John D. Barrow quotes

John D. Barrow was an English cosmologist, mathematician, and writer, admired for his contributions to the understanding of the universe. His work spanned a wide range of topics, including the Big Bang, the nature of physical laws, and the relationship between science and philosophy. He inspired many by communicating complex scientific concepts with clarity and insight. Here are 59 of his quotes:

If a `religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Godel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one. (John D. Barrow)
There is no reason that the universe should be designed for our convenience. View quote
John D. Barrow
There was no 'before' the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time. View quote
John D. Barrow
Everyone knows there are billions and billions of stars, and national debts conjure up similar astronomical numbers. Yet we have found a way to hide the zeros: 109 doesn't look as bad as 1,000,000,000. View quote
John D. Barrow
In the spring of 1845, William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse, began observing with his great six-foot telescope... The Earl was excited by what he was the first human to see: spiral patterns of stars, seemingly swirling in great 'spiral convolutions' about the centre of the galaxy. ...No one could ever have seen the spiral pattern of stars in a galaxy unless they had looked through Rosse's telescope or seen his drawings. ...I believe that Van Gogh would have seen those drawings in the press following the publicity attracted by them, or in Flammarion's book... and gained his astronomical inspiration from them. View quote
John D. Barrow
We have witnessed a revolution in the history of science. Not the sort of revolution that philosophers of science once believed in-they don't happen any more-but a revolution brought about by new tools, different ways of seeing, and novel ways of understanding. Nothing old needed to be overthrown to make way for the new. The future of science will be increasingly dominated by artificial images and simulations. View quote
John D. Barrow
This may be the low-impact evolutionary path you need to follow in order to survive into the far, far future. View quote
John D. Barrow
Just focusing on what exists now seems a bit exclusive. View quote
John D. Barrow
There was always something left: a vacuum energy that permeated every fibre of the Universe. View quote
John D. Barrow
The Indian system of counting is probably the most successful intellectual innovation ever devised by human beings. It has been universally adopted. ...It is the nearest thing we have to a universal language. View quote
John D. Barrow
There could not be a non-mathematical Universe containing living observers. (John D. Barrow)
There is a good deal more to Pythagorean musical theory than celestial harmony. View quote
John D. Barrow
Ultimate explanation no longer means only a story that encompasses everything. View quote
John D. Barrow
The abstractions of Einstein's curved space and time gave rise to analogies and pictures that played a new explanatory role. View quote
John D. Barrow
Unfortunately, truth is neither a listable nor a decidable property; nor is the truth of a statement of arithmetic. The American logician John Myhill has used the term 'prospective' to characterize those attributes of the world that are neither listable nor decidable. They are properties that cannot be recognized by the application of some formula, made to conform to a rule, or generated by some computer program. They are characterized by incessant novelty that cannot be encompassed by any finite set of rules. 'Beauty', 'ugliness', 'truth', 'harmony', simplicity', and 'poetry' are names we give to some of the attributes of this sort. There is no way of listing all examples of beauty or ugliness, nor any procedure for saying whether or not something possesses either of those attributes, without redefining them in some more restrictive fashion that kills their prospective character. View quote
John D. Barrow
The physicist's concept of nothing-the vacuum... began as empty space-the void... turned into a stagnant ether through which all the motions of the Universe swam, vanished in Einstein's hands, then re-emerged in the twentieth-century quantum picture of how Nature works. View quote
John D. Barrow
Each of the most basic physical laws that we know corresponds to some invariance, which in turn is equivalent to a collection of changes which form a symmetry group. ...whilst leaving some underlying theme unchanged. ...for example, the conservation of energy is equivalent to the invariance of the laws of motion with respect to translations backwards or forwards in time... the conservation of linear momentum is equivalent to the invariance of the laws of motion with respect to the position of your laboratory in space, and the conservation of angular momentum to an invariance with respect to directional orientation... discovery of conservation laws indicated that Nature possessed built-in sustaining principles which prevented the world from just ceasing to be. There were fewer roles for the Deity to play... View quote
John D. Barrow
It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns. ...When viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics. ...In many ways the search for a Theory of Everything is a manifestation of a faith that this compression goes all the way down to the bedrock of reality... View quote
John D. Barrow
Einstein showed us how to find all the possible universes that were consistent with the laws of physics and the character of gravity, how to reconstruct their pasts and predict their futures. But actually finding them was no easy task. View quote
John D. 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. View quote
John D. Barrow
The legacy of the great monotheistic religions is the expectation of a single over-arching explanation for the Universe. ...There is no logical reason why the Universe should not contain surds of arbitrary elements that do not relate to the rest. (John D. Barrow)
Einstein showed us that the Universe might contain a mysterious form of vacuum energy.... Last year, two teams of astronomers used Earth's most powerful telescopes... to gather persuasive evidence for the reality of the cosmic vacuum energy. Its effects are dramatic. It is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. View quote
John D. Barrow
The secret of how galaxies came into being may well be fathomed by the study of the most elementary particles of matter in particle detectors buried deep underground; the identity of those elementary particles may be revealed by observations of distant starlight. ...by the coming together of the largest and the smallest aspects of the physical world our appreciation of the unity of the universe becomes more impressive and complete. View quote
John D. Barrow
The logic of the Greeks prevents them having the idea at all and it is to the Indian cultures that we must look to find thinkers who are comfortable with the idea that Nothing might be something. View quote
John D. Barrow
There is a good deal more to nothing than meets the eye. View quote
John D. Barrow