Quotes about Astrophysics

Time, space, and matter came into existence at the Big Bang.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

all the atoms that make each of us up—the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains—were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.

Time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker.

It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.

It's the gravity that shapes the large scale structure of the universe, even though it is the weakest of four categories of forces.

The discovery that the universe was expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.

If you fall towards a black hole feet first, gravity will pull harder on your feet than your head, because they are nearer the black hole. The result is that you will be stretched out lengthwise, and squashed in sideways. If the black hole has a mass of a few times our Sun, you would be torn apart and made into spaghetti before you reached the horizon.

The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.