Top 60 Martin Rees Quotes

Just as there are many Jews who keep the Friday ritual in their home despite describing themselves as atheists, I am a ‘tribal Christian,’ happy to attend church services.

Campaigning against religion can be socially counter-productive. If teachers take the uncompromising line that God and Darwinism are irreconcilable, many young people raised in a faith-based culture will stick with their religion and be lost to science.

Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.

I think a few hundred years from now we’ll start having the ‘posthuman’ era of different species.

The ‘clean energy‘ challenge deserves a commitment akin to the Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing.

In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind of disaster. Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure – error rather than terror.

The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.

Manufacturing doesn’t just mean building cars and metal-bashing; it includes making pharmaceuticals and hi-tech electronics. A crucial part of the process is the research and development that allows better and greener products to come to market. Britain has traditionally had a strong science and engineering base.

Manned spaceflight has lost its glamour – understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, 40 years after Apollo, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

I would support peaceful co-existence between religion and science because they concern different domains. Anyone who takes theology seriously knows that it’s not a matter of using it to explain things that scientists are mystified by.

It might seem paradoxical that the biggest scientific instruments of all are needed in order to probe the very smallest things in nature. The micro-world is inherently ‘fuzzy‘ – the sharper the detail we wish to study, the higher the energy that is required and the bigger the accelerator that is needed.

It’s often better to read first-rate science fiction than second-rate science – it’s far more stimulating, and perhaps no more likely to be wrong.

It’s important that everyone realizes how much scientists still don’t know.

It is astonishing that human brains, which evolved to cope with the everyday world, have been able to grasp the counterintuitive mysteries of the cosmos and the quantum.

We are ‘nuclear waste‘ from the fuel that makes stars shine; indeed, each of us contains atoms whose provenance can be traced back to thousands of different stars spread through our Milky Way.

From the growth of the Internet through to the mapping of the human genome and our understanding of the human brain, the more we understand, the more there seems to be for us to explore.

Science is the one culture that’s truly global – protons, proteins and Pythagoras’s Theorem are the same from China to Peru. It should transcend all barriers of nationality. It should straddle all faiths, too.

I’m not myself religious but have no wish to insult or denigrate those who are.

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere – perhaps irreversibly – through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

Some global hazards are insidious. They stem from pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. And they will be aggravated as the population rises to a projected nine billion by mid-century, and by the effects of climate change. An ‘ecological shock‘ could irreversibly degrade our environment.

The scientific issues that engage people most are the truly fundamental ones: is the universe infinite? Is life just a sideshow in the cosmos? What happened before the Big Bang? Everyone is flummoxed by such questions, so there is, in a sense, no gulf between experts and the rest.

Perhaps future space probes will be plastered in commercial logos, just as Formula One cars are now. Perhaps Robot Wars in space will be a lucrative spectator sport. If humans venture back to the moon, and even beyond, they may carry commercial insignia rather than national flags.

I’ve got no religious beliefs at all.

Most practising scientists focus on ‘bite-sized’ problems that are timely and tractable. The occupational risk is then to lose sight of the big picture.

If you are teaching Muslim sixth formers in a school, and you tell them they can’t have their God and Darwin, there is a risk they will choose their God and be lost to science.

I hope that by 2050 the entire solar system will have been explored and mapped by flotillas of tiny robotic craft.

The images of Earth’s delicate biosphere, contrasting with the sterile moonscape where the astronauts left their footsteps, have become iconic for environmentalists: these may indeed be the Apollo programme‘s most enduring legacy.

The advance of science spares us from irrational dread.

Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations.

The Cern laboratory in Geneva was set up in 1955 to bring together European scientists who wished to pursue research into the nuclear and sub-nuclear world. Physicists then had greater clout than other scientists because the memory of their role in the Second World War was fresh in people’s minds.

Indeed, the night sky is the part of our environment that’s been common to all cultures throughout human history. All have gazed up at the ‘vault of heaven‘ and interpreted it in their own way.

General writing about science, even if we do it badly, helps us to see our work in perspective and broadens our vision.

To ensure continuing prosperity in the global economy, nothing is more important than the development and application of knowledge and skills.

The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science’s great ‘open frontiers.’ These are parts of the intellectual map where we’re still groping for the truth – where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe ‘here be dragons.’

Darwin and his successors taught us how our biosphere evolved, and thereby transformed our conception of humanity‘s place in nature. In the twenty-first century, space scientists are setting Darwin in a grander cosmic context – probing the origins of Earth, stars, atoms and the universe itself.

Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have.

As regards my own ‘philosophy,’ I continue to be inspired by the music, liturgy and architectural tradition of the Anglican Church in which I was brought up. No one can fail to be uplifted by great cathedrals – such as that at Ely, near my home in Cambridge.

In the case of climate change, the threat is long-term and diffuse and requires broad international action for the benefit of people decades in the future. And in politics, the urgent always trumps the important, and that is what makes it a very difficult and challenging issue.

The atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising – mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels. It’s agreed that this build-up will, in itself, induce a long-term warming trend, superimposed on all the other complicated effects that make climate fluctuate.

Given the scale of issues like global warming and epidemic disease, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of a can-do attitude to science rather than a can’t-afford-it attitude.

I’m a technological optimist in that I do believe that technology will provide solutions that will allow the world in 2050 to support 9 billion people at an acceptable standard of living. But I’m a political pessimist in that I am concerned about whether the science will be appropriately applied.

Stars that become supernovae start off at least eight times heavier than our sun. They’re so short-lived that, even if they have planets, there is unlikely to be time for life to get started. The surface is 40,000C and, as a result, the colouring will be extremely blue.

Indeed, evolutionists don’t agree on how divergently our own biosphere could have developed if such contingencies as ice ages and meteorite impacts had happened differently.

We can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don’t know what banged and why it banged. That’s a challenge for 21st-century science.

It would be sad if the expertise built up during the 40 years of the U.S. and Russian manned programmes were allowed to dissipate. But abandoning the shuttle, and committing to new launch vehicles and propulsion systems, is actually a prerequisite for a vibrant manned programme.

Space doesn’t offer an escape from Earth’s problems. And even with nuclear fuel, the transit time to nearby stars exceeds a human lifetime. Interstellar travel is therefore, in my view, an enterprise for post-humans, evolved from our species not via natural selection, but by design.

There’s now, for the first time, a huge gulf between the artefacts of our everyday life and what even a single expert, let alone the average child, can comprehend. The gadgets that now pervade young people‘s lives, iPhones and suchlike, are baffling ‘black boxes‘ – pure magic to most people.

We do not fully understand the consequences of rising populations and increasing energy consumption on the interwoven fabric of atmosphere, water, land and life.

Advances in technology – hugely beneficial though they are – render us vulnerable in new ways. For instance, our interconnected world depends on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, and so forth.

Devastation could arise insidiously, rather than suddenly, through unsustainable pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. Indeed, these pressures are the prime ‘threats without enemies‘ that confront us.

Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just ‘virtual reality.’

Maybe the search for life shouldn’t restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.

One of President Obama‘s first acts was to give a massive boost to America‘s scientific community.

A monkey is unaware that atoms exist. Likewise, our brainpower may not stretch to the deepest aspects of reality. The bedrock nature of space and time, and the structure of our entire universe, may remain ‘open frontiers’ beyond human grasp.

Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests – is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn’t offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.

Not even the most secular among us can fail to be uplifted by Christianity‘s architectural legacy – the great cathedrals. These immense and glorious buildings were erected in an era of constricted horizons, both in time and in space.

There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy.

The scientific community should work as hard as possible to address major issues that affect our everyday lives such as climate change, infectious diseases and counterterrorism; in particular, ‘clean energy’ research deserves far higher priority. And science and technology are the prime routes to tackling these issues.

The next humans to walk on the moon may be Chinese. Only China seems to have the resources, the dirigiste government, and the willingness to undertake a risky Apollo-style programme. If Americans or Europeans venture to the moon and beyond, this will have to be in a very different style and with different motives.

All space projects push the frontiers of technology and are drivers of innovation.