John D. Barrow

Some things are as they are regardless of what they were.

— John D. Barrow

Once upon a time there was no Time.

— John D. Barrow

What cannot be known is more revealing than what can.

— John D. Barrow

Once upon a time when there was no time.

— John D. Barrow

There was no "before" the beginning of our universe, because once upon a time there was no time.

— John D. Barrow

“Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it -Barrow's Uncertainty Principle”

— John D. Barrow

“Each of us is a complicated assymetrical outcome of the laws of electromagnetism and gravity.”

— John D. Barrow

We can predict the present without having to know everything about the past.

— John D. Barrow

We can never know the origins of the universe. The deepest secrets are the ones that keep themselves.

— John D. Barrow

“nothing is higher than heaven; nothing is beyond the walls of the world; nothing is lower than hell, or more glorious than…

— John D. Barrow

“It is the cosmological vacuum energy that contributes a repulsive lambda force to the gravitational force of Newton.”

— John D. Barrow

“Any string of symbols that can be given an abbreviated representation is called algorithmically compressible.”

— John D. Barrow

“Prior to then it was believed that black holes were just cosmic cookie monsters, swallowing everything that came within their gravitational clutches.”

— John D. Barrow

History is full of people who thought they were right -- absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And…

— John D. Barrow

“Our brains are the most complicated objects that we have so far encountered in the Universe. We are far from simple. Indeed,…

— John D. Barrow

“Since so much of the physical universe, from brain waves to quantum waves, relies upon travelling waves we appreciate the key role…

— John D. Barrow

“The fact that simultaneous discovery occurs in mathematics, as well as the sciences, points toward some objective element within their subject matter…

— John D. Barrow

If all the stars and galaxies in the universe today were smoothed out into a uniform sea of atoms, there would only…

— John D. Barrow

When we try to observe things that are very small, the act of observation itself will significantly disturb the state we are…

— John D. Barrow

“Thus we see that the quantisation of atomic energies into a ladder of seperate values, rather than allowing them to take on…

— John D. Barrow

“The inclusion of just one contradiction (like 0 = 1) in an axiomatic system allows any statement about the objects in the…

— John D. Barrow

“As we look way back into the first instants of the Big Bang, we find the quantum world that we described in…

— John D. Barrow

“If the deep logic of what determines the value of the fine-structure constant also played a significant role in our understanding of…

— John D. Barrow

“The pulsar is like a lighthouse beam spinning at high speed. Every time it comes around to face us we see a…

— John D. Barrow

“Anselm conceives of God as something than which nothing greater or more perfect can be conceived. Since this idea arises in our…

— John D. Barrow

“Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who died in 1965, wrote of how the mere thought of the infinite led him to contemplate suicide:…

— John D. Barrow

“The effect of the 'time becomes space' proposal is that there is no definite moment or point of creation. In more conventional…

— John D. Barrow

“Gravity acts on all forms of mass and energy, but energy comes in a host of very different forms that behave in…

— John D. Barrow

“First, energy is quantised: in atoms it does not take on all possible values but only a ladder of specific values whose…

— John D. Barrow

“Aristotle draws a sharp dividing-line between the activities of the physicist and those of the mathematician. The mathematician limits his enquiry to…

— John D. Barrow

“The universe appears to be a system of very low density wherever we look. This is no accident. The expansion of the…

— John D. Barrow

“The deep significance of this discovery appears to be that we have found a physical situation where two different natural principles, of…

— John D. Barrow

“The inflationary period of expansion does not smooth out irregularity by entropy-producing processes like those explored by the cosmologies of the seventies.…

— John D. Barrow

“At first, one might think that something like thermodynamics is a rather restrictive concept because it concerns itself with temperature and heat.…

— John D. Barrow

“Then, in 1974, Stephen Hawking made a dramatic discovery. He decided to examine for the forst time what occurs when one applies…

— John D. Barrow

“A future world of computer circuits, getting smaller and smaller, yet faster and faster, is a plausible future "life- form" more technically…

— John D. Barrow

We are just strings of quarks living in a suburb of the local density maximum of the universe.

— John D. Barrow

“The presence of the particles of matter , and their motion, determine the local topography of the space in which they sit.”

— John D. Barrow

There is no reason that the universe should be designed for our convenience.

— John D. Barrow

“There is no formula that can deliver all truth, all harmony, all simplicity. No Theory of Everything can ever provide total insight.…

— John D. Barrow