quotations about the Universe
[With quantum computers] you can calculate how many bits are in the universe, how much energy it takes to flip them, how much energy exists, and use that to rule out lots of things about the universe's history. Anything that takes more bit flips couldn't have happened.
SETH LLOYD
"PopSci Q & A: Seth Lloyd Talks Quantum Computing and Quoogling", Popular Science, November 4, 2011
Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
attributed, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty-First Century
There was a God, and He wasn't mean. His universe was a deadly contraption, but maybe there wasn't any way to build a universe that wasn't a deadly contraption -- like a square circle. He made the contraption, and He put Man in it, and Man was a fairly deadly contraption himself. But the funny part of it was, there wasn't a damn thing the universe could do to a man that man wasn't built to endure. He could even endure it when it killed him. And gradually he could get the better of it.
WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
"The Lineman"
Asking what the universe is made of turns out to be the wrong question. We are trying to squeeze juice out of an illusion, and it won't work. The universe is made of what we want it to show us.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
You Are the Universe
There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe and what can be more special than that there is no boundary?
STEPHEN HAWKING
attributed, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
WILLIAM GOLDING
A Moving Target
If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.
PHILIP K. DICK
attributed, Small Molecule Therapeutics for Schizophrenia
We seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us. We do not want to be reduced to accepting the strange features of our universe as brute facts.
SEAN M. CARROLL
Scientific American, June 2008
The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity.
SETH LLOYD
Programming the Universe