John D. Barrow quotes - page 2

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:

Assuming the simulators, or at least the early generations of them, have a very advanced knowledge of the laws of Nature, it's likely that they would still have incomplete knowledge of them. ...gradually the little flaws will begin to build up. ...The only escape is if their creatures intervene to patch up the problems one by one as they arise.

John D. Barrow

The Indian religious traditions... accepted the concept of non-being on an equal footing with that of being. Like many other Eastern religions, the Indian culture regarded Nothing as a state from which one might have come and to which one might return.. Where Western religious traditions sought to flee from nothingness... a state of non-being was something to be actively sought by Buddhist and Hindus in order to achieve Nirvana: oneness with the Cosmos.

John D. Barrow

By interlinking causes, by searching always for unity in the face of superficial diversity, modern scientific explanations prize depth above breadth. A deep and narrow theory can, and often does, graduate to become a deep and broad one. A broad and shallow theory never does.

John D. Barrow

Hundreds of years ago, natural theologians tried to impress their readers with stories of the wondrous symmetries of Nature; now we see that, ironically, it is the departures from those symmetries that makes life possible. It is upon the flaws of Nature, not the laws of Nature, that the possibility of our existence hinges. ...The laws and constants of Nature are features that enforce uniformity and simplicity, while initial conditions and symmetry breakings permit complexity and diversity.

John D. Barrow

Copernicus' picture did more than picture the solar system correctly: it painted a new world picture.

John D. Barrow

If musical appreciation is a by-product of a more general pattern-processing propensity of the brain, then why are our senses heightened by pink noises? It is significant that the world around us is full of variations with 1/f spectra. Benoit Mandelbrot has pioneered the study of natural and computer-generated patterns that are scale-free. (He calls them fractals...) Mandelbrot draws attention to the fact that there is a pattern to the noise spectrum displayed by the human nervous system. At the extremities of the body... it tends to be of white-noise form; but, as one approaches closer to the central nervous system and the brain, these variations become 1/f-like. Our nervous system may act as a spectral filter to prevent the brain from being swamped with uninteresting white background noise about the world...

John D. Barrow

...logical contradictions will inevitably arise and the laws of the simulations will appear to break down now and again. The inhabitants of the simulation-especially the simulated scientists-will occasionally be puzzled by the experimental results they obtain. The simulated astronomers, might, for instance, make observations that show that their so-called constants of Nature are very slowly changing.

John D. Barrow

The advent of small, inexpensive computers with superb graphics has changed the way many sciences are practiced, and the way that all sciences present the results of experiments and calculations.

John D. Barrow

Images and pictures... have played a key role in shaping our scientific picture of the world. ...Carefully constructed families of pictures can act as a calculus all their own. Like any successful systems of symbols, with an appropriate grammar they enlarge the number of things that we can do without consciously thinking.

John D. Barrow

What Hubble discovered was the expansion of the universe.... We are not expanding. Nor is Brooklyn. Nor is earth. Nor is the solar system. Nor, in fact, is the Milky Way galaxy. Nor even those aggregates of thousands of galaxies that we call "galaxy clusters." These collections of matter are bound together by chemical and gravitational forces between their constituents-forces that are stronger than the force of expansion.

John D. Barrow

Gods reappear in unlimited numbers in the guise of the simulators who have the power of life and death over the simulated realities that they bring into being. The simulators determine the laws, and can change the laws, that govern their worlds. They can engineer anthropic fine-tunings. They can pull the plug on the simulation at any moment, intervene or distance themselves from their simulation; watch as the simulated creatures argue about whether there is a god who controls or intervenes, work miracles or impose their ethical principles upon the simulated reality.

John D. Barrow

Aristotle believed that the world did not come into being at some time in the past; it had always existed and it would always exist, unchanged in essence for ever. He placed a high premium on symmetry and believed that the sphere was the most perfect of all shapes. Hence the universe must be spherical. ...An important feature of the spherical shape... was the fact that when a sphere rotates it does not cut into empty space where there is no matter and it leaves no empty space behind. ...A vacuum was impossible. It could no more exist than an infinite physical quantity. ...Circular motion was the most perfect and natural movement of all.

John D. Barrow

We are products of a past world where sensitivities to certain things were a matter of life or death.

John D. Barrow

While we have no reason to expect that our position in the universe is special in every way, we would be equally misled were we to assume that it could not be special in any way.

John D. Barrow

Where there is life there is a pattern, and where there is a pattern there is mathematics.

John D. Barrow

In general, the shorter the possible representation... the less random... On this view we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions.

John D. Barrow

The laws of Nature are based upon the existence of a pattern.

John D. Barrow

If one looks at the special problems that were the mainsprings of progress along the oldest and most persistent lines of human inquiry, then one finds Nothing, suitably disguised as something, never far from the centre of things.

John D. Barrow

Continual miniaturisation allows resources to be conserved, efficiency to be increased, pollution to be reduced, and the remarkable flexibilities of the quantum world to be tapped.

John D. Barrow

Gradually, over the last twenty years, the vacuum has turned out to be more unusual, more fluid, less empty, and less intangible than even Einstein could have imagined.

John D. Barrow

Mathematics became an experimental subject. Individuals could follow previously intractable problems by simply watching what happened when they were programmed into a personal computer.

John D. Barrow

The quantum revolution showed us why the old picture of a vacuum as an empty box was untenable.

John D. Barrow