Words matter. These are the best Martin Rees Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy.
Whether it is to reduce our carbon-dioxide emissions or to prepare for when the coal and oil run out, we have to continue to seek out new energy sources.
If we ever established contact with intelligent life on another world, there would be barriers to communication. First, they would be many light years away, so signals would take many years to reach them: there would be no scope for quick repartee. There might be an IQ gap.
Advances in technology – hugely beneficial though they are – render us vulnerable in new ways. For instance, our interconnected world depends on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, and so forth.
And we should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to concepts on the fringe of science fiction. Flaky American futurologists aren’t always wrong. They remind us that a superintelligent machine is the last instrument that humans may ever design – the machine will itself take over in making further steps.
I’m not myself religious but have no wish to insult or denigrate those who are.
There are lots of ideas which extend the Copernican principle one step further. We went from the solar system to the galaxy to zillions of galaxies and now to realising even that isn’t all there is.
To ensure continuing prosperity in the global economy, nothing is more important than the development and application of knowledge and skills.
It’s often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science – it’s far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.
The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.
In the case of climate change, the threat is long-term and diffuse and requires broad international action for the benefit of people decades in the future. And in politics, the urgent always trumps the important, and that is what makes it a very difficult and challenging issue.
We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds. It may have involved a fluke so rare that it happened only once in the entire galaxy. On the other hand, it may have been almost inevitable, given the right environment.
The U.S., France, Germany and Canada have all responded to the financial crisis by boosting rather than cutting their science funding. The U.K. has not.
Science is a part of culture. Indeed, it is the only truly global culture because protons and proteins are the same all over the world, and it’s the one culture we can all share.
The extreme sophistication of modern technology – wonderful though its benefits are – is, ironically, an impediment to engaging young people with basics: with learning how things work.
Science isn’t just for scientists – it’s not just a training for careers.
To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as ‘what NASA does’. This perception is – in many respects – a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.
Just as there are many Jews who keep the Friday ritual in their home despite describing themselves as atheists, I am a ‘tribal Christian,’ happy to attend church services.
It’s important that everyone realizes how much scientists still don’t know.
There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows and what we should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds.
Over most of history, threats have come from nature – disease, earthquakes, floods, and so forth. But the worst now come from us. We’ve entered a geological era called the anthropocene. This started, perhaps, with the invention of thermonuclear weapons.
I’m a technological optimist in that I do believe that technology will provide solutions that will allow the world in 2050 to support 9 billion people at an acceptable standard of living. But I’m a political pessimist in that I am concerned about whether the science will be appropriately applied.
The scientific issues that engage people most are the truly fundamental ones: is the universe infinite? Is life just a sideshow in the cosmos? What happened before the Big Bang? Everyone is flummoxed by such questions, so there is, in a sense, no gulf between experts and the rest.
The atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising – mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels. It’s agreed that this build-up will, in itself, induce a long-term warming trend, superimposed on all the other complicated effects that make climate fluctuate.
I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.
It is mistaken to claim that global problems will be solved more quickly if only researchers would abandon their quest to understand the universe and knuckle down to work on an agenda of public or political concerns. These are not ‘either/or’ options – indeed, there is a positive symbiosis between them.
General writing about science, even if we do it badly, helps us to see our work in perspective and broadens our vision.
The Blair government perhaps ranks as the best the U.K. has had for 50 years. It cannot match the scale of Attlee’s reforms, but has a fine record of constitutional reform and economic competence. In my own areas – science and innovation – there have been well-judged and effective changes.
Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.
Given the scale of issues like global warming and epidemic disease, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of a can-do attitude to science rather than a can’t-afford-it attitude.
Maybe the search for life shouldn’t restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.
Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just ‘virtual reality.’
The advance of science spares us from irrational dread.
From the growth of the Internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore.
Indeed, evolutionists don’t agree on how divergently our own biosphere could have developed if such contingencies as ice ages and meteorite impacts had happened differently.
Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have.
Some global hazards are insidious. They stem from pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. And they will be aggravated as the population rises to a projected nine billion by mid-century, and by the effects of climate change. An ‘ecological shock’ could irreversibly degrade our environment.
We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don’t know what banged and why it banged. That’s a challenge for 21st-century science.
In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure – error rather than terror.
Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests – is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn’t offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.
The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism.
We need to broaden our sympathies both in space and time – and perceive ourselves as part of a long heritage, and stewards for an immense future.
If you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school, and you tell them they can’t have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science.
We are ‘nuclear waste’ from the fuel that makes stars shine; indeed, each of us contains atoms whose provenance can be traced back to thousands of different stars spread through our Milky Way.
Ever since Darwin, we’ve been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.
