# John D. Barrow

- Quotes: 21
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-d-barrow

## Books

- [The Book Of Nothing](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-d-barrow/the-book-of-nothing.md) — 11 quotes
- [The Book of Universes](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-d-barrow/the-book-of-universes.md) — 7 quotes
- [The Origin Of The Universe](https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-d-barrow/the-origin-of-the-universe.md) — 3 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> 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.

p. 39

> There is a good deal more to nothing than meets the eye.

> 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.

p. 42

> 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.

p. 22

> Einstein had spent the previous thirty years showing how we could understand the behaviour of whole universes with simple maths. Gamow saw that those universes must have had a past that was unimaginably different to the present. What had stopped them both in their tracks was Gamow's suggestion that the laws of physics could describe something being created out of nothing.

p. 2

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

p. 4

> 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.

p. 12

> 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.

p. 4

> 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. Very advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe may have been forced to follow the same technological path. Their nano-scale space probes, their atomic-scale machines and nano-computers, would be imperceptible to our coarse-grained surveys of the universe. ...This may be the low-impact evolutionary path you need to follow in order to survive into the far, far future.

p. 23