The Temptation To Believe That The Universe

To A Physicist Life Looks Nothing Short Of A Miracle. It's Just Amazing What Living Things Can Do.

Although Gravity Is By Far The Weakest Force Of Nature, Its Insidious And Cumulative Action Serves To Determine The Ultimate Fate Not Only Of Individual Astronomical Objects But Of The Entire Cosmos. The Same Remorseless Attraction That Crushes A Star Operates On A Much Grander Scale On The Universe As A Whole.

For Me, Science Is Already Fantastical Enough. Unlocking The Secrets Of Nature With Fundamental Physics Or Cosmology Or Astrobiology Leads You Into A Wonderland Compared With Which Beliefs In Things Like Alien Abductions Pale Into Insignificance.

We Will Never Fully Explain The World By Appealing To Something Outside It That Must Simply Be Accepted On Faith, Be It An Unexplained God Or An Unexplained Set Of Mathematical Laws.

We Could Tell Them [alien Civilization] Things That We Have Discovered In The Realm Of Mathematical Physics, But There Is Stuff That I Would Like To Know. There Are Some Famous Problems Like How To Bring Gravitation And Quantum Physics Together, The Long-sought-after Theory Of Quantum Gravity. But It May Be Hard To Understand The Answer That Comes Back.