John D. Barrow Quotes

“History is full of people who thought they were right
absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And because history never seems like history when you are living through it, it is tempting for us to think the same.”

— John D. Barrow

There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history.

— John D. Barrow

If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of all the physical processes in which the fine-structure constant enters, then we would be stymied. Fortunately, we do not need to know everything before we can know something.

— John D. Barrow

“Prior to then it was believed that black holes were just cosmic cookie monsters, swallowing everything that came within their gravitational clutches.”

— John D. Barrow

“Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it
-Barrow's Uncertainty Principle”

— John D. Barrow

“Nothing is higher than heaven; nothing is beyond the walls of the world; nothing is lower than hell, or more glorious than virtue.48”

— John D. Barrow

“Navy: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision. Civilian: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to South to avoid a collision. Navy: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert your course. Civilian: No, I say again, divert your course. Navy: This is the aircraft carrier Enterprise. We are a large warship of the US Navy. Divert your course now!! Civilian: This is a lighthouse. Your call. Canadian naval radio conversation38”

— John D. Barrow

I love cosmology: there's something uplifting about viewing the entire universe as a single object with a certain shape. What entity, short of God, could be nobler or worthier of man's attention than the cosmos itself? Forget about interest rates, forget about war and murder, let's talk about space. Rudy Rucker21

— John D. Barrow

Since only a narrow range of the allowed values for, say, the fine structure constant will permit observers to exist in the Universe, we must find ourselves in the narrow range of possibilities which permit them, no matter how improbable they are. We must ask for the conditional probability of observing constants to take particular ranges, given that other features of the Universe, like its age, satisfy necessary conditions for life.

— John D. Barrow

“There was no 'before' the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.”

— John D. Barrow

“There is no reason that the universe should be designed for our convenience.”

— John D. Barrow

“Once upon a time when there was no time.”

— John D. Barrow

“We are just strings of quarks living in a suburb of the local density maximum of the universe.”

— John D. Barrow

If all the stars and galaxies in the universe today were smoothed out into a uniform sea of atoms, there would only be about one atom in every cubic meter of space.

— John D. Barrow

“Once upon a time there was no Time.”

— John D. Barrow

Some things are as they are regardless of what they were.

— John D. Barrow

“What cannot be known is more revealing than what can.”

— John D. Barrow

“We can never know the origins of the universe. The deepest secrets are the ones that keep themselves.”

— John D. Barrow

“All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is" ... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of our inability to capture all with language and symbol-all have their counterparts in the quest for the nature of Platonic mathematics.”

— John D. Barrow

“We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past.”

— John D. Barrow

When we try to observe things that are very small, the act of observation itself will significantly disturb the state we are seeking to measure.

— John D. Barrow

“Apparently, a great deal of dark, unseen material exists, whose gravitational pull is responsible for the motions of the stars and galaxies that we see.”

— John D. Barrow