John D. Barrow: Quotes about the world

John D. Barrow was British scientist. Explore interesting quotes on world.
John D. Barrow: 116   quotes 1   like

“We are products of a past world where sensitivities to certain things were a matter of life or death.”

John D. Barrow

The Artful Universe (1995)
Context: The Universe has imposed aspects of its structure upon us by the inevitability of the forces of Nature... In a world where adapters succeed, but non-adapters fail, one expects to find vestigial remnants... Many of these adaptations... give rise to a suite of curious byproducts, some of which have played a role in determining our aesthetic sense. We are products of a past world where sensitivities to certain things were a matter of life or death.<!-- Ch. 6, p.246

Life , Death , World , Past

“Continual miniaturisation allows resources to be conserved, efficiency to be increased, pollution to be reduced, and the remarkable flexibilities of the quantum world to be tapped.”

John D. Barrow

The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (2011)
Context: Continual miniaturisation allows resources to be conserved, efficiency to be increased, pollution to be reduced, and the remarkable flexibilities of the quantum world to be tapped. Very advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe may have been force to follow the same technological path. Their nano-scale space probes, their atomic-scale machines and nano-computers, would be imperceptible to our course-grained surveys of the universe.... This may be the low-impact evolutionary path you need to follow in order to survive into the far, far future.<!--ch. 2, pp. 23-24

World

“It is enigma enough that the world is described by mathematics; but by simple mathematics, of the sort that a few years energetic study now produces familiarity with, this is an enigma within an enigma.”

John D. Barrow

New Theories of Everything (2007)
Context: Scanning the past millennia of human achievement reveals just how much has been achieved during the last three hundred years since Newton set in motion the effective mathematization of Nature. We found that the world is curiously adapted to a simple mathematical description. It is enigma enough that the world is described by mathematics; but by simple mathematics, of the sort that a few years energetic study now produces familiarity with, this is an enigma within an enigma.<!--Ch. 1, p. 2

World , Mathematics , Study

“It is not hard to see why the Eastern holistic perspective made scientific progress so difficult. It denies the intuition that one can study the parts of the world in isolation from the rest—that one can analyze the world…”

John D. Barrow

New Theories of Everything (2007)

World , Study , Parting

“The living world is not a marble palace. It is a higgledy-piggledy outcome of natural selection and the competition between many interacting factors. The outcome is often neither elegant nor symmetrical.”

John D. Barrow

New Theories of Everything (2007), Ch. 2, p. 18

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”

John D. Barrow

The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos (2011)
Context: 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.<!--ch. 1, pp. 12-13

World , Time , Past

“Unfortunately, truth is neither a listable nor a decidable property; nor is the truth of a statement of arithmetic. The American logician John Myhill has used the term 'prospective' to characterize those attributes of the world that are neither listable nor decidable. They are properties that cannot be recognized by the application of some formula, made to conform to a rule, or generated by some computer program. They are characterized by incessant novelty that cannot be encompassed by any finite set of rules. 'Beauty', 'ugliness', 'truth', 'harmony', simplicity', and 'poetry' are names we give to some of the attributes of this sort. There is no way of listing all examples of beauty or ugliness, nor any procedure for saying whether or not something possesses either of those attributes, without redefining them in some more restrictive fashion that kills their prospective character.”

John D. Barrow

Source: The Artful Universe (1995), Ch. 5, pp. 219-220

Truth , World , Beauty , Way

“Each of the most basic physical laws that we know corresponds to some invariance, which in turn is equivalent to a collection of changes which form a symmetry group. …whilst leaving some underlying theme unchanged. …for example, the conservation of energy is equivalent to the invariance of the laws of motion with respect to translations backwards or forwards in time… the conservation of linear momentum is equivalent to the invariance of the laws of motion with respect to the position of your laboratory in space, and the conservation of angular momentum to an invariance with respect to directional orientation… discovery of conservation laws indicated that Nature possessed built-in sustaining principles which prevented the world from just ceasing to be. There were fewer roles for the Deity to play…”

John D. Barrow

New Theories of Everything (2007)

World , Law , Nature , Change

“It is simplest to think of mathematics as the catalogue of all possible patterns. …When viewed in this way, it is inevitable that the world is described by mathematics. …In many ways the search for a Theory of Everything is a manifestation of a faith that this compression goes all the way down to the bedrock of reality…”

John D. Barrow

New Theories of Everything (2007)

World , Faith , Way , Search

“The secret of how galaxies came into being may well be fathomed by the study of the most elementary particles of matter in particle detectors buried deep underground; the identity of those elementary particles may be revealed by observations of distant starlight. …by the coming together of the largest and the smallest aspects of the physical world our appreciation of the unity of the universe becomes more impressive and complete.”

John D. Barrow

Preface
The Origin of the Universe (1997)

Secret , World , Study , Universe

“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

“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

“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

“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