still in the sky for Joshua.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“I don't know if science and reason will ultimately help guide humanity to a better and more peaceful future, but I am certain that this belief is part of what keeps the 'Star Trek' fandom going.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“To the extent that we even understand string theory, it may imply a massive number of possible different universes with different laws of physics in each universe, and there may be no way of distinguishing between them or saying why the laws of physics are the way they are. And if I can predict anything, then I haven't explained anything.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview with regards to the claimed miracles of the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

Life has survived for more than three billion years because it is robust, and almost no mutations can easily outwit the defense mechanisms built up through eons of exposure to potential pathogens.

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“By no definition of any modern scientist is intelligent design science, and it's a waste of our students' time to subject them to it.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Reality doesn't owe us comfort.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes humans objects in a cruel experiment whereby we are created to be sick and commanded to be well. -CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God. Without science, everything is a miracle. With science, there remains the possibility that nothing is. Religious belief in this case becomes less and less necessary, and also less and less relevant.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Edwin Hubble, who continues to give me great faith in humanity, because he started out as a lawyer and then became an astronomer.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“One thing is certain, however. The metaphysical 'rule', which is held as an ironclad conviction by those whom I have debated the issue of creation, namely that "out of nothing nothing comes," has no foundation in science. Arguing that it is self-evident, unwavering, and unassailable is like arguing, as Darwin falsely did, when he made the suggestion that the origin of life was beyond the domain of science by building an analogy with the incorrect claim that matter cannot be created or destroyed. All it represents is an unwillingness to recognize the simple fact that nature may be cleverer than philosophers or theologians.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

If the universe doesn't care about us and if we're an accident in a remote corner of the universe, in some sense it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us; we provide our own meaning.

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Andromeda was discovered to be another island universe, another spiral galaxy almost identical to our own, and one of the more than 100 billion other galaxies that, we now know, exist in our observable universe.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“The date here is very interesting, because, as far as I can determine, the first Star Trek episode to refer to a black hole, which it called a "black star," was aired in 1967 before Wheeler ever used the term in public.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“While the nature of this radiation will give no information whatsoever on what fell into the black hole,”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun - the plane of the earth around the sun - the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe. The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is (s)imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“For those who find it remarkable that we live in a universe of Something, just wait. Nothingness is heading on a collision course right toward us!”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“If you ask religious believers why they believe, you may find a few "sophisticated" theologians who will talk about God as the "Ground of all Isness," or as "a metaphor for interpersonal fellowship" or some such evasion. But the majority of believers leap, more honestly and vulnerably, to a version of the argument from design or the argument from first cause. Philosophers of the caliber of David Hume didn't need to rise from their armchairs to demonstrate the fatal weakness of all such argument: they beg the question of the Creator's origin.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“More often than you might think, teaching science is inseparable from teaching doubt.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Without science, everything is a miracle.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“The lack of understanding of something is not evidence for God. It's evidence of a lack of understanding.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a 1 percent bit of pollution in a universe ... we are completely irrelevant.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

As a scientist, I don't believe anything. Science shouldn't use the word belief. There are things more likely and less likely. Science can say nothing with absolute certainty.

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“It is a shame when nonsense can substitute for fact with impunity.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“We all trust each other to some extent. We have to rely on experts to some extent, but we should learn to be sceptical.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Science is not just there for technology. It's part of what addressing who you are in the universe and understanding your place in the cosmos. Good art, good literature, good music - all of that is for that and science is a part of it.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

The fact is that people would rather cling when they're afraid of something to a priori beliefs than rather open their minds about it.

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“Now, since the time of Newton there had been a debate about whether light was a wave
that is, a traveling disturbance in some background medium
or a particle, which travels regardless of the presence of a background medium. The observation of Maxwell that electromagnetic waves must exist and that their speed was identical to that of light ended the debate: light was an electromagnetic wave.”

— Lawrence M. Krauss

“My area of research is something that in all fairness has no practical usability whatsoever and the thing is I'm often asked to apologize for that. It is interesting to me that people ask 'what's the point of doing that if it's not useful?' But they never ask that, or do they very rarely ask that about art or literature or music. Those things are not gonna produce a better toaster.”