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Experiments that crash atoms together could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth.

Martin Rees

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Martin Rees
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: June 23
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Cosmologist
Physicist
Politician
University Teacher
Jórvík
Baron Rees of Ludlow
Martin John Rees
Baron Rees of Ludlow
OM
FRS
FREng
FMedSci
Lord Martin Rees
Professor Martin John Rees
Baron Rees of Ludlow
Earth
Chain
Together
Crash
Everything
Atoms
Reaction
Chains
Reactions
Experiments
Erodes
Start
Erode

More quotes by Martin Rees

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In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.
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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.
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Some claim that computers will, by 2050, achieve human capabilities. Of course, in some respects they already have.
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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.
Martin Rees
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In future, children won't perceive the stars as mere twinkling points of light: they'll learn that each is a 'Sun', orbited by planets fully as interesting as those in our Solar system.
Martin Rees
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One of the computer models for a four degree temperature rise would give rise to a 10 degree temperature rise in Africa. And bear in mind also that in the depth of an ice age the mean temperature drop compared to the present was five degrees.
Martin Rees
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Scientists habitually moan that the public doesn't understand them. But they complain too much: public ignorance isn't peculiar to science. It's sad if some citizens can't tell a proton from a protein. But it's equally sad if they're ignorant of their nation's history, can't speak a second language, or can't find Venezuela or Syria on a map.
Martin Rees
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I'm not myself religious but have no wish to insult or denigrate those who are.
Martin Rees
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I have no religious belief myself, but I don't think we should fight about it. In particular, I think that we should not rubbish moderate religious leaders like the Archbishop of Canterbury because I think we all agree that extreme fundamentalism is a threat, and we need all the allies we can muster against it.
Martin Rees
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Science isn't just for scientists - it's not just a training for careers.
Martin Rees
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If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star ... They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.
Martin Rees
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I recall a lecture by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. When asked what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blast-off, he replied, I was thinking that the rocket has 20,000 components, and each was made by the lowest bidder.
Martin Rees
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An insect is more complex than a star..and is a far greater challenge to understand.
Martin Rees
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God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.
Martin Rees
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It's better to read first rate science fiction than second rate science-it's a lot more fun, and no more likely to be wrong.
Martin Rees
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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.
Martin Rees
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The universe is still a place of mystery and wonder.
Martin Rees
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I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.
Martin Rees
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There may be organic life out there, or maybe machines created by long-dead civilizations, but any signals, even if they are difficult to decode, would tell us that the concepts of logic and physics are not limited to the hardware in human skulls, and will transform our view of the universe.
Martin Rees
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The important point there is that when people talk about a mean temperature rise of say two, three or four degrees that's a sort of global average which really is a signature of large scale change in climatic patterns.
Martin Rees