John R Gribbin - Collected Quotes

"Imagination - backed up by practical tests to determine which imaginative leaps are securely founded - is the key to a more accurate world picture.” (John R Gribbin, “White holes: Cosmic gushers in the universe”, 1977)

"Our form of life depends, in delicate and subtle ways, on several apparent ‘coincidences’ in the fundamental laws of nature which make the Universe tick. Without those coincidences, we would not be here to puzzle over the problem of their existence […] What does this mean? One possibility is that the Universe we know is a highly improbable accident, ‘just one of those things’." (John R Gribbin, "Genesis: The Origins of Man and the Universe", 1981)

"Good theories are the ones that get those predictions right; the best theories enable us to ‘get right’ the calculation of how the Universe came into being and then exploded into its present form. But that doesn’t mean that they convey ultimate truth, or that there ‘really are’ little hard particles rattling around against each other inside the atom. Such truth as there is in any of this work lies in the mathematics; the particle concept is simply a crutch ordinary mortals can use to help them towards an understanding of the mathematical laws." (John R Gribbin, "The Search of Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything", 1998)

"No matter how beautiful the whole model may be, no matter how naturally it all seems to hang together now, if it disagrees with experiment, then it is wrong." (John R Gribbin, "Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science", 1999)

"[…] some systems […] are very sensitive to their starting conditions, so that a tiny difference in the initial ‘push’ you give them causes a big difference in where they end up, and there is feedback, so that what a system does affects its own behavior." (John R Gribbin, "Deep Simplicity", 2004)

"In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world […] all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else." (John R Gribbin, "In Search Of Schrodinger's Cat: Updated Edition", 2012)

"The natural effect of processes going on in the Universe is to move from a state of order to a state of disorder, unless there is an input of energy from outside." (John R Gribbin, "The Time Illusion", 2016)