Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

Science simply forces us to revise what is sensible to accommodate the universe, rather than vice versa.

Now some people say, "Well, if there's virtual particles there it's really not nothing," but there are no real particles. You try and measure things there, there's nothing, but those virtual particles can give space energy and in fact we've discovered to our great surprise—it won the Nobel prize two years ago—that empty space has energy, and if you put energy in empty space, then it's really strange because it's not like the normal energy... it's not gravitationally attractive, it's actually repulsive, and we've discovered the expansion of the universe is not slowing down like any sensible universe should do. It's actually speeding up... because it's dominated by the energy of empty space.

The forces that govern our experience, electromagnetism and gravity, are blind to the distinction between left and right. No process moderated by either force can turn something such as your right hand into its mirror image. I cannot

We need to live our experience as it is and with our eyes open. The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.

escape the shackles of our prior experience to uncover profound and beautiful simplifications and predictions

But common sense is deceptive precisely because it is based on common experience.

Science is empirical: knowing the answer is nothing. Testing your knowledge means everything.

It's hard to imagine a more extraordinary claim than that some hidden intelligence created a universe of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each containing more than a hundred billion stars, and then waited more than 13.7 billion years until a planet in a remote corner of a single galaxy evolved an atmosphere sufficiently oxygenated to support life, only to then reveal his existence to an assortment of violent tribal groups before disappearing again.

But what we've discovered is that, in fact... the total energy of the universe could be zero, which is a first clue that maybe it could come from nothing. ...In physics, ...once you include gravity, there's positive energy and negative energy, and our universe appears as if its total energy could be precisely zero, which is the first hint that maybe it could come from nothing. That, and the great discovery... that namely empty space, you take a region of space, get rid of all the particles and all the radiation ...so there's nothing there. That empty space weighs something, and we don't understand why.

"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."

[O]ne of the great things about science is it forces us to refine our idea of what's common sense. It forces us to have our beliefs conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around. The universe may not be like we'd like it to be, but it doesn't really care.

"[T]he declaration of a First Cause still leaves open the question, "Who created the creator?" After all, what is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one?"

What's going to happen in the far future? Remember a hundred years ago we thought we lived into static eternal Universe. What will the future bring? The amazing thing is, for civilizations that live in a far future, what will they see? Well, the Universe is accelerating. That means all the distant galaxies are getting carried away from us, and eventually they'll move away from us faster than the speed of light. It's allowed in General relativity. They will disappear. The longer we wait, the less we will see. In a hundred billion years any observers evolving on stars around [us]... and there will be stars just like our Sun in 100 billion years. Any observers and civilizations... evolving around those stars will see nothing except for our Galaxy, which is exactly the picture they had in 1915. All evidence of the Hubble expansion will disappear. Why? Because we won't see other galaxies moving apart from us. So they will have no evidence, in fact, of Big Bang. They won't see the Hubble expansion. They won't even know about dark energy, and I won't go into that. They won't know about the cosmic microwave background - it will disappear too. It will redshift away, and it turns out for fancy reasons: there is a plasma in our Galaxy and when the Universe is 50 times its present age the microwave background won't able to propagate in our Galaxy. All evidence of the Big Bang will have disappeared, and those scientists will discover quantum mechanics, discover relativity, discover evolution, discover all the basic principles of science that we understand today, use the best observations they can do with the best telescopes they will build and they will derive a picture of the Universe which is completely wrong. They will derive a picture of the Universe as being one Galaxy surrounded by empty space that's static and eternal. Falsifiable science will produce the wrong answer. In fact, I want to end with the good news. We live in a very special time, the only time we can observationally verify that we live in a very special time.

Even if the asymmetry were 1 part in a billion there would be enough matter left over to account for everything we see in the universe today. In fact, an asymmetry of 1 part in a billion or so is precisely what was called for, because today there are roughly 1 billion photons in the cosmic microwave background for every proton in the universe. The CMBR photons are the remnants, in this picture, of the early matter-antimatter annihilations near the beginning of time.

I have challenged several theologians to provide evidence contradicting the premise that theology has made no contribution to knowledge in the past five hundred years at least, since the dawn of science. So far no one has provided a counterexample. The most I have ever gotten back was the query, ‘What do you mean by knowledge?’ From an epistemological perspective this may be a thorny issue, but I maintain that, if there were a better alternative, someone would have presented it. Had I presented that same challenge to biologists, or psychologists, or historians, or astronomers, none of them would have been so flummoxed.