Quotes & Sayings About Spacetime

Quantum events have a way of just happening, without any cause, as when a radioactive atom decays at a random time. Even the quantum vacuum is not an inert void, but is boiling with quantum fluctuations. In our macroscopic world, we are used to energy conservation, but in the quantum realm this holds only on average. Energy fluctuations out of nothing create short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs, which is why the vacuum is not emptiness but a sea of transient particles. An uncaused beginning, even out of nothing, for spacetime is no great leap of the imagination. — Taner Edis

Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself. An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide;and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself whoever himself may be is immortal;and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality. — E. E. Cummings

Spacetime grips mass, telling it how to move ...
Mass grips spacetime, telling it how to curve — John Archibald Wheeler

It is theoretically possible to warp spacetime itself, so you're not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but it's actually space that's moving. — Elon Musk

I first began to worry about this during the summer of 1989, when it began to be clear that string theory would not quickly lead to a unique theory of everything. Henry Tye, a string theorist from Cornell University, had told me of his computer program to produce new string theories. When you run Tye's program, you input a rough description of a universe you would like to describe. You tell it the dimension of spacetime, and something about how the world should look. It outputs all the string theories it can construct that lead to the world you requested, one per page. — Lee Smolin

A full explanation of this is beyond the scope of this book, suffice to say that Einstein was forced into this bold move primarily because Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism were incompatible with Newton's 200-year-old laws of motion. Einstein abandoned the Newtonian ideas of space and time as separate entities and merged them. In Einstein's theory there is a special speed built into the structure of spacetime itself that everyone must agree on, irrespective of how they are moving relative to each other. This special speed is a universal constant of nature that will always be measured as precisely 299,792,458 metres (983,571,503 feet) per second, at all times and all places in the Universe, no matter what they are doing. This — Brian Cox

With general relativity, we know that before gravity can act, spacetime has to deform. This process does not happen instantaneously. It takes time. Gravity waves travel at the speed of light. Gravitational effects can kick in at a given position only after the time it takes for a signal to travel there and distort spacetime. — Lisa Randall

We have one real candidate for changing the rules; this is string theory. In string theory the one-dimensional trajectory of a particle in spacetime is replaced by a two-dimensional orbit of a string. Such strings can be of any size, but under ordinary circumstances they are quite tiny, ... a value determined by comparing the predictions of the theory for Newton's constant and the fine structure constant to experimental values. — Edward Witten

Over the last three decades, theorists have proposed at least a dozen new approaches. Each approach is motivated by a compelling hypothesis, but none has so far succeeded. In the realm of particle physics, these include Technicolor, preon models, and supersymmetry. In the realm of spacetime, they include twistor theory, causal sets, supergravity, dynamical triangulations, and loop quantum gravity. Some of these ideas are as exotic as they sound. — Lee Smolin

You are telling me that I did something because I was going to do something."
"Well, didn't you? You were there."
"No, I didn't - no ... well, maybe I did, but it didn't feel like it."
"Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience."
"But ... but - " Wilson took a deep breath and got control of himself. Then he reached back into his academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion he had been struggling to express. "It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You would have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That's silly."
"Well, didn't you? — Robert A. Heinlein

Just solving certain theorems makes waves in the Platonic over-space. Pump lots of power through a grid tuned carefully in accordance with the right parameters - which fall naturally out of the geometry curve I mentioned, which in turn falls easily out of the Turing theorem - and you can actually amplify these waves, until they rip honking great holes in spacetime and let congruent segments of otherwise-separate universes merge. You really don't want to be standing at ground zero when that happens. — Charles Stross

Spacetime is generated by processes in which these spin networks transform into one another, and these processes are described by sums over spinfoams. A — Carlo Rovelli

A singularity is a point or region in spacetime at which some physical quantity such as the density of mass or energy, the temperature, or the strength of the gravitational field, becomes infinite. Whenever they happen, they pose serious difficulties for physics because they signal a breakdown in the description of the world in mathematical terms. — Lee Smolin

In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time. — Michio Kaku

Even today, I am in total awe of the following wondrous chain of ideas and interconnections. Guided throughout by principles of symmetry, Einstein first showed that acceleration and gravity are really two sides of the same coin. He then expanded the concept to demonstrate that gravity merely reflects the geometry of spacetime. The instruments he used to develop the theory were Riemann's non-Euclidean geometries-precisely the same geometries used by Felix Klein to show that geometry is in fact a manifestation of group theory (because every geometry is defined by its symmetries-the objects it leaves unchanged). Isn't this amazing? — Mario Livio

You must accept that the universe does not owe you anything. It has already given you everything. — Don Murphy

Physicists traced the failure to the jitters of quantum uncertainty. Mathematical techniques had been developed for analyzing the jitters of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic fields, but when the same methods were applied to the gravitational field-a field that governs the curvature of spacetime itself-they proved ineffective. This left the mathematics saturated with inconsistencies such as infinite probabilities. — Brian Greene

In spacetime, all events are baked together: a four-dimensional continuum. Past and future are no more privileged than left and right or up and down. — James Gleick

Ain't spacetime a bitch," said Ram. "Noted," said the expendable. "Nineteen times. — Orson Scott Card

Quantum particles do not behave like tennis balls, but like the quantum particles they are. To get from one place to another, they take all the possible paths in space and time as long as these paths link their starting point to their end point. The particle [...] literally went everywhere. Simultaneously. To the left and to the right of the post. And through it. And outside the room. And into the future and back - until the moment when it hit a detector on the wall. — Christophe Galfard

Minkowski spacetime. — Arthur C. Clarke

If we don't accept any common beliefs, we can't exist in spacetime. But when we don't believe in age, at least we don't have to die because our numbers change. [ ... ] When you don't believe in birthdays, the idea of aging turns a little foreign to you. You don't fall into trauma over your sixteenth birthday or your thirtieth or the big Five-Oh or the deadly Century. You measure your life by what you learn, not by counting how many calendars you've seen. If you're going to have trauma, better it be the shock of discovering the fundamental principle of the universe that some date predictable as next July. — Richard Bach

You have to get old because of the geometry of spacetime. — Brian Cox

These electric and magnetic fields can be elegantly unified into what's known as the electromagnetic field, represented by six numbers at each point in spacetime. As we discussed in Chapter 7, light is simply a wave rippling through the electromagnetic field, so if our physical world is a mathematical structure, then all the light in our Universe (which feels quite physical) corresponds to six numbers at each point in spacetime (which feels quite mathematical). These numbers obey the mathematical relations that we know as Maxwell's equations, shown in Figure 10.4. — Max Tegmark

What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment. — Charles Stross

Asking about a time before the beginning of our spherical spacetime is like asking what lies north of the North Pole. There is no such thing. — Taner Edis

So, in one slightly technical line, here's the mathematical skinny. There's an equation in string theory that has a contribution of the form (D-10) times (Trouble), where D represents the number of spacetime dimensions and Trouble is a mathematical expression resulting in troublesome physical phenomena, such as the violation of energy conservation mentioned above. As to why the equation takes this precise form, I can't offer any intuitive, nontechnical explanation. But if you do the calculation, that's where the math leads. Now, this simple but key observation is that if the number of spacetime dimensions is ten, not the four we expect, the contribution becomes 0 times Trouble. And since 0 times anything is 0, in a universe with ten spacetime dimensions the trouble gets wiped away. That's how the math plays out. Really. And that's why string theorists argue for a universe with more than four spacetime dimensions. — Brian Greene

So, Einstein's theory of gravity is a theory of causal structure. It tells us that the essence of spacetime is causal structure and that the motion of matter is a consequence of alterations in the network of causal relations. What is left out from the notion of causal structure is any measure of quantity or scale. — Lee Smolin

The claim that the universe *began* with the big bang has no basis in current physical and cosmological knowledge. The observations confirming the big bang do not rule out the possibility of a prior universe. — Victor J. Stenger

The body is an arrangement in spacetime, a patterning, a process; the mind is a process of the body, an organ, doing what organs do: organize. Order, pattern, connect ... an immensely flexible technology, or life strategy, which if used with skill and resourcefulness presents each of us with that most fascinating of all serials, The Story of My Life. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Nonetheless, in all cases matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move. — Lisa Randall

A brane is a distinct region of spacetime that extends through only a (possibly multidimensional) slice of space. The word "membrane" motivated the choice of the word "brane" because membranes, like branes, are layers that either surround or run through a substance. — Lisa Randall

That's what happens when stars stop fusing hydrogen into helium. They lose their helium, become too heavy, and then fall through the spacetime fabric, leaving the black hole behind them. — Diana Rose

Space is a spin network whose nodes represent its elementary grains, and whose links describe their proximity relations. Spacetime — Carlo Rovelli

There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change. — Edward Witten

Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve. — John Archibald Wheeler

According to string theory, which Professor Tamashi and other scientists have been using to try to solve the Big Bang, in addition to the four dimensions of spacetime we know, there are six of these very small, curled-up dimensions, making ten all told. And the strings, which are little strands of energy, wiggle around vibrating in these ten dimensions.'

'Like Dennis's mother,' Mario, seeking vengeance for the ant slur, interjects, 'wiggling around vibrating with her vibrator, because she is a famous slut, and also, she has ten dimensions because she is a fat bitch. — Paul Murray

On the other hand, we don't understand the theory too completely, and because of this fuzziness of spacetime, the very concept of spacetime and spacetime dimensions isn't precisely defined. — Edward Witten

It is scandalous the way some scientists accept uncritically some of the most ridiculous speculations, such as the plurality of worlds, the opinion that spacetime has more than 4 dimensions, that particles can move faster than light, or that human life can be prolonged indefinitely. — Mario Bunge

Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me? — Charles Stross

In the popular imagination, the Big Bang is a great explosion; at one time there was nothing, then matter erupted into previously empty space. However, the Big Bang is the beginning of spacetime itself, not an event in time. — Taner Edis

Thorne sent his answers to Franklin in the form of heavily researched memos. Pages long, deeply sourced, and covered in equations, they were more like scientific journal articles than anything else. Franklin's team wrote new rendering software based on these equations and spun up a wormhole. The result was extraordinary. It was like a crystal ball reflecting the universe, a spherical hole in spacetime. — Anonymous

Sense of beauty, perception, and the mathematical universe are all part of the same texture. — Neeti Sinha

What lies north of the North Pole? — Stephen Hawking

Never make a calculation until you know the answer. Make an estimate before every calculation, try a simple physical argument (symmetry! invariance! conservation!) before every derivation, guess the answer to every paradox and puzzle. Courage: No one else needs to know what the guess is. Therefore make it quickly, by instinct. A right guess reinforces this instinct. A wrong guess brings the refreshment of surprise. In either case life as a spacetime expert, however long, is more fun! — John Archibald Wheeler

All of the patterns we've discussed of course exist in four dimensions rather than three, and the metaphors about braids, cables and trees, shouldn't be taken too literally. The key point is simply that you can be an unchanging pattern in spacetime-the specific details of this pattern are less important for the points we're making. This pattern is part of the mathematical structure that is our Universe, and the relations between different parts of the pattern are encoded in mathematical equations. As we saw in Chapter 8, Everett's quantum mechanics endows you with an even more interesting-but no less mathematical-structure, since a single you (the tree trunk) can split into many branches, each feeling that they're the one and only you
we'll return to this later. — Max Tegmark

What sort of work do you do?"
Lifting her skirts with one hand, still holding the owl in the other, she started for the cottage. "Quickening. Citizens of this spacetime call it clockwork magic."
--- — Sharon Lynn Fisher

We begin life as uninhibited explorers with a boundless fascination for the ever growing world to which we have access. And what I find amazing is that if that fascination is fed, and if it's challenged, and if it's nurtured, it can grow to an intellect capable of grappling with such marvels as the quantum nature of reality, the energy locked inside the atom, the curved spacetime of the cosmos, the elementary constituents of matter, the genetic code underlying life, the neural circuitry responsible for consciousness, and perhaps even the very origin of the universe.
- Brian Greene — Brian Greene

everything travels through spacetime at the speed of light. — Andrew Thomas

So: if you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now, and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime. — Brian Greene

The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world. — Bill Gaede

Everything I do now
Was once an unremembered dream.
-Spoken by Dr. Perry after return from the chrysalis — Don Murphy

According to quantum mechanics, at the Planck scale length, instead of a gradually undulating geometry, there should be wild fluctuations and loops and handles of spacetime branching off, the sort of topography that the futuristic Ike encountered. General relativity cannot be used in such untamed territory. — Lisa Randall