Best 17 quotes of Adam Frank on MyQuotes

I'm found of what's called emergence - as the universe gets more complex, new laws can emerge. Like evolution - there's things that you just aren't able to explain, even if you had an understanding of atoms.

Like most young physicists, when I was a kid enraptured with physics, I thought, "Everything can be explained by the theory of the atom!" But as I've gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there's a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn't actually account for the world. As I've gotten older, I've also become sensitive to the ways - to all that is not amenable to explanation. Things that, even if you had an explanation, what good would it be?

Millennials, in particular, consider themselves to be spiritual, but they're not necessarily going to anybody's church. It's not like the world is becoming hardcore, Richard Dawkins-atheist, but people are looking to sort of synthesize science - people love science, especially the millennials.

New laws, new kinds of things can emerge as the universe evolves. The more moving parts you have in something, the more possibilities there are. There's a whole new science now of complexity, and what we see is that complexity requires a very different approach than the kind of bottom-up approach that fundamental physics has always used. We're gonna have to think about the world in a different way if we want to address complex systems.

People have been talking about multiverses as a philosophical idea for a long time. But the current incarnations in physics, I think, are more indicative of problems with some things going on at the frontier of physics than ideas that are gonna last.

People love science and all it offers, but they also feel a calling in themselves to the sense of what's deeper.

Rather than make claims of final theories, perhaps we should focus on our ever-continuing dialogue with the universe. It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end. It is the sacred act of inquiry wherein we gently trace the experienced outlines of an ever-greater whole. It is the dialogue that lets the brilliance of the diamond’s infinite facets shine clearly. It is the dialogue that instills within us a power and capacity that is, and always has been, saturated with meaning.

Right now, culturally, we're seeing a really interesting evolution in ideas about spirituality and the world, right? The number of people who consider themselves to be religious and going to services is dropping, and the number of people who consider themselves to be spiritual but not religious is increasing.

Scientists and artists are both living in the cultural milieu that they come up in. They're always responding to what is happening culturally.

There's not a single shred of evidence for the multiverse. If, in order to explain this universe, you need a theory that invents an infinite number of parallel universes - that's not a very good theory.

The way superheroes dominate the fictional landscape now, along with dystopian futures and zombies. Yeah, definitely - I think these stories function as a kind of mythology for us.

From the exoplanet data, astronomers can now say with confidence that one out of every five stars hosts a world where life as we know it could form. So, when you’re standing out there under the night sky, choose five random stars. Chances are, one of them has a world in its Goldilocks zone where liquid water could be flowing across its surface and life might already exist.

In other words, pretty much every star you see in the night sky hosts at least one planet. The next time you find yourself outside at night, take a moment to stop and consider the implications of this result as you gaze at all those pinpricks of light. Every one of them hosts at least one world, and most stars will have more than one planet. Solar systems are the rule and not the exception. They’re everywhere.

In other words, what were the chances that ours is the only civilization ever? Putting in the exoplanet data, we found the answer to be 10 –22 , or one in ten billion trillion. We called this number the “pessimism line" To understand how to think about the pessimism line, imagine you were handed a very big bag of Goldilocks-zone planets. Our results say the only way human beings are unique as a civilization-building species would be if you pulled out ten billion trillion planets and not one of them had a civilization. That’s because Kepler has shown us that there must be ten billion trillion Goldilocks-zone planets in the universe.

Speaking before a joint session of Congress, President Johnson said: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” It’s remarkable to note that, more than fifty years ago, an American president was already aware of, and acknowledging, human-created climate change. Johnson had been briefed on the dangers of CO 2 increases by the famous climate scientists Charles Keeling and Roger Revelle, among others. So, not only was Johnson aware of the issue, but he was already concerned enough to raise it before Congress. That single sentence in his address gives the lie to the claims of so many climate-change deniers that global warming is some kind of recent hoax.

the classic predator-prey model. It begins with two equations. One tracks the prey population, which could be something like the number of bunnies in a forest. The second follows the predator population, which we could imagine as the number of wolves in the same forest. The important point for modelers to capture is that the two populations are tied together. The wolves eat the bunnies, and that changes the bunny population. But eating bunnies lets the wolves reproduce, adding to their population. So, the bunny population affects the wolf population, too. In these linked equations, there’s a part that describes how the bunnies get eaten by wolves, and another that describes how the wolves have more babies by eating bunnies. Eventually, the bunny population peaks as the rapidly growing number of wolves starts having its impact. After that, the bunny numbers drop and they start to grow scarce. The wolf population, however, takes some time to feel the change. Only later do their numbers peak and then start dropping. Eventually, the wolf population gets low enough for the bunnies to recover, and the cycle begins anew.

The mystery of what happened to Easter Island’s civilization has haunted generations of writers and scientists. There are no trees on Easter Island because the Easter Islanders cut them all down. They deforested their island in the building and transportation of those giant stone heads. In the process of deforesting the island, they also started a downward spiral that drove their civilization to collapse. Easter Island serves as an object lesson for the interaction between an isolated, habitable environment and a civilization using that environment’s resources: they did it to themselves. The parallel to our current situation on Earth seems clear. In his 2007 bestseller, Collapse , anthropologist Jared Diamond unpacked that parallel. His work explored the trajectories of a number of human civilizations that disappeared at the height of their vibrancy and power. Diamond’s examples included the Anasazi of the American southwest, the Maya, and the Norse colony on Greenland. In each case, the civilization overshot the carrying capacity of its environment. Their populations grew as the society became ever more ingenious at extracting resources from its surroundings. Eventually, the limits to growth were hit. A short time after running into those limits, each civilization fell apart. Easter Island was the