John Joly Quotes

I am not a creationist as the term is usually understood. I believe that the earth is billions of years old and the universe even older. I do believe that God is the creator, but that's a completely different thing. I've written in defense of evolution and made arguments that are based on evolution.

All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.

The universe is almost 14 billion years old, and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I think it would be inexcusably egocentric of us to suggest that we're alone in the universe.

We are all made up of stars and all of us are billions of years old - that's what I believe, at least.

The Big Bang theory is the idea that if we go back early enough in the history of the universe - and we can do this, of course, by looking at starlight coming to us from billions of years ago - we will see a very hot and dense period where the universe was much smaller, denser, and hotter.

Seeing outward is equivalent to looking backward in time because the telescope's mirror is capturing primeval light... galaxies that existed before our time.

If you take a galaxy and try to make it bigger, it becomes a cluster of galaxies, not a galaxy. If you try to make it smaller than that, it seems to blow itself apart.

If you have this idea that the earth is only 6,000 years old, you are denying, if you will, everything that you can touch and see. You're not paying attention to what's happening in the universe around you.

If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.

I think the universe is just so big that there has to be something else out there.

There comes a point in your life when you realize how quickly time goes by, and how quickly it has gone. Then it really speeds up exponentially. With that, I think you start to put a lot of things into context; you start to see how huge the world is, and really, the universe.

The principal reason for the universe's poker face is that its constituents are far away. Stars careen through space, and galaxies spin at speeds thousands of times faster than a jet plane. But given their distance, you'd need the patience of Job to notice much change in their appearance or position.

The universe is very large, and its boundaries are not known very well, but it is still possible to define some kind of a radius to be associated with it.

Eventually, when the universe expands enough, all that will be left is the dark energy.

But if we begin thinking about the world being over 100 million years old, then it's absolutely by chance that you and I are sitting here alive today, while all the others are dead or have never been born.

We people of the Earth exist because our potential was there in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, as the universe exploded into being.

In this model, the sun is a very tiny speck of dust indeed-a speck less than a three-thousandth of an inch in diameter ... Think of the sun as something less than a speck of dust in a vast city, of the earth as less than a millionth part of such a speck of dust, and we have perhaps as vivid a picture as the mind can really grasp of the relation of our home in space to the rest of the universe.

A million million million million (1 with twenty-four zeros after it) miles, the size of the observable universe.

Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.

I can feel the universe expanding and making things be further apart.

When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old. Now scientists say it's four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion.

No matter what you may believe spiritually or otherwise, the Earth is clearly not 6,000 or 10,000 years old.

The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a base to fix the parallax of any other star

The human race, whose intelligence dates back only a single tick of the astronomical clock, could hardly hope to understand so soon what it all means.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.