Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

When you're a theorist, the two most addictive states to be in are excited and confused

But being uncomfortable is a virtue, not a hindrance.

Forget Jesus. Stars died so you could live.

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

Curiosity-driven research may seem self-indulgent and far from the immediate public good. However, essentially all of our current quality of life, for people living in the first world, has arisen from the fruits of such research, including all the electric power that drives almost every device we use.

Indeed, the best answer I have ever heard to the question of what it would be like to be dead (i.e., be nonbeing) is to imagine how it felt to be before you were conceived.

"[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?"

К счастью для нас, звезды не взрываются столь часто, примерно раз в сто лет в галактике. Но нам повезло, что они взрываются, потому что, если бы не это, нас бы здесь не было. Один из самых поэтичных фактов, которые я знаю о Вселенной, что, по сути, каждый атом в вашем теле произошел из звезды, которая взорвалась. Более того, атомы в левой руке, возможно, произошли из одной звезды, а в правой — из другой. Мы все, буквально, звездные дети, и наши тела сделаны из звездной пыли.

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.

The tapestry that science weaves in describing the evolution of our universe is richer and far more fascinating than any revelatory images or imaginative stories that humans have concocted. Nature comes up with surprises that far exceed those that the human imagination can generate.

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

But relying on invisible miracles is the stuff of religion, not science. To ascertain whether this remarkable accident was real, physicists relied on another facet of the quantum world. Associated with every background field is a particle, and if you pick a point in space and hit it hard enough, you may whack out real particles.

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.

Nevertheless, all of these phenomena imply that, under the right conditions, not only can nothing become something, it is required to.

see also positrons; virtual particles Aristotle, 172–73 Atkins, Peter, 191 baryons, 76 Big Bang, xvii, 95, 107, 150, 173, 189 CMBR left from, see cosmic microwave background radiation dating of, 3, 15–16, 77, 87 density of protons and neutrons in,