Home > Work > The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe
1 " Sin embargo, si descubrimos una teoría completa, debería en su momento ser comprensible en sus líneas generales por todos, no solo por unos pocos científicos. Entonces todos seremos capaces de tomar parte en la discusión de por qué el universo existe. Si encontramos la respuesta a ello, sería el triunfo definitivo de la razón humana, pues entonces conoceríamos la mente de Dios. "
― Stephen Hawking , The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe
2 " The most remarkable property of the universe is that it has spawned creatures able to ask questions. "
3 " As often happens in science, discoveries are made in the pursuit of an elusive (and sometimes nonexistent) goal. "
4 " We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars. We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary, average-sized, yellow star, near the outer edge of one of the spiral arms. "
5 " The discovery that the universe was expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century. "
6 " The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart. This is because you have to expend energy to separate them. You have to pull against the gravitational force attracting them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of the whole universe, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy of the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero. "
7 " one has a singularity contained within a region of space-time known as a black hole. "
8 " I realized that if one reversed the direction of time in Penrose’s theorem so that the collapse became an expansion, the conditions of his theorem would still hold, provided the universe were roughly like a Friedmann model on large scales at the present time. "
9 " [Segunda ley de la termodinámica]. Según esta ley, el desorden o la entropía aumenta siempre con el tiempo. En otras palabras, se trata de una forma de la ley de Murphy: las cosas van a peor. "
10 " Esto no debería preocuparnos demasiado, puesto que para entonces, a menos que tengamos colonias más allá del sistema solar, la humanidad habrá desaparecido hace tiempo, extinguida con la muerte de nuestro Sol. "
11 " En consecuencia, si solo sabemos lo que ha sucedido desde el big bang, no podemos determinar lo que sucedió antes. Para nosotros, los sucesos anteriores al big bang no pueden tener consecuencias, de modo que no deberían formar parte de un modelo científico del universo. Por eso deberíamos eliminarlos del modelo y decir que el tiempo tuvo un comienzo en el big bang. "