John D Barrow - Collected Quotes

"Each of the most basic physical laws that we know corresponds to some invariance, which in turn is equivalent to a collection of changes which form a symmetry group. […] whilst leaving some underlying theme unchanged. […] for example, the conservation of energy is equivalent to the invariance of the laws of motion with respect to translations backwards or forwards in time […] the conservation of linear momentum is equivalent to the invariance of the laws of motion with respect to the position of your laboratory in space, and the conservation of angular momentum to an invariance with respect to directional orientation [...] discovery of conservation laws indicated that Nature possessed built-in sustaining principles which prevented the world from just ceasing to be."  (John D Barrow, "New Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation", 1991)

"Everywhere […] in the Universe, we discern that closed physical systems evolve in the same sense from ordered states towards a state of complete disorder called thermal equilibrium. This cannot be a consequence of known laws of change, since […] these laws are time symmetric- they permit […] time-reverse. […] The initial conditions play a decisive role in endowing the world with its sense of temporal direction. […] some prescription for initial conditions is crucial if we are to understand […]" (John D Barrow, "New Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation", 1991)

"In practice, the intelligibility of the world amounts to the fact that we find it to be algorithmically compressible. We can replace sequences of facts and observational data by abbreviated statements which contain the same information content. These abbreviations we often call 'laws of Nature.' If the world were not algorithmically compressible, then there would exist no simple laws of nature. Instead of using the law of gravitation to compute the orbits of the planets at whatever time in history we want to know them, we would have to keep precise records of the positions of the planets at all past times; yet this would still not help us one iota in predicting where they would be at any time in the future. This world is potentially and actually intelligible because at some level it is extensively algorithmically compressible. At root, this is why mathematics can work as a description of the physical world. It is the most expedient language that we have found in which to express those algorithmic compressions."  (John D Barrow, "New Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation", 1991)

"On this view, we recognize science to be the search for algorithmic compressions. We list sequences of observed data. We try to formulate algorithms that compactly represent the information content of those sequences. Then we test the correctness of our hypothetical abbreviations by using them to predict the next terms in the string. These predictions can then be compared with the future direction of the data sequence. Without the development of algorithmic compressions of data all science would be replaced by mindless stamp collecting - the indiscriminate accumulation of every available fact. Science is predicated upon the belief that the Universe is algorithmically compressible and the modern search for a Theory of Everything is the ultimate expression of that belief, a belief that there is an abbreviated representation of the logic behind the Universe's properties that can be written down in finite form by human beings."  (John D Barrow, "New Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation", 1991)

"The goal of science is to make sense of the diversity of Nature."  (John D Barrow, "New Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation", 1991)

"There is one qualitative aspect of reality that sticks out from all others in both profundity and mystery. It is the consistent success of mathematics as a description of the workings of reality and the ability of the human mind to discover and invent mathematical truths."  (John D Barrow, "New Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation", 1991)

"Highly correlated brown and black noise patterns do not seem to have seem to have attractive counterparts in the visual arts. There, over-correlation is the order of the day, because it creates the same dramatic associations that we find in attractive natural scenery, or in the juxtaposition of symbols. Somehow, it is tediously predictable when cast in a one-dimensional medium, like sound." (John D Barrow, "The Artful Universe", 1995)

"Where there is life there is a pattern, and where there is a pattern there is mathematics." (John D Barrow, "The Artful Universe", 1995)

"The advent of small, inexpensive computers with superb graphics has changed the way many sciences are practiced, and the way that all sciences present the results of experiments and calculations." (John D Barrow, "Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science", 2008)