Clifford A. Pickover > Quotes

“Without these supernova explosions, there are no mist-covered swamps, computer chips, trilobites, Mozart or the tears of a little girl. Without exploding stars, perhaps there could be a heaven, but there is certainly no Earth.”
― Clifford A. Pickover

“I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe....The fact that reality can be described or approximated by simple mathematical expressions suggests to me that nature has mathematics at its core.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Loom of God: Mathematical Tapestries at the Edge of Time

“It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“There can never be a clock at the center of the Universe to which everyone can set their watches. Your entire life can be the blink of an eye to an alien who leaves Earth traveling close to the speed of light, then returns an hour later to find that you have been dead for centuries.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics

“In this book, you will encounter various interesting geometries that have been thought to hold the keys to the universe. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) suggested that "Nature's great book is written in mathematical symbols." Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) modeled the solar system with Platonic solids such as the dodecahedron. In the 1960s, physicist Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) was impressed with the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." Large Lie groups, like E8-which is discussed in the entry "The Quest for Lie Group E8 (2007)"- may someday help us create a unified theory of physics. in 2007, Swedish American cosmologist Max Tegmark published both scientific and popular articles on the mathematical universe hypothesis, which states that our physical reality is a mathematical structure-in other words, our universe in not just described by mathematics-it is mathematics.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“For those of you who are about to embark on reading The Math Book from cover to cover, look for the connections, gaze in awe at the evolution of ideas, and sail on the shoreless sea of imagination.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“At his "World of Physics" Web site, Eric W. Weisstein notes that the fine structure constant continues to fascinate numerologists, who have claimed that connections exist between alpha, the Cheops pyramid, and Stonehenge!”
― Clifford A. Pickover, A Passion for Mathematics: Numbers, Puzzles, Madness, Religion, and the Quest for Reality

“Einstein created an unstoppable "intellectual chain reaction," an avalanche of pulsing, chattering neurons and memes that will ring for an eternity”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics

“Mathematical theories have sometimes been used to predict phenomena that were not confirmed until years later. For example, Maxwell's equations, named after physicist James Clerk Maxwell, predicted radio waves. Einstein's field equations suggested that gravity would bend light and that the universe is expanding. Physicist Paul Dirac once noted that the abstract mathematics we study now gives us a glimpse of physics in the future. In fact, his equations predicted the existence of antimatter, which was subsequently discovered. Similarly, mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky said that "there is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not someday be applied to the phenomena of the real world.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“As I write this entry, I touch a saber-tooth tiger skull in my office. Without stars there could be no skulls”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics

“Georges Ifrah in the Universal History of Numbers discusses simultaneity when writing about Mayan mathematics:

We therefore see yet again how people who have been widely separated in time or space have...been led to very similar if not identical results....In some cases, the explanation for this may be found in contacts and influences between different groups of people....The true explanation lies in what we have previously referred to as the profound unity of culture: the intelligence of Homo sapiens is universal and its potential is remarkably uniform in all parts of the world.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“Often, simply knowing the answer is the largest hurdle to overcome when formulating a proof.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“The usefulness of mathematics allows us to build spaceships and investigate the geometry of our universe. Numbers may be our first means of communication with intelligent alien races. Some physicists have even speculated that an understanding of higher dimensions and of topology-the study of shapes and their interrelationships-may someday allow us to escape our universe, when it ends in either great heat or cold, and then we could call all of space-time our home.”
― Clifford A. Pickover

“Obviously, the final goal of scientists and mathematicians is not simply the accumulation of facts and lists of formulas, but rather they seek to understand the patterns, organizing principles, and relationships between these facts to form theorems and entirely new branches of human thought. For me, mathematics cultivates a perpetual state of wonder about the nature of mind, the limits of thoughts, and our place in this vast cosmos.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“Además, cuando envejecemos, las moléculas de nuestro cuerpo se intercambian con el ambiente. Con cada respiración puede que inhalemos cientos de millones de átomos de aire exhalado hace semanas por alguien en el otro lado del planeta. Pensando en un nivel mayor, nuestros cerebros y órganos están "desapareciendo" en el aire, y las células a veces se reemplazan tan rápido como se destruyen. Dentro de uno o dos años, la mayoría de los átomos de nuestros cuerpos serán reemplazados por otros.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, Death and the Afterlife: A Chronological Journey, from Cremation to Quantum Resurrection

“This three-dimensional froth even produces tunnels and wormlike tubes commonly depicted in embedding diagrams for quantum froth. The connecting bridges in the foam correspond to wormholes between different universes or between different places in the same universe.”
― Clifford A. Pickover

“Preservations are working to save neon signs for future generations, either on-site or in museums. After all, what would America be without a few giant doughnuts around.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics

“Neutronium is so dense that a chunk the size of a thimble would weigh about 100 million tons.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide

“The quipu is significant because it dispels the notion that mathematics flourishes only after a civilization has developed writing; however, societies can reach advanced states without ever having developed written records.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“For relatively small stars, the Pauli exclusion principle keeps the electrons in a star sufficiently separated to prevent the star from contracting further after it has spent its fuel. In other words, the electrons counteract the crushing gravitational force. However, for stars more than about 1.5 times the mass of the sun (a mass known as the Chandrasekhar limit), this repulsive force would not be enough to stop stellar collapse.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide

“In the froth, space doesn't have a definite structure. It has various probabilities for different shapes and curvatures. It might have a 50 percent chance of being in one shape, a 10 percent chance of being in another, and a 40 percent chance of being in a third form. Because any structure is possible inside the singularity, we say the singularity is constructed from probabilistic foam, or quantum foam. Quantum gravity governs the probabilities for the various foam structures.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide

“Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has proved that if two black holes unite, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the surface areas of the initial black holes. For these reasons the total black-hole portion of the universe is ever increasing.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide

“philosophical speculation can provide a stimulus for scientific breakthroughs.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics

“Ancient people, like the Greeks, had a deep fascination with numbers. Could it be that in difficult times numbers were the only constant thing in an ever shifting world? To the Pythagoreans, an ancient Greek sect, numbers were tangible, immutable, comfortable, eternal, more reliable than friends, less threatening than Apollo and Zeus.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“According to his controversial theory, we notice the tops of the waves, but beneath the surface some kind of synchronistic mechanism may exist that mysteriously connects events in our world and causes them to cluster.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics

“He calmly rode on, leaving it to his horse’s discretion to go which way it pleased, firmly believing that in this consisted the very essence of adventure.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes, and the Quest for Transcendence