Diana Nyad Quotes

And what we know, or think we know, about the universe of space and time is changing very quickly.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, we've got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, it's one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe - maybe it's countless other universes.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?'

The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.

At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space - abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms.

The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.

Why is there space rather than no space? Why is space three-dimensional? Why is space big? We have a lot of room to move around in. How come it's not tiny? We have no consensus about these things. We're still exploring them.

There may be many Big Bangs that happened at various and far-flung locations, each creating its own swelling, spatial expanse, each creating a universe - our universe being the result of only one of those Big Bangs.

The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?

Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations.

They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.

Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.

Although we don't know what is outside our universe, astronomers still wonder. Several pictures of what there might be have been dreamed up. An interesting one, called multiverse, has lots of universes. Picture it as a foam of bubbles. Our universe would be one bubble, and we'd be surrounded by lots of other bubbles.

For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.

My main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can't understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don't seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics. I'd be very happy just to understand the last singularity and leave the other ones to future generations.

If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.

From a scientific point of view, our mission is to seek answers to the fundamental questions about the universe. Many are open - we don't know about dark matter, which accounts for a quarter of the universe's matter, nor do we know why there's antimatter.

Evolutionary cosmology formulates theories in which a universe is capable of giving rise to and generating future universes out of itself, within black holes or whatever.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

I wouldn't say that 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.

Most gravity has no known origin. Is it some exotic particle? Nobody knows. Is dark energy responsible for expansion of the universe? Nobody knows.

Pure science - this vision of the universe as 15 billion light years across - I am bedazzled and awed by it.

Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less.