Caleb Scharf > Quotes

“We are accelerating and extending our minds through our computers and algorithms, through our medical prowess and our accumulated knowledge. These minds of ours are the most precious things; we need to cherish all seven-plus billion of them. Walking this rocky globe somewhere today may be a human who will take us to the next level of insight. This person could be anywhere-from Africa to Asia, Oceania to Europe, or in the Americas. This person could even be you. And that journey will be as extraordinary as this one.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Our existence in this place, this microscopic corner of the cosmos, is fleeting. With utter disregard for our wants and needs, nature plays out its grand acts on scales of space and time that are truly hard to grasp. Perhaps all we can look to for real solace is our endless capacity to ask questions and seek answers about the place we find ourselves in.”
― Caleb Scharf

“As a gas of normal matter pulls together-or, rather, falls together-it transforms gravitational potential energy into thermal energy. In other words, it heats up. That sets in motion a competition between gravity workimg to condense matter and thermal-energy pressure spreading matter apart. In the right circumstances, though, if the matter can cool off fast enough, gravity can pull it into very dense concentrations indeed.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Some estimates, based on analyses of the known geometry of space-time, suggest that the "full" universe could extend at least 250 cosmic horizons farther. Other estimates, based on the very rapid expansion-or inflation-of the universe in its very early youth, suggest that the universe may be on the order of 10^23 times larger than the part we will ever see, or ever access.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“The gloriously bright daytime side of the Earth is therefore not just a pretty sight. It signals a relentless absorption of electromagnetic radiation. Earth reflects, but it also acts like a giant sponge for photons that would otherwise streak off into the rest of the cosmos. We may be a small world, but we cast a long shadow.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“We also exist at one of the few periods in the history of the universe when our eyes and telescopes have the opportunity to make meaningful observations about the nature of what surrounds us. If we lived deeper in the past or further in the future, we’d be missing out on vital information.”
― Caleb Scharf

“In animals, for example, there is an observed mathematical relationship between basal metabolic rate (how fast animals burn chemical energy while resting) and body mass. This relationship actually holds from bacteria to tiny shrews, and all the way up to enormous blue whales: the metabolic rate increases with body mass to the power of three-quarters. That's a law that runs across the whole 10^22 span of masses for living things.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“Notably, if life is rare, it is rather striking that the universe is nonetheless so good at setting the right stage.”
― Caleb Scharf

“200-square-mile region. The second came in September with a fireball entry over the small town of Murchison in eastern Australia, and left behind about two hundred pounds of primitive matter.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

“On the daytime side of Earth, the solar radiation hitting the top fo the atmosphere deposits around 1,300 watts of power per square meter. That's about the same amount used by an electric kettle. It doesn't seem like a great deal.

But add up that incoming solar radiation across one whole hemisphere of Earth, and a total of about 174 petawatts (10^15, or a quadrillion, watts) of solar power is hitting the top of the atmosphere. A colossal total of 89 petawatts of that same power is absorbed by the surface of the Earth directly. The rest is reflected by the surface, or absorbed by the atmosphere reflected by its clouds of condensed water.

By human standards this is a fearsome amount of Energy. Estimates of current human energy consumption suggest that in a single year we use roughly 1.6 X 10^11 megawatt-hours, which means that with 8,760 hours in a year we are using energy at a rate of about 0.018 petawatts. All life on Earth (adding up photosynthetic organisms, water transpiration in plants, and what life gets from chemical and geophysical energy) is estimated to consume energy at a rate of between 0.1 and 5 petawatts. In other words, despite life's potent footpirnt on the planet, on a cosmic scale it's still barely sipping at what the Sun's photons rain down on us.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“That is not to say that there’s any change in their individual physics, but rather that the physics of these building blocks is not enough by itself to tell you all their properties and behaviors when they’re part of you.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm

“There are as many orders of magnitude in scale from here to a speck of dirt as from a speck of dirt to the entire observable universe.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“We've been around for the tiniest sliver of cosmic time, yet our science can already take us across sixty orders of magnitude in scale. To put that in perspective, if the age of the universe were a human lifetime, it would have taken the cosmos about five hours to attain its present understanding of itself in the form of us.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“perhaps none of these attributes were inevitable results of natural selection. Maybe they were sheer dumb luck—after all, brains like ours may have arisen only once in nearly 4 billion years of life on Earth. That hardly suggests a great evolutionary strategy.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

“However, some scientists argue for what’s called convergent evolution, the idea that there are only a finite number of useful biological blueprints, and that evolution will always drift toward them. For complex organisms, this argument has been used to help explain how similar “camera eyes” exist in both vertebrates (like humans) and cephalopods (like squid), even though we and they are on evolutionary tracks that parted a very long time ago.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Copernicus Complex: Caleb A. Scharf

“With enough infalling matter, a spinning black hole can convert mass to energy with higher efficiency than even nuclear fusion. The most luminous cases across the universe shine with the power of hundreds of trillions of suns.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“But there are a couple of other stable flavors of magnesium around, with 25 and 26 particles in their atomic nuclei. In the CAIs there is proportionately more of this 26-particle”
― Caleb Scharf, The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

“Any claims of life operating via some kind of truly alternative biochemistry are at present unsubstantiated,”
― Caleb Scharf, The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities

“These bubble-like cosmic voids can span scales of more than thirty million light-years (3 X 10^23 meters). In these regions the density of matter is less than one-tenth of the average density of the universe, which makes these places quite depressing, unless you enjoy emptiness.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“1 Hundred Quadrillion Seconds (10 ^ 17) for light to travel from cosmic horizon to us.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“In a very real sense all of us, and all of what surrounds us, are pieces inside an ongoing four-billion-year-old game. It’s not a game with a perfectly prescribed set of rules. Instead it’s a game governed by rules that emerge from the game itself. One might say that the very object of the game is to produce its own rules. The ultimate players of the game are also hard to spot. They are even more ancient, and have no discernable physical form—they are the root properties and predispositions of the universe; they are everywhere, yet nowhere in particular.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life's Unending Algorithm

“.1 millimeters (10 ^ -4 meters) is halfway between 10^-35 meters and 10^27 meters on a logarithmic scale: as large compared to the Planck scale as the whole observable universe is to .1 millimeters.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“If you were a hapless cosmic hitchhiker stranded between the stars of the Milky Way, your body would represent a concentration of matter a hundred million trillion times greater than the sparse interstellar space around you. To put that another way, take a look at the tip of your little finger. That pinky end contains about 10^23 atoms. That number is the same as the total number of atoms in a sphere of about 100 million cubic kilometers of typical interstellar void.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“The most distant quasars exist in a very young universe, barely a billion years old.”
― Caleb Scharf, Gravity's Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos

“The idea of the existence of WIMPS fits with many cosmic measurements, including the inferred gravitational fields of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, the observation of gravitational lensing, and the patterns of the cosmic microwave background radiation. The snag is that no WIMP has ever been detected directly, and a number of Earth- bound experiments are actively searching for them. It's possible that instead of there being dark matter, there is something incomplete in our understanding of the nature of gravity itself.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“...life is a collection of phenomena at the boundary between order and chaos.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Copernicus Complex: Caleb A. Scharf

“I’d argue that these facts are pushing us toward a new scientific idea about our place in the cosmos, a departure from both the Copernican and anthropic principles, and I think it’s well along the road to becoming a principle in its own right. Perhaps we could call it a “cosmo-chaotic principle,” the place between order (from the original Greek kósmos, meaning a well-ordered system) and chaos. Its essence is that life, and specifically life like that on Earth, will always inhabit the border or interface between zones defined by such characteristics as energy, location, scale, time, order and disorder. Factors such as the stability or chaos of planetary orbits, or the variations of climate and geophysics on a planet, are direct manifestations of these characteristics. Too far away from such borders, in either direction, and the balance for life tips toward a hostile state. Life like us requires the right mix of ingredients, of calm and chaos—the right yin and yang.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Copernicus Complex: Caleb A. Scharf

“In powers of ten, humans exist almost halfway between the inconceivably big and the unimaginably tiny, and the final plunge from 10^-19 meters to 10^-34 meters is as deep as the descent from the human scale to the interior of a proton.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“For example, add two identical balls of dough together, and the new radius of the combined ball is not twice what it was; it's only about 26 percent larger. Why? Because for ordinary materials in a sphere the radius grows as the cube root of the mass-double the mass and you only increase the size by 26 percent.”
― Caleb Scharf, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing

“If I computed the total power of this radiation, it was a hundred times greater than the X-ray emission of a normal galaxy cluster.”
― Caleb Scharf, Gravity's Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos