Martin J. Rees · 208 pages
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“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, quote from Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
“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, quote from Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
“[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, quote from Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
“A measure of the strength of a body's gravity is the speed with which a projectile must be fired to escape its grasp. It takes 11.2 kilometers per second to escape from the Earth. This speed is tiny compared with that of light, 300,000 kilometers per second, but it challenges rocket engineers constrained to use chemical fuel, which converts only a billionth of its so-called mass 'rest-mass energy' (Einstein's mc^2) into effective power. The escape velocity from the sun's surface is 600 kilometers per second-still only one fifth of one percent of the speed of light.”
― Martin J. Rees, quote from Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
“More energy is needed to rise a millimetre above a neutron star's surface than to break completely free of Earth's gravity. A pen dropped from a height of one metre would impact with the energy of a ton of TNT (although the intense gravity on a neutron star's surface would actually, of course, squash any such objects instantly). A projectile would need to attain half the speed of light to escape its gravity; conversely, anything that fell freely onto a neutron star from a great height would impact at more than half the speed of light.”
― Martin J. Rees, quote from Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
“The Sun contains about a thousand times more mass than Jupiter. If it were cold, gravity would squeeze it a million times denser than an ordinary solid: it would be a 'white dwarf' about the size of the Earth but 330,000 times more massive. But the Sun's core actually has a temperature of fifteen million degrees-thousands of time hotter than its glowing surface, and the pressure of this immensely hot gas 'puffs up' the Sun and holds it in equilibrium.”
― Martin J. Rees, quote from Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
Martin J. Rees
Born place: in York, The United Kingdom
Born date June 23, 1942
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“Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; 180 Departed, have left no addresses.”
― T.S. Eliot, quote from The Waste Land
“And from the whole she deduced this useful lesson, that to go previously engaged to a ball, does not necessarily increase either the dignity or enjoyment of a young lady.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Northanger Abbey
“Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing. At first alienists described this condition as “moral insanity” and those who exhibited the disorder as “moral imbeciles.” They later adopted the term “psychopath,” used in the lay press as early as 1885 in William Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette, which described it as a “new malady” and stated, “Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.” Half a century later, in his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as “a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. … So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.”
― Erik Larson, quote from The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
“But now, by saying what his future was going to be like, he had created it. A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes a along with other realities-never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Pearl
“After all this time?” “Always,” said Snape.”
― J.K. Rowling, quote from Harry Potter Boxset
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