Home > Author > Martin J. Rees
1 " God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton. "
― Martin J. Rees , Our Cosmic Habitat
2 " The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein -- humane, global and farseeing. And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth "
― Martin J. Rees
3 " [The fine structure constant] ... defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table. "
― Martin J. Rees , Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
4 " Inside every black hole that collapses may lie the seeds of a new expanding universe. "
5 " I'd like to widen people's awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead--for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae. "
6 " In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it. "
7 " I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms that we can't conceive. And there could, of course, be forms of intelligence beyond human capacity – beyond as much as we are beyond a chimpanzee "
8 " It's better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science -- it's a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong," joked Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal and the former president of the Royal Society, at Wired 2013. "
9 " We’re not aware of the “big picture,” any more than a plankton whose universe was a liter of water would be aware of the world’s topography and biosphere. "
10 " Some innovations just don’t attract enough economic or social demand: just as supersonic flight and manned space flight stagnated after the 1970s, today (in 2002) the potentialities of broadband (G3) technology are being taken up rather slowly because few people want to surf the Internet or watch movies from their mobile phones. "
― Martin J. Rees , Our Final Hour: A Scientist's warning - How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century — On Earth and Beyond
11 " The Internet offers access, in principle, to an unprecedented variety of opinions and information. Nonetheless, it could narrow understanding and sympathies rather than broaden them: some people may choose to stay closeted within a cybercommunity of the likeminded. "
12 " Our universe, extending immensely far beyond our present horizon, may itself be just one member of a possibly infinite ensemble. This ‘multiverse’ concept, though speculative, is a natural extension of current cosmological theories, which gain credence because they account for things that we do observe. The physical laws and geometry could be different in other universes, and this offers a new perspective on the seemingly special values that the six numbers take in ours. "
13 " More energy is needed to rise a millimetre above a neutron star's surface than to break completely free of Earth's gravity. A pen dropped from a height of one metre would impact with the energy of a ton of TNT (although the intense gravity on a neutron star's surface would actually, of course, squash any such objects instantly). A projectile would need to attain half the speed of light to escape its gravity; conversely, anything that fell freely onto a neutron star from a great height would impact at more than half the speed of light. "
14 " The Sun contains about a thousand times more mass than Jupiter. If it were cold, gravity would squeeze it a million times denser than an ordinary solid: it would be a 'white dwarf' about the size of the Earth but 330,000 times more massive. But the Sun's core actually has a temperature of fifteen million degrees-thousands of time hotter than its glowing surface, and the pressure of this immensely hot gas 'puffs up' the Sun and holds it in equilibrium. "
15 " The atoms that comprise our bodies and that make all visible stars and galaxies, are mere trace-constituents of a universe whose large-scale structure is controlled by some quite different (and invisible) substance. We see, as it were, just the white foam on the wave-crests, not the massive waves themselves. We must envisage our cosmic habitat as a dark place, made mainly of quite unknown material. "
16 " The sun has adjusted its structure so that nuclear power is generated in the core, and diffuses outward, at just the rate needed to balance the heat lost from the surface-heat that is the basis for life on Earth. "
17 " The other naturally occurring viruses, like ebola, are not durable enough to generate a runaway epidemic. "
18 " We, and the visible universe around us, may exist only because of a difference in the ninth decimal place between the numbers of quarks and of antiquarks. "
19 " The global village will have its village idiots and they’ll have global range. "
― Martin J. Rees , On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
20 " In this perspective, it looks surprising that our universe was initiated with a very finely tuned impetus, almost exactly enough to balance the decelerating tendency of gravity. It's like sitting at the bottom of a well and throwing a stone up so that it just comes to a halt exactly at the top-the required precision is astonishing: at one second after the Big Bang, Omega cannot have differed from unity by more than one part in a million billion (one in 10^15) in order that the universe should now, after ten billion years, be still expanding and with a value of Omega that has certainly not departed wildly from unity. "
