Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

Richard Feynman used to go up to people all the time and he'd say, "You won't believe what happened to me today. You won't believe what happened to me." And people would say "What?" And he'd say, "Absolutely nothing". Because we humans believe that everything that happens to us is special, and significant. And that—and... Carl Sagan wrote beautifully about that in Demon-Haunted World—that is much of the source of religion. OK? Everything that happens is unusual, and I expect that the likelihood that Richard and I ever would've met—if you think about all the variables, the probability that we were in the same place at the same time, ate breakfast at the same... Whatever. It's zero. Every event that happens has small probability... but it happens, and then when it happens; if it's weird, if you dream one million nights and it's nonsense, but one night you dream that your friend is gonna break his leg and the next day he breaks his arm. You think, "ah." ...So the [real] thing that physics tell us about the universe is it's big, rare events happen all the time—including life—and that doesn't mean it's special.

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.

It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.

And, just as with inflation, as described in the last chapter, our observable universe is at the threshold of expanding faster than the speed of light.

أنا غير كفؤ للحديث عن اللاشيء، لأن رجال الدين والفلاسفة هم خبراء في لاشيء!

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.

I don’t make any claims to answer any questions that science cannot answer, and I have tried very carefully within the text to define what I mean by “nothing” and “something.” If those definitions differ from those you would like to adopt, so be it. Write your own book. But don’t discount the remarkable human adventure that is modern science because it doesn’t console you.

Finally, and inevitably, the flat universe will further flatten into a nothingness that mirrors its beginning. Not only will there be no cosmologists to look out on the universe, there will be nothing for them to see even if they could. Nothing at all. Not even atoms. Nothing. If you think that’s bleak and cheerless, too bad. Reality doesn’t owe us comfort.

the universe could have expanded during this inflationary period by a factor of more than 1028. While this is an incredible amount, it amazingly could have happened in a fraction of a second in the very early universe.

"[...] It is. Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, "those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym." And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.
[the atlantic, Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete? - interview, apr 23 2012]"

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.

At the heart of quantum mechanics is a rule that sometimes governs politicians or CEOs — as long as no one is watching, anything goes.

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.

... 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 ...

The amazing thing is that 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 - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could 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.