TV show quotes
But there is one paradox that time-travel may create. When time-travelling Todd turns over those time machine plans to his ancestor, that ancestor could then pass down those plans back to time-travelling Todd, who uses the plans to build the time machine. Neither of them actually created the plans.
The question is, where did the plans come from? The plans seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
But to find the backwards-in-time-travelling Higgs singlet, we'll have to look at what happens before the collision that created it. … Currently, the L. H. C. isn't set up to look at collisions before they happen.
It may seem that time relentlessly carries us from the past toward the future, but that's not the way the universe really works. What takes place in our past does not simply recede into history, it becomes imprinted into the fabric of the cosmos. One day, we may learn to weave the threads of the past and the future together, and truly play with the boundless possibilities of time.
What is the meaning of life? Don't you believe there's a reason for us being here? We are, after all, such sophisticated creatures, the result of billions of years of evolution. Surely, life is about more than just our biological needs, more than the daily rat race. Is all the knowledge we've gained over the generations aiming toward some final goal? Are we architects of our own fate, or is life just a series of random accidents? Is our existence just a fluke of nature, or are we here for a reason?
This is why we're really excited, because we can show that evolution can occur in the natural world without genetic material.
Where there is energy, and there is matter, chemistry transforms into biology over time. And this happens as a natural law.
Richard doesn't have billions of years to watch evolution in action, but he does have the span of one lifetime, which he has dedicated to performing the longest evolutionary experiment in the history of science. Twenty-seven years ago, Richard plucked twelve genetically-identical E. coli bacteria from a container and allowed them to start their own populations in twelve separate worlds. Ever since, day after day, he's watched each of the twelve populations multiply and compete amongst themselves for a limited amount of food.
Humans exhibit a lot of changes in our genome over the last ten-thousand years. My own, personal opinion is, yes, you can define humans as a domestic animal. We live in large groups. If you took humans individually, and put them on an island, they really couldn't survive.
Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes, if you like. They're information that is copied from person to person, person to book— They encompass all of the skills, habits, stories that we pass from person to person, and they compete to use our brains to get themselves copied, and, in that way, they evolve.
I think about biological systems as physical systems, but they're a unique kind of physical system, and they're uniquely defined, really, by the way they handle information.
Sara defines life as a self-replicating algorithm, a computational machine that processes information and then makes copies of itself.
What's amazing about having a small child in your home is how they learn things. … So he's really just like an information junkie, running around being like, "What is this? What is this? What is this?" And, so, it's pretty fun.
Perhaps that actually is the purpose of living systems—is to figure out how the universe actually works. So living systems, in this kind of framework, are somewhat fundamental to the universe because they're the way the universe figures itself out.
Life may not have one unifying purpose, but that shouldn't stop us all from searching for it.
Our universe certainly seems real. But what if it's not? We may be nothing more than video game characters designed for someone else's amusement. But how could a computer juggle every aspect of the cosmos? Maybe what looks random has already been programmed to happen. Can we discover some hidden glitch in the laws of the universe and uncover its hidden code? Do we live in the Matrix?
These quotes come from Wikiquote's Through the Wormhole pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
