Our greatest theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, recently declared that humans have no more than a hundred years to get off this planet to ensure the survival of our species. And when someone such as he does so, it is with an understanding not just of the science, but of both our tenuous place and our possibility in the universe.
One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.
Our ancient yogis and sages were not just medical healers, but systems scientists and systems engineers, who saw the body and the universe as an interconnected engineering system, a system of systems that are governed by fundamental engineering systems principles.
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
The simple hearth of the small farm is the true center of our universe.
Our Heavenly Father created the universe that we might reach our potential as His sons and daughters.
A boxing workout is the heaviest thing, but it's the best. The worst part is that boxing gyms are the smelliest things in the universe. You have to lie down on the floor, where everyone has been sweating and spitting, and do 1,000 situps and push-ups.
Scientists didn't discover the noble gas helium - the second most common element in the universe - on Earth until 1895. And they thought it existed in minute quantities only, until miners found a huge underground cache in Kansas in 1903.
The universe starts off with the Big Bang theory, and the first thing that emerged from the Big Bang is essentially hydrogen and then helium. And that's what combusts in stars. Finally, stars implode, and they build heavier elements out of that. And those heavier elements are reconstituted in the heart of other stars, eventually.
Hierarchical formulations died because their wedding cake levels posited a multiply fractured cosmos that does not match the Space Age revelation of a unified universe in which the earth is clearly in, rather than separated from, the heavens. Hierarchical representations do not reflect what either the world or we are like.
From an early age, Yosemite became the centre of my universe. I've been going every summer since I was a child. I love everything about that place: waterfalls, high-quality rock, history.
It's so weird how our existence hinges on just absolute crazy chance, but it feels so essential. It's like, 'Nothing would be here if you weren't here,' because you are the centre of your universe.
It's an unusual opportunity, a chance for so many people to share in the excitement and the fun of the fact that we may be on to hints as to what the Universe is made out of. I guess the whole point of a prize like this is to be able to get that out into the community.
Debt can be the most addictive thing in the universe, and it can kill you. You get used to living high off the hog. It was intoxicating.
When I was 12, my brother and I moved back to Honolulu to live with our mother. Hawaii felt like another universe, and reflecting on it, I am struck by how much more open and accepting it was.
For me, writing about hotels is like writing about being in a parallel universe. The sense of voyeurism, and the sense of removedness, and there are all these people silently above you and next to you.
There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe.
I had always been told by my parents, not implicitly told, but every inference was that Britain was the hub of the universe.
Even Hubble hasn't found yet the end of this universe, and we don't know that it has any end.
I will fight in the United States Senate this year to fund a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008, a mission that would potentially increase Hubble's power and efficiency by a factor of 10 and allow us to look back almost to the beginning of the universe.
