“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)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "What Hubble discovered was the expansion of the universe…. We are not expanding. Nor is Brooklyn. Nor is earth. Nor is …" by John D. Barrow?

John D. Barrow 58

British scientist 1952–2020

Related quotes

“Giving then to matter all the properties which philosophy knows it has, or all that atheism ascribes to it, and can prove, and even supposing matter to be eternal, it will not account for the system of the universe or of the solar system, because it will not account for motion, and it is motion that preserves it. When, therefore, we discover a circumstance of such immense importance, that without it the universe could not exist, and for which neither matter, nor any, nor all, the properties of matter can account, we are by necessity forced into the rational and comfortable belief of the existence of a cause superior to matter, and that cause man calls, God.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)

“There's a loophole if you weigh galaxies and clusters because you're weighing the total amount of energy around galaxies. What if there's energy where galaxies aren't? What is where galaxies aren't? Nothing.”

Lawrence M. Krauss book A Universe from Nothing

"Lawrence Krauss: A Universe from Nothing" (2031)
Source: 23:32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46sKeycH3bE&t=1412s

“If the expansion of the space of the universe is uniform in all directions, an observer located in anyone of the galaxies will see all other galaxies running away from him at velocities proportional to their distances from the observer.”

George Gamow (1904–1968) Russian-American physicist and science writer

Source: The Creation of the Universe (1952), p. 31

“Life can exist on other planets, in other solar systems, in other galaxies and universes.”

J. Posadas (1912–1981) Argentine Trotskyist (1912-1981)

Source: Flying saucers, the process of matter and energy, science, the revolutionary and working-class struggle and the socialist future of mankind (26 June 1968)

“Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith — the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible. Intangible as the ether, ineluctable as gravitation, the radium of the moral and mental spheres, mysterious, indefinable, known only by its effects, faith pours out an unfailing stream of energy while abating nor jot nor tittle of its potency.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…

The Faith that Heals (1910)
Context: Nothing in life is more wonderful than faith — the one great moving force which we can neither weigh in the balance nor test in the crucible. Intangible as the ether, ineluctable as gravitation, the radium of the moral and mental spheres, mysterious, indefinable, known only by its effects, faith pours out an unfailing stream of energy while abating nor jot nor tittle of its potency. Well indeed did St. Paul break out into the well-known glorious panegyric, but even this scarcely does justice to the Hertha of the psychical world, distributing force as from a great storage battery without money and without price to the children of men.
Three of its relations concern us here. The most active manifestations are in the countless affiliations which man in his evolution has worked out with the unseen, with the invisible powers, whether of light or of darkness, to which from time immemorial he has erected altars and shrines. To each one of the religions, past or present, faith has been the Jacob's ladder. Creeds pass, an inexhaustible supply of faith remains, with which man proceeds to rebuild temples, churches, chapels and shrines.

“The first step is that we need to revisit the validity of Newton’s universal law of gravitation. Starting in the 1980s, Mordehai Milgrom at the Weizmann Institute in Israel showed that a small generalisation of Newton’s laws can yield the observed dynamics of matter in galaxies and in galaxy clusters without dark matter. This approach is broadly known as MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics). Milgrom’s correction allows gravitational attraction to fall off with distance more slowly than expected (rather than falling off with the square of distance as per Newton) when the local gravitational acceleration falls below an extremely low threshold. This threshold could be linked to other cosmological properties such as the ‘dark energy’ that accounts for the accelerating expansion of the Universe. These links suggest a deeper fundamental theory of space, time and matter, which has not yet been formulated.”

Pavel Kroupa (1963) Australian astrophysicist

[Pavel Kroupa, Has dogma derailed the scientific search for dark matter?, aeon.co, November 2016, https://aeon.co/ideas/has-dogma-derailed-the-scientific-search-for-dark-matter]

“The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.
Source: Isaiah's Job (1936), II

“We do not struggle for ourselves, nor for our race, not even for humanity.
We do not struggle for Earth, nor for ideas.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Saviors of God

The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: We do not struggle for ourselves, nor for our race, not even for humanity.
We do not struggle for Earth, nor for ideas. All these are the precious yet provisional stairs of our ascending God, and they crumble away as soon as he steps upon them in his ascent.
In the smallest lightning flash of our lives, we feel all of God treading upon us, and suddenly we understand: if we all desire it intensely, if we organize all the visible and invisible powers of earth and fling them upward, if we all battle together like fellow combatants eternally vigilant — then the Universe might possibly be saved.
It is not God who will save us — it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit.

“I have to believe there's some other life force out there. I don't know in what form. But we can't have all these galaxies and universes without something going on. ”

John Travolta (1954) American actor, dancer and singer

“… If a distant galaxy is moving relative to us, its entire spectrum is Doppler-shifted in frequency. Its spectral lines are displaced relative to those of stationary light sources. Thanks to this effect, we know that distant galaxies recede from the solar system at speeds proportional to their distances from us. That's the effect that told us of the expanding universe, and of its birth, long ago, in the Big Bang.”

Sheldon L. Glashow (1932) American theoretical physicist

Source: From Alchemy to Quarks (1994), p. 385

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

John D. Barrow 58

Related quotes

Related topics