John D. Barrow: Trending quotes (page 3)

John D. Barrow

Source: The Artful Universe (1995), Ch. 5, p.236

Art , Nature

“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

"Glitch," New Scientist (June 7, 2003)

Law , Nature , Knowledge , Problem

“The Indian religious traditions… accepted the concept of non-being on an equal footing with that of being. Like many other Eastern religions, the Indian culture regarded Nothing as a state from which one might have come and to which one might return.. Where Western religious traditions sought to flee from nothingness… a state of non-being was something to be actively sought by Buddhist and Hindus in order to achieve Nirvana: oneness with the Cosmos.”

John D. Barrow

Source: The Book of Nothing (2009), chapter one "Zero—The Whole Story"

Religion

“A less inflexible picture of mathematics is one that focuses on the fact that it is an open-ended human activity. Inventionism is the belief that mathematics is nothing more than what mathematicians do. …We invent mathematics; we do not discover it. …The independent discovery of the same mathematical theorems by different mathematicians from totally different economic, cultural, and political backgrounds—often at widely separated times in history—argues against such a simple view. The inventionist could respond by pointing to the universality of human languages. …One might expect that those aspects of this universal grammar that share features of logic, and hence counting, would also make counting appear instinctive. In fact, although simple counting… is fairly universal in ancient and primitive cultures, virtually none of them went on to carry out mathematical operations more sophisticated than counting. This suggests that these higher mathematical operations are not genetically programmed into the human brain… They are more likely to be by-products of multi-purpose pattern-recognition capabilities.”

John D. Barrow

The Artful Universe (1995)

History , Mathematics , Universe , Appearance

“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: 109 doesn't look as bad as 1,000,000,000.”

John D. Barrow

Source: The Book of Nothing (2009), chapter nought "Nothingology—Flying to Nowhere"

Way , Star

“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

Source: New Theories of Everything (2007), Ch. 1, p. 7

Search

“Hundreds of years ago, natural theologians tried to impress their readers with stories of the wondrous symmetries of Nature; now we see that, ironically, it is the departures from those symmetries that makes life possible. It is upon the flaws of Nature, not the laws of Nature, that the possibility of our existence hinges. …The laws and constants of Nature are features that enforce uniformity and simplicity, while initial conditions and symmetry breakings permit complexity and diversity.”

John D. Barrow

The Artful Universe (1995)

Life , Law , Departure , Nature

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

John D. Barrow

p, 125
Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science (2008)

World , Painting

“If musical appreciation is a by-product of a more general pattern-processing propensity of the brain, then why are our senses heightened by pink noises? It is significant that the world around us is full of variations with 1/f spectra. Benoit Mandelbrot has pioneered the study of natural and computer-generated patterns that are scale-free. (He calls them fractals…) Mandelbrot draws attention to the fact that there is a pattern to the noise spectrum displayed by the human nervous system. At the extremities of the body… it tends to be of white-noise form; but, as one approaches closer to the central nervous system and the brain, these variations become 1/f-like. Our nervous system may act as a spectral filter to prevent the brain from being swamped with uninteresting white background noise about the world…”

John D. Barrow

Source: The Artful Universe (1995), Ch. 5, p.236

World , Music , Nature , Sense

“…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

"Glitch," New Scientist (June 7, 2003)

Law , Nature , Appearance , Change

“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

Introduction
Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science (2008)

Way , Science , Change

“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

Introduction
Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science (2008)

World , Family , Thinking , Success

“In the spring of 1845, William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse, began observing with his great six-foot telescope… The Earl was excited by what he was the first human to see: spiral patterns of stars, seemingly swirling in great 'spiral convolutions' about the centre of the galaxy. …No one could ever have seen the spiral pattern of stars in a galaxy unless they had looked through Rosse's telescope or seen his drawings. …I believe that Van Gogh would have seen those drawings in the press following the publicity attracted by them, or in Flammarion's book… and gained his astronomical inspiration from them.”

John D. Barrow

Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science (2008)

Books , Star , Spring , Drawing

“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

Preface
The Origin of the Universe (1997)

World , Imagination , Sense , Time

“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

Preface
Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science (2008)

Way , History , Understanding , Science

“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

The Origin of the Universe (1997)

Way , Universe

“Gods reappear in unlimited numbers in the guise of the simulators who have the power of life and death over the simulated realities that they bring into being. The simulators determine the laws, and can change the laws, that govern their worlds. They can engineer anthropic fine-tunings. They can pull the plug on the simulation at any moment, intervene or distance themselves from their simulation; watch as the simulated creatures argue about whether there is a god who controls or intervenes, work miracles or impose their ethical principles upon the simulated reality.”

John D. Barrow

"Glitch," New Scientist (June 7, 2003)

Life , Death , God , World

“Aristotle believed that the world did not come into being at some time in the past; it had always existed and it would always exist, unchanged in essence for ever. He placed a high premium on symmetry and believed that the sphere was the most perfect of all shapes. Hence the universe must be spherical. …An important feature of the spherical shape… was the fact that when a sphere rotates it does not cut into empty space where there is no matter and it leaves no empty space behind. …A vacuum was impossible. It could no more exist than an infinite physical quantity. …Circular motion was the most perfect and natural movement of all.”

John D. Barrow

The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (2011)

Time , Past , Nature , Universe