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Martin Rees Quotes about Science

All Martin Rees Quotes Challenges Culture Earth Moon Science quotes Technology
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

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.

Martin Rees
Science, Years, Matter

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Martin Rees
Science, Vastness, Ontology
Quoted in Project Cyclops: A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, rev. ed., ed. B. M. Oliver and J. Billingham (1973). An earlier version by A. R. Burn appeared in a book review by Burn in The Classical Review, June 1969: "absence of evidence is not identical with evidence of absence."

The physicist is like someone who's watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves in the game are. But understanding the rules is just a trivial preliminary on the long route from being a novice to being a grand master. So even if we understand all the laws of physics, then exploring their consequences in the everyday world where complex structures can exist is a far more daunting task, and that's an inexhaustible one I'm sure.

Martin Rees
Moving, Science, Law

Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion 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, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.

Martin Rees
Science, Thinking, Years
"The Catastrophist" by Christopher Hitchens, www.theatlantic.com. January 2010.

If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star ... They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

Martin Rees
Stars, Future, Science

God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.

Martin Rees
God, Science, Space
Martin Rees (2011). “Our Cosmic Habitat”, p.9, Princeton University Press

It's becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics.

Martin Rees
Stars, Learning, Science

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.

Martin Rees
Life, Science, Intelligent
"Aliens can't hear us, says astronomer" by Robin McKie, www.theguardian.com. January 27, 2010.

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