“Life as we know, and partially understand it, is a classical example of what can occur when a sufficient level of complexity is attained. Consciousness appears to be a manifestation of an even more elaborate level of organization.” — John D. Barrow Copy Share Image
“The brain is the most effective algorithmic compressor of information that we have so far encountered in Nature. It reduces complex sequences of sense data to simple abbreviated forms which permit the existence of thought and memory. The natural limits… — John D. Barrow Copy Share
“One of Nature's deep secrets is the fact that the outcomes of the laws of Nature do not have to possess the same symmetries as the laws themselves. The outcomes are far more complicated, and far less symmetrical, than the laws. Consequently, they are far more difficult to understand. In this way it is possible to have a Universe governed… — John D. Barrow Copy Share
“The effect of the 'time becomes space' proposal is that there is no definite moment or point of creation. In more conventional quantum mechanical terms we would say that the universe is the result of a quantum mechanical tunneling process, where it must be interpreted as having tunneled from nothing at all. Quantum tunneling processes, which are familiar to physicists… — John D. Barrow Copy Share
“Humans are distinguished further by the highly effective way in which they have pooled the individual intelligence of single individuals to produce a collective… — John D. Barrow Copy Share Image
We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past. — John D. Barrow Copy Share Image
All our surest statements about the nature of the world are mathematical statements, yet we do not know what mathematics "is"... and so we find that we have adapted a religion strikingly similar to many traditional faiths. Change "mathematics" to "God" and little else might seem to change. The problem of human contact with some spiritual realm, of timelessness, of… — John D. Barrow Copy Share
“If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of all the… — John D. Barrow Copy Share Image
“Each of us is a complicated assymetrical outcome of the laws of electromagnetism and gravity.” — John D. Barrow Copy Share Image
“Impressed by the success of high-level mathematics in the formulation of the general theory of relativity in 1915, we find that Einstein's life-long quest for a unified field theory was dominated by the search for more general mathematical formalisms that could bring together the existing descriptions of gravity and electromagnetism. We find none of Einstein's compelling thought experiments and beautifully… — John D. Barrow Copy Share
“Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who died in 1965, wrote of how the mere thought of the infinite led him to contemplate suicide: “A necessity I could not imagine swept over me: I had to try again and again to imagine the edge of space, or its edgelessness, time with a beginning and an end or time without a beginning or… — John D. Barrow Copy Share
“As we look way back into the first instants of the Big Bang, we find the quantum world that we described in Chapter 3. From that state, where like effects do not follow from like causes, there must somehow emerge a world resembling our own, where the results of most observations are definite. This is by no means inevitable and… — John D. Barrow Copy Share
“The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the system to be proved true (and also proved false). When Bertrand Russell pointed this out in a lecture he was once challenged by a heckler demanding that he show how the questioner could be proved to be the… — John D. Barrow Copy Share
