Princeton University Press quotes

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The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.

Hermann Weyl (1949)



A true theory of quantum gravity should replace our present concept of Spacetime at a singularity. It should give a clear-cut way of talking about what we call a singularity in classical theory. It shouldn’t be simply a non-singular Spacetime, but something drastically different.

Roger Penrose (1996)



If there were an instant, at a “big bang,” when our universe started expanding, it is not in the cosmology as now accepted, because no one has thought of a way to adduce objective physical evidence that such an event really happened.

— Jim Peebles (1993)



It is natural to ask whether distant objects may be made of antimatter; one might even hope the answer will teach us something about the way … the other forms of matter were created.

— Jim Peebles (1993)



Cosmology is in an exciting state because we have a rich and growing list of problems and a growing observational base that may allow us to find a few solutions.

— Jim Peebles (1993)



The fundamental tenet of Einstein’s cosmic religion is that science furthers religion.

— Max Jammer (1999)



It is, of course, precisely the very ‘beginning of the expansion,” the question of how and why the universe started, that attracted the attention of theologians and philosophers

— Max Jammer (1999)



Cosmology cannot predict anything about the universe unless it makes some assumption about the initial conditions.

Stephen Hawking (1994)



If gravity had been sometimes attractive and sometimes repulsive, like electrodynamics, we would never notice it at all because it is about 1040 times weaker. It is only because gravity always has the same sign that the gravitational force between the particles of two macroscopic bodies like ourselves and the Earth add up to give a force we can feel.

Stephen Hawking (1994)