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Word Gems What is a man but the sum of his
thoughts?
Universe
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Not only is the universe
stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Karl Heisenberg

Personal Statement #3:
An Introduction to The Scientific Evidence for
The AfterLife: "I'm not allowed to tell you too much about
what it's like over here, because some of you
might try to end your mortal lives just to get here a little
faster"
Personal Statement #28:
Love In The AfterLife: The Perfect Storm of Ultimate Human
Suffering: Exploring Cosmic Meaning in
Separation from a
Soulmate Lover: Making Your Music Pure
Personal Statement
#42: The Fear of Death and the Meaning of
Judgment in the AfterLife: We Cannot Escape our
Responsibility to Unfold the Spirit, to Evolve
as a Soul, to Love Ourselves! I'm not afraid of dying, but I am
afraid of losing you!
Personal Statement
#46: Love In The AfterLife: Romance at the Pinnacle of
Existence! The Ultimate Dualistic-Halves of
Eternal Twin-Soul
Love! Why Your Deepest Yearning is the Voice of the Universe
Proclaiming Its Truest Cosmic Message! I will love no
other! no other!
Personal Statement
#63: Love In The AfterLife: Summerland: Where Dreams Come True,
Part II: How You Will Yet Find Healing from the
Devastating Losses of
this World! Long, long shall I rue thee, too deeply to
tell
Personal Statement #66:
Imprimatur! Let it be printed! A Priest Speaks
Out from The AfterLife! The Testimony of Father Robert
Benson
Dr. Gerald Schroeder:
"What the Meaning of the Word
is
is"
Dr. Lonny
Brown: "What is this Universe?"
Dr. Leslie Weatherhead:
"Is the Universe Justifiable?"
The Universe as a Hologram: Does
Objective Reality Exist?

Fred Hoyle: "There is a coherent plan in the universe,
though I don't know what it's a plan for."
Albert Einstein: "A human
being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited
in time and space.
He
experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something
separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his
consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting
us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons
nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by
widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Albert Einstein: "I cannot believe that God would
choose to play dice with the universe."
Joseph Ford: "Not only is God playing dice with the
universe, He's using loaded dice."
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This is
the first direct image of a star other than the Sun, made with
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Called Alpha Orionis, or
Betelgeuse, it is a red supergiant star marking the shoulder
of the winter constellation Orion the Hunter (diagram at
right). Hubble can resolve the star even though the apparent
size is 20,000 times smaller than the width of the full Moon
-- roughly equivalent to being able to resolve a car's
headlights at a distance of 6,000 miles. Betelgeuse is so huge that, if it replaced the
Sun at the center of our Solar System, its outer atmosphere
would extend past the orbit of Jupiter (scale at lower
left). Credit: Andrea Dupree (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), Ronald
Gilliland (STScI), NASA and
ESA. |
Robert Jastrow: "It seems as though science will never
be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has
lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad
dream. He has scaled
the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak;
as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of
theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." (quoted in,
Smoot, G. and Davison, K. Wrinkles in Time. Wm. Morrow, New York,
1993. p. 291).
Dr. Don Morse: "The universe is
approximately 15 billion years old. Had it been much younger,
then intelligent mankind would not be around to observe it.
Had it been much older, then the universe would have either had the
stars die out or be on the way to a big crunch. In either case,
mankind would no longer be around to observe it. Is it just pure
chance that the universe is just old enough for it to be observable
by humanity? The huge number of chance happenings [which caused life
as we know it to come about] had led the cosmologist, Brandon
Carter, to formulate the anthropic principle. This basically means
that the incredible sequence of coincidences that led to the present
universe and the formation of life on Earth must have happened
because, from the very beginning, all of the various laws of physics
were so fine-tuned to expressly allow for the eventual emergence of
humanity."
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| This image, called theHubble Deep Field (1996), has
been billed as our deepest look ever into
the universe, perhaps as far away and as far back in time as
just 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxies
are so far away that some are nearly four billion times
fainter than the limits of human vision. Each little blob is the combined light of 100
billion
stars. |
Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson: "The universe in some sense must have known we were
coming" (quoted in Smoot, G. and Davidson, K. Wrinkles in
Time. Wm. Morrow, New York, 1993, p. 293).
Christopher Morley: "My theology,
briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed."
Dr. Don Morse: "When I was a graduate
student, I was informed that physics is an exact science and that
some day the universe would be completely deterministic. However,
with the formulation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the
development of quantum mechanics, it now appears that when the most
finite particles are examined (quarks [of which there are at least
three], gluons, bosons, photons, and other sub-atomic particles),
these particles can no longer have separate and well-defined
positions and velocities. In fact, these particles behave in some
way as if they were waves rather than particles. An incredible, yet
scientifically verified fact about quarks, is that our observation
of them changes their position and appearance. That is, human
observation of these quantum particles affects them! This had led to
the belief that without the human observer, these finite particles
would not exist. This leads us to the well-known hypothetical
question, If a tree fell in a forest and there was no one there to
observe it, would it really have fallen? This basic philosophy
question - given new impetus from the research showing that
subatomic particles respond to their observation - requires a rather
startling assumption. That is, prior to the development of human
consciousness, the literal universe could not exist because it
requires observation of itself. If the physical universe did exist
prior to human consciousness, then it could mean that every living
creature, including a virus or a bacterium, has some form of
consciousness."
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On Nov. 5, 2003 the space
probe,
Voyager 1, was 8.4 billion
miles from Earth. Launched in 1977, with enough fuel to
operate until 2020, the spacecraft was sent on a tour of the
Solar System before heading out into interstellar
space.
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Woody Allen: "I'm astounded by people who want to
'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around
Chinatown."
Rocky Kolb, Blind Watchers of the Sky:
"Earlier than about 3.3 million years after the bang, the universe
was too warm for comfort. In fact, it was hotter than hell (assuming
that the temperature of hell is about the boiling point of
brimstone, 445 degrees Celsius). This era might have theological
implications, but nothing of interest to cosmologists occurred at
this time; the universe seemed to pass uneventfully through the
temperature of hell."
Sir Fred Hoyle, London Observer, Sept. 9,
1979: "Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if
your car could go straight upwards."
Plato, The
Republic: "Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads
us from this world to another."
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn: "We had the
stars up there," said Huck, "And we use to lie on our backs and look
up at them and discuss 'bout whether they was made or just happened.
Jim he allowed that the stars was made, but I allowed they just
happened. Jim said the Moon could'a laid them; Well, that looked
kind of reasonable so I didn't say nothing against it. I've seen a
frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done."
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M77 is one of the finest examples of a
classic spiral galaxy. Its main luminous area is approx.
120,000 light-years across. About 60 million light-years from
the Milky Way, M77 is thought to contain a
mass equal
to about 1 trillion Suns. |
Vincent van Gogh: "Sometimes I have a terrible need of
- shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out at night and paint
the stars."
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe: "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone
discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it
will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more
bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that
this has already happened."
Robin Williams: "Never go to Pluto, it's a Mickey Mouse
planet."
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe: "In the beginning the Universe was
created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely
regarded as a bad move."
Peter de Vries: "The universe is like a safe to which
there is a combination, but the combination is locked up in the
safe."
James Jeans, The
Mysterious Universe: "Life exists in the universe only because
the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties."
Aristotle, Politics: "Nature does
nothing without purpose or uselessly."
Ayn Rand: "To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of
nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense."
J.B.S Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other
Essays: "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only
queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose ... I
suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are
dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy."
Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, The AfterLife Experiments:
"...as I stood at my hotel window looking out at the stars and the
light coming from other windows in my view, the thought came to me
that starlight, traveling in space forever, could be interpreted as
an expression of immortality... long after stars have 'died,'
photons of their energy i.e., their light -- continue to exist.
Suddenly I realized that the moonlit glow illuminating my body was
also traveling into space... A being out in space, with a
sufficiently sensitive instrument of the right design, could clearly
detect my photons as they whizzed past. I asked myself, 'What kind
of God would allow the starlight from distant stars to continue
forever, even after the star has 'died' -- a fundamental premise of
contemporary astrophysics -- yet would not provide the same
opportunity for our personal biophotons?'... The
philosopher-scientist in me wondered, 'If there really was a 'Grand
Organizing Designer,' and this G.O.D. created eternal starlight, why
wouldn't she/he/it/they have allowed our own personal
electromagnetic waves -- our information and energy -- to be eternal
as well?' This realization was accompanied by a deep personal
revelation, in which I experienced myself as an extended energy
being, continuously reflecting visible and invisible light into
space."
Anonymous: "Cows in space: the herd shot around the
world."
FRACTAL CHAOS, http://www.fractalwisdom.com/FractalWisdom/paradigm.html: "The image of God playing dice with the Universe was
threatening and fearful to the old scientists, even the great ones
like Einstein, who incidently grew up in a civil law system. But
that was only because they did not understand the order lurking in
Chaos, the great beauty inherent in chance."
Albert Einstein: "Nature conceals her secrets because
she is sublime, not because she is a trickster."
American Museum of Natural History web site: "Einstein
mathematically showed that objects, such as the Sun and planets,
bend "space-time," or the four-dimensional arena in which all things
exist. Imagine the depression you make by standing in the middle of
a trampoline. Roll a ball across the
trampoline's surface, and it is redirected by the "valley" your mass
forms. To Einstein, space-time valleys create the effect of
gravity. So, the bowl-shaped warp made by Earth's mass, for example,
alters the course of an object, like a satellite, that travels into
that warp. Large objects such as the Sun and planets aren't the only
masses that warp the fabric of space-time. Anything with mass - including your body - bends this
four-dimensional cosmic grid. The warp, in turn, creates the
effect of gravity, redirecting the path of objects that travel into
it. The strength of gravity depends on the size of the space-time
warp. A large object with little mass creates a smaller distortion
than a tiny object with a huge mass."
James Jeans, The
Mysterious Universe: "The stream of knowledge is heading towards
a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a
great thought than a great machine."
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The universe is wider than
our views of it.
Henry David Thoreau
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Like grains of sand on a
cosmic beach, individual stars of large spiral galaxy NGC 300
are resolved in this sharp image from the Hubble Space
Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The inner region of
the galaxy is pictured, spanning about 7,500 light-years. At
its center is the bright, densely packed galactic core
surrounded by a loose array of dark dust lanes mixed with the
stars in the galactic
plane. |
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