John D. Barrow

If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.

— John D. Barrow

Our sensitivity to changes of pitch ... is underused in musical sound. Western music, in particular, is based on scales that use pitch changes that are at least twenty times bigger than the smallest changes that we could perceive. If we used our discriminatory power to full, we could generate an undulating sea of sound that displayed continuously changing frequency rather like the undersea sonic songs of dolphins and whales.

— John D. Barrow

Where there is life there is a pattern, and where there is a pattern there is mathematics. Once that germ of rationality and order exists to turn a chaos into a cosmos, then so does mathematics. There could not be a non-mathematical Universe containing living observers.

— John D. Barrow

Highly correlated brown and black noise patterns do not seem to have seem to have attractive counterparts in the visual arts. There, over-correlation is the order of the day, because it creates the same dramatic associations that we find in attractive natural scenery, or in the juxtaposition of symbols. Somehow, it is tediously predictable when cast in a one-dimensional medium, like sound.

— John D. Barrow

The Universe has imposed aspects of its structure upon us by the inevitability of the forces of Nature... In a world where adapters succeed, but non-adapters fail, one expects to find vestigial remnants... Many of these adaptations... give rise to a suite of curious byproducts, some of which have played a role in determining our aesthetic sense. We are products of a past world where sensitivities to certain things were a matter of life or death.

— John D. Barrow

The various creation stories of ancient time were not scientific theories in any modern sense. They did not attempt to reveal anything new about the structures of the world; they aimed simply to remove the specter of the unknown from human imaginings.

— John D. Barrow

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.

— John D. Barrow

What Hubble discovered was the expansion of the universe. ...We are not expanding. Nor is Brooklyn. Nor is earth. Nor is the solar system. Nor, in fact, is the Milky Way galaxy. Nor even those aggregates of thousands of galaxies that we call "galaxy clusters." These collections of matter are bound together by chemical and gravitational forces between their constituents—forces that are stronger than the force of expansion.

— John D. Barrow

Assuming the simulators, or at least the early generations of them, have a very advanced knowledge of the laws of Nature, it's likely that they would still have incomplete knowledge of them. ...gradually the little flaws will begin to build up. ...The only escape is if their creatures intervene to patch up the problems one by one as they arise.

— John D. Barrow

...logical contradictions will inevitably arise and the laws of the simulations will appear to break down now and again. The inhabitants of the simulation—especially the simulated scientists—will occasionally be puzzled by the experimental results they obtain. The simulated astronomers, might, for instance, make observations that show that their so-called constants of Nature are very slowly changing.

— John D. Barrow

Ultimate explanation no longer means only a story that encompasses everything.

— John D. Barrow

By interlinking causes, by searching always for unity in the face of superficial diversity, modern scientific explanations prize depth above breadth. A deep and narrow theory can, and often does, graduate to become a deep and broad one. A broad and shallow theory never does.

— John D. Barrow

The legacy of the great monotheistic religions is the expectation of a single over-arching explanation for the Universe. ...There is no logical reason why the Universe should not contain surds of arbitrary elements that do not relate to the rest.

— John D. Barrow

We say that the string is 'random' if there is no other representation of the string which is shorter than itself. But we will say that it is 'non-random' if there does exist such an abbreviated representation. ...In general, the shorter the possible representation... the less random... On this view we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions.

— John D. Barrow

It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns. ...When viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics. ...In many ways the search for a Theory of Everything is a manifestation of a faith that this compression goes all the way down to the bedrock of reality...

— John D. Barrow

It is not hard to see why the Eastern holistic perspective made scientific progress so difficult. It denies the intuition that one can study the parts of the world in isolation from the rest—that one can analyze the world...

— John D. Barrow

The living world is not a marble palace. It is a higgledy-piggledy outcome of natural selection and the competition between many interacting factors. The outcome is often neither elegant nor symmetrical.

— John D. Barrow

We have witnessed a revolution in the history of science. Not the sort of revolution that philosophers of science once believed in—they don't happen any more—but a revolution brought about by new tools, different ways of seeing, and novel ways of understanding. Nothing old needed to be overthrown to make way for the new.The future of science will be increasingly dominated by artificial images and simulations.

— John D. Barrow

Images and pictures... have played a key role in shaping our scientific picture of the world. ...Carefully constructed families of pictures can act as a calculus all their own. Like any successful systems of symbols, with an appropriate grammar they enlarge the number of things that we can do without consciously thinking.

— John D. Barrow

The advent of small, inexpensive computers with superb graphics has changed the way many sciences are practiced, and the way that all sciences present the results of experiments and calculations.

— John D. Barrow

Mathematics became an experimental subject. Individuals could follow previously intractable problems by simply watching what happened when they were programmed into a personal computer. ...The PC revolution has made science more visual and more immediate. ...by creating films of imaginary experiences of mathematical worlds. ...Words are no longer enough.

— John D. Barrow

Scientific pictures are often not just about science. They may... have an undeniable aesthetic quality. They may even have been primarily works of art that possess a scientific message.

— John D. Barrow

The abstractions of Einstein's curved space and time gave rise to analogies and pictures that played a new explanatory role. Space and time gave way to space-time, visible light was augmented by images across the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we realised that we could see back towards the apparent beginnings of time.

— John D. Barrow

Copernicus' picture did more than picture the solar system correctly: it painted a new world picture.

— John D. Barrow

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.

— John D. Barrow

The spooky ether was persistent. It took an Einstein to remove it from the Universe. ...Gradually, over the last twenty years, the vacuum has turned out to be more unusual, more fluid, less empty, and less intangible than even Einstein could have imagined. Its presence is felt on the very smallest and largest dimensions over which the forces of Nature act.

— John D. Barrow

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

— John D. Barrow

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: 10 doesn't look as bad as 1,000,000,000.

— John D. Barrow

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.

— John D. Barrow

The logic of the Greeks prevents them having the idea at all and it is to the Indian cultures that we must look to find thinkers who are comfortable with the idea that Nothing might be something.

— John D. Barrow

The quantum revolution showed us why the old picture of a vacuum as an empty box was untenable. ...Gradually, this exotic new picture of quantum nothingness succumbed to experimental exploration... in the form of vacuum tubes, light bulbs and X-rays. Now the 'empty' space itself started to be probed. ...There was always something left: a vacuum energy that permeated every fibre of the Universe.

— John D. Barrow

Einstein showed us that the Universe might contain a mysterious form of vacuum energy. ...Last year, two teams of astronomers used Earth's most powerful telescopes... to gather persuasive evidence for the reality of the cosmic vacuum energy. Its effects are dramatic. It is accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

— John D. Barrow

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.

— John D. Barrow

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.

— John D. Barrow

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.

— John D. Barrow

Just focusing on what exists now seems a bit exclusive. And if we include everything that has ever existed as part of the universe, why not include the future as well? This seems to leave us with the definition that the universe is everything that has ever existed, does exist, or will ever exist.

— John D. Barrow

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.

— John D. Barrow

Location is not, as the estate agents say, everything. We must also consider our place in history.

— John D. Barrow

There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history.

— John D. Barrow