John D. Barrow

"The laws of Nature are based upon the existence of a pattern, linking one state of affairs to another; and where there is pattern, there is symmetry. Yet...the symmetries that the laws enshrine are br…"

"Einstein showed us how to find all the possible universes that were consistent with the laws of physics and the character of gravity, how to reconstruct their pasts and predict their futures. But actu…"

"Assuming the simulators, or at least the early generations of them, have a very advanced knowledge of the laws of Nature, it's likely that they would still have incomplete knowledge of them. ...gradua…"

"Aristotle believed that the world did not come into being at some time in the past; it had always existed and it would always exist, unchanged in essence for ever. He placed a high premium on symmetry…"

"Scanning the past millennia of human achievement reveals just how much has been achieved during the last three hundred years since Newton set in motion the effective mathematization of Nature. We foun…"

"The Universe has imposed aspects of its structure upon us by the inevitability of the forces of Nature... In a world where adapters succeed, but non-adapters fail, one expects to find vestigial remnan…"

"Everyone knows there are billions and billions of stars, and national debts conjure up similar astronomical numbers. Yet we have found a way to hide the zeros: 109 doesn't look as bad as 1,000,000,000…"

"Einstein had spent the previous thirty years showing how we could understand the behaviour of whole universes with simple maths. Gamow saw that those universes must have had a past that was unimaginab…"