Martin J. Rees Quotes

[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.

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.

But it remains a fundamental challenge to understand the very beginning-this must await a 'final' theory, perhaps some variant of superstrings. Such a theory would signal the end of an intellectual quest that started with Newton, and continued through Maxwell, Einstein, and their successors. It would deepen our understanding of space, time, and the basic forces, as well as elucidating the ultra-early universe and the centres of black holes.

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

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.

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.

The other naturally occurring viruses, like ebola, are not durable enough to generate a runaway epidemic.

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

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.

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.

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.

Inside every black hole that collapses may lie the seeds of a new expanding universe.

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.