Martin J. Rees Quotes & Sayings

God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton. — Martin J. Rees

The other naturally occurring viruses, like ebola, are not durable enough to generate a runaway epidemic. — Martin J. Rees

[The fine structure constant] ... defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on Earth were made. Its value controls the power from the Sun and, more sensitively, how stars transmute hydrogen into all the atoms of the periodic table. — Martin J. Rees

Some innovations just don't attract enough economic or social demand: just as supersonic flight and manned space flight stagnated after the 1970s, today (in 2002) the potentialities of broadband (G3) technology are being taken up rather slowly because few people want to surf the Internet or watch movies from their mobile phones. — Martin J. Rees

In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it. — Martin J. Rees

The sun has adjusted its structure so that nuclear power is generated in the core, and diffuses outward, at just the rate needed to balance the heat lost from the surface-heat that is the basis for life on Earth. — Martin J. Rees

It's better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science
it's a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong, joked Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal and the former president of the Royal Society, at Wired 2013. — Martin J. Rees

We're not aware of the "big picture," any more than a plankton whose universe was a liter of water would be aware of the world's topography and biosphere. — Martin J. Rees

Our universe, extending immensely far beyond our present horizon, may itself be just one member of a possibly infinite ensemble. This 'multiverse' concept, though speculative, is a natural extension of current cosmological theories, which gain credence because they account for things that we do observe. The physical laws and geometry could be different in other universes, and this offers a new perspective on the seemingly special values that the six numbers take in ours. — Martin J. Rees

I'd like to widen people's awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead
for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae. — Martin J. Rees