Barbara Adde’s Reviews > Humble before the Void: A Western Astronomer, his Journey East, and a Remarkable Encounter Between Western Science and Tibetan Buddhism > Status Update

“…The message is that learning is a labor of love and joy. Students need to be actively engaged and encouraged to roam outside the box. In the US, where problems in the educational system seem intractable, the solutions are actually simple: honor teachers, train them in their discipline, pay them properly, give them the resources to succeed, and hold them and their students to high standards of commitment & app.

“Our rocket travel into space is actually quite primitive when compared to our own digital technology, in which information - and therefore a coded form of life -can transmit from A to B in seconds.”

Hawking’s quantum creation theory: in the very early universe, the Big Bang started due to a quantum fluctuation, the smallest of jolts, at a subatomic level. It triggered the creation of energy and matter. The universe expanded suddenly and rapidly by borrowing energy from the vacuum of space, essentially from the void. From this energy, matter arose.

“When we rap our knuckles on a table we feel and hear a pleasing solidity, but it’s really an illusion created by the electric force. What we call ‘stuff’ is really empty space. Buddhists might well be satisfied that physicists too were deconstructing reality.”

Correction: “there’s nothing outside.”

“The Big Bang was an event where space unfolded like a lotus flower. Space is the flower - there’s nothing inside.”

“We are limited in our view by the time it takes distant light to reach us, so the universe has an edge in time not space.”

“For 5B years the expansion rate of the physical universe was faster than light. Gravity slowed matter down. Thus, the physical universe must be larger than we can see, since ‘seeing’ requires light. From some regions of space, light has never been able to reach us. Meanwhile, light crossed slower regions of expansion, and they are what we see.”

Interesting discussion about Time.
Makes me think that Time is like the Earth seen from space - all the borders and demarcations disappear because they are manmade….

“We live in a world where no phenomena exists independent of the act of observation.”