Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

a negative charge moving backward in time is mathematically equivalent to a positive charge moving forward in time!

Metaphysical speculation is independent of the physical validity of the Big Bang itself and is irrelevant to our understanding of it.

Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake.

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.

"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."

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

Science has been effective at furthering our understanding of nature because the scientific ethos is based on three key principles: (1) follow the evidence wherever it leads; (2) if one has a theory, one needs to be willing to try to prove it wrong as much as one tries to prove that it is right; (3) the ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one's a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one's theoretical models.

If you have nothing in quantum mechanics, you will always have something.

The fact that we need to refine what we mean by “common sense” in order to accommodate our understanding of nature is, to me, one of the most remarkable and liberating aspects of science. Reality liberates us from the biases and misconceptions that have arisen because our intellects evolved through our animal ancestors, whose survival was based on whether predators might lurk behind trees or in caves and not on understanding the wave function of electrons in atoms. Our modern conception of the universe is so foreign to what even scientists generally believed a mere century ago that it is a tribute to the power of the scientific method and the creativity and persistence of humans who want to understand it. That is worth celebrating. As I describe in this book, the question and the possible answers to how something might come from nothing are even more interesting than merely the possibility of galaxies manifesting from empty space. Science provides a possible road map for the creation of space (and time) itself — and perhaps also an understanding of how the laws of physics that govern the dynamics of space and time can arise haphazardly.

... we're here because of an environmental accident if there is a multiverse and if the laws of physics are different in the different regions ...

one of the dumbest academic decisions ever made (and that is a tough list to top), Maxwell was unceremoniously laid off.

The one thing that I want every single child to have experienced at some point in their life, as part of their education, is to have some idea they hold to be true, and at the very basis of their being, proved to be wrong.

Because that opens your mind to the realization that the world is different than you thought it would be, and you have to begin to open your mind to the possibilities of existence.

And opening your mind frees you, it doesn't constrain you. It makes the world more wonderful, more exciting, and more worth living in.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

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.

Of course, supernatural acts are what miracles are all about. They are, after all, precisely those things that circumvent the laws of nature. A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.