Brian Cox QUOTES

1 " We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself. "

2 " The problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it.

The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense! "

― Brian Cox

3 " Life, just like the stars, the planets and the galaxies, is just a temporary structure on the long road from order to disorder. But that doesn't make us insignificant, because we are the Cosmos made conscious. Life is the means by which the universe understands itself. And for me, our true significance lies in our ability to understand and explore this beautiful universe. "

― Brian Cox

4 " I'm comfortable with the unknown -- that's the point of science. There are places out there, billions of places out there, that we know nothing about. And the fact that we know nothing about them excites me, and I want to go out and find out about them.

And that's what science is.

So I think if you’re not comfortable with the unknown, then it’s difficult to be a scientist… I don’t need an answer. I don’t need answers to everything. I want to have answers to find. "

― Brian Cox

5 " Science is most definitely not a priesthood where people stand on a mountain and pass truths down to the waiting minions below. "

― Brian Cox

6 " Light is the only connection we have with the Universe beyond our solar system, and the only connection our ancestors had with anything beyond Earth. Follow the light and we can journey from the confines of our planet to other worlds that orbit the Sun without ever dreaming of spacecraft. To look up is to look back in time, because the ancient beams of light are messengers from the Universe's distant past. "

― Brian Cox , Wonders of the Universe

7 " You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe. "

― Brian Cox , Forces of Nature

8 " Every carbon atom in every living thing on the planet was produced in the heart of a dying star. "

― Brian Cox , Wonders of the Universe

9 " The ultimate paradox, of course, is that even though we're all going to die, we've all got to live in the meantime… "

― Brian Cox

10 " (On the energy radiated by the Sun)
It's four hundred million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year, radiated in one second, and we worked that out by using some water, a thermometer, a tin, and an umbrella. And that's why I love physics. "

― Brian Cox

11 " To me, and to the participants of at the Green Bank conference, the idea that a civilization might destroy itself is both ludicrous and likely. We are pathetically inadequate at long-term planning, idiotically primitive in our destructive urges and pathologically incapable of simply getting along. "

― Brian Cox , Human Universe

12 " You have to get old because of the geometry of spacetime. "

― Brian Cox , Forces of Nature

13 " You dig deeper and it gets more and more complicated, and you get confused, and it's tricky and it's hard, but... It is beautiful. "

― Brian Cox

14 " We explore because we are curious, not because we wish to develop grand views of reality or better widgets. "

― Brian Cox

15 " In science, there are no universal truths, just views of the world that have yet to be shown to be false. "

― Brian Cox , Why Does E=mc²? (And Why Should We Care?)

16 " The practice of science happens at the border between the known and the unknown. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we peer into the darkness with eyes opened not in fear but in wonder. "

― Brian Cox , Wonders of the Universe

17 " We're both clever and stupid in equal measure. "

― Brian Cox , Human Universe

18 " Look at any randomly selected piece of your world. Encoded deep in the biology of every cell in every blade of grass, in every insect’s wing, in every bacterium cell, is the history of the third planet from the Sun in a Solar System making its way lethargically around a galaxy called the Milky Way. Its shape, form, function, colour, smell, taste, molecular structure, arrangement of atoms, sequence of bases, and possibilities for the future are all absolutely unique. There is nowhere else in the observable Universe where you will see precisely that little clump of emergent, living complexity. It is wonderful. "

― Brian Cox , Wonders of Life: Exploring the Most Extraordinary Phenomenon in the Universe

19 " Two and a half million years ago, when our distant relative Homo habilis was foraging for food across the Tanzanian savannah, a beam of light left the Andromeda Galaxy and began its journey across the Universe. As that light beam raced across space at the speed of light, generations of pre-humans and humans lived and died; whole species evolved and became extinct, until one member of that unbroken lineage, me, happened to gaze up into the sky below the constellation we call Cassiopeia and focus that beam of light onto his retina. A two-and-a-half-billion-year journey ends by creating an electrical impulse in a nerve fibre, triggering a cascade of wonder in a complex organ called the human brain that didn’t exist anywhere in the Universe when the journey began. "

― Brian Cox

20 " [Real scientist are delighted when they find out they are wrong. And to me that is one of the greatest gifts that a scientific education can bring.] There are too many people in this world who want to be right. And too few who just want to know. "

― Brian Cox , Forces of Nature

1
2
3
4
5