The Universe has imposed aspects of its structure upon us by the inevitability of the forces of Nature... In a world where adapters succeed, but non-… - John Barrow

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The Universe has imposed aspects of its structure upon us by the inevitability of the forces of Nature... In a world where adapters succeed, but non-adapters fail, one expects to find vestigial remnants... Many of these adaptations... give rise to a suite of curious byproducts, some of which have played a role in determining our aesthetic sense. We are products of a past world where sensitivities to certain things were a matter of life or death.

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About John Barrow

John David Barrow, FRS (November 29, 1952 – September 27, 2020) was an English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, mathematician, writer of popular science, and an amateur playwright.

Also Known As

Native Name: John David Barrow
Alternative Names: John D. Barrow
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Additional quotes by John Barrow

Even today, there persists... a feeling that the creation of the Universe out of nothing must violate some basic conservation law that stops one from getting something for nothing. Nevertheless, there is actually no evidence that the Universe as a whole possesses a non-zero value of any such conserved quantity. The total mass-energy of all the constituents of a finite Universe appears to be always equal in magnitude but opposite in sign to the total gravitational potential energies of those particles. ...Similarly, there is no evidence that the Universe possesses any overall net rotation or electric charge.

Our sensitivity to changes of pitch ... is underused in musical sound. Western music, in particular, is based on scales that use pitch changes that are at least twenty times bigger than the smallest changes that we could perceive. If we used our discriminatory power to full, we could generate an undulating sea of sound that displayed continuously changing frequency rather like the undersea sonic songs of dolphins and whales.

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