Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“Asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless, according to the no-boundary proposal, because there is no notion of time available to refer to. It would be like asking what lies south of the South Pole.”---Stephen Hawking

“Perhaps we should not be too surprised that nature sometimes appears counterintuitive to a tribe of observant, carbon-based ape descendants roaming around on the surface of a rocky world orbiting an unremarkable middle-aged star at the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy.”
― Brian Cox Jeff Forshaw, Why Does E=mc²?

“As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so”
― Freeman Dyson

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“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
― Max Planck

“There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. [...] Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. [...] If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing.”
― Lee Smolin, Three Roads To Quantum Gravity

''The art of knowing, is knowing what to ignore.'' - Rumi

“I’ve never started a poem whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” - Robert Frost

“The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
― Michel Foucault

“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“It was autumn, the season of pomegranate and quince. The scent of roasted nuts and barbecued corn from the street vendors, of mud-packed alleyways, gasoline fumes, and concrete roads—I hadn’t known, until I encountered them again, how much I’d missed the city.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird