# Quote — Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe

> Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums... On astronomically large scales... weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes... put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.

- Author: [Max Tegmark](https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark.md)
- Book: [Our Mathematical Universe](https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Tegmark#Our_Mathematical_Universe:_My_Quest_for_the_Ultimate_Nature_of_Reality_(2014)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/evolution-endowed-us-with

## More from this book

> The very fabric of our physical world, space itself, could be a purely mathematical object in the sense that its only intrinsic properties are mathematical... as dimensionality, and topology.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/the-very-fabric.md)

> In 1814... Joseph von Fraunhofer invented... a spectrograph, which let him separate white light into into a rainbow of colors... He discovered mysterious dark lines in the rainbow... and... the detailed positions of these lines... depended on what the light source was made of, constituting a kind of spectral fingerprint. During the following decades such spectra were measured and catalogued for many... substances. ...Sensationally, the spectrum of sunlight revealed that the Sun... contained elements... such as . Moreover... it revealed that stars are made of roughly the same mixture of gases as the Sun! This clinched it in favor of Bruno: stars are distant suns...

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/in-1814-joseph.md)

> But I’ve suddenly changed my mind and turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. Why? Because I’ve come to believe that advanced evolved life is very rare, yet has huge future potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/max-tegmark/our-mathematical-universe/but-ive-suddenly.md)