...in principle, one can predict everything in the universe solely from physical laws. Thus, the long-standing 'first cause' problem intrinsic in cosmology has been finally dispelled.

— Li Zhi Fang

I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain, and I’m rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my “essential salts” as it were, I’m the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang.

— Laird Barron

It was in the horizon of existence, that the Big Bang must have created our souls, we loved each other like the plane of time doesn't hold a fleck of control over us.

— Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Now, almost one hundred years later, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much our picture of the universe has changed in the span of a single human lifetime. As far as the scientific community in 1917 was concerned, the universe was static and eternal, and consisted of a one single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by vast, infinite, dark, and empty space. This is, after all, what you would guess by looking up at the night sky with your eyes, or with a small telescope, and at the time there was little reason to suspect otherwise.

— Lawrence M. Krauss

On growing peonies:The fact that a flower as gentle and delightful as the peony should be so exacting and dictate such harsh terms hits me with the force of a cold shower. It's just like my girlfriends when I was a teenager, it was always the loveliest and most yielding ones who ran everything...[and] According to the English gardening book, peonies are so fussy that you might as well not bother. You'd need to go back generations to discover the composition of the soil, you'd have to go right back to the Big Bang to find out how the elements are distributed in your garden.

— Bodil Malmsten

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

Physicists explain creation by telling us that the universe began with the Big Bang, an intense energy singularity that continued expanding. But pray, please do explain who created the singularity?

— Ashwin Sanghi

Quantum fluctuations are, at their root, completely a-causal, in the sense that cause and effect and ordering of events in time is not a part of how these fluctuations work. Because of this, there seem not to be any correlations built into these kinds of fluctuations because 'law' as we understand the term requires some kind of cause-and-effect structure to pre-exist. Quantum fluctuations can precede physical law, but it seems that the converse is not true. So in the big bang, the establishment of 'law' came after the event itself, but of course even the concept of time and causality may not have been quite the same back then as they are now.

— Sten F. Odenwald

Retrograde time is forward time which has passed the turning point; then as it turns back it is freighted with the load of accumulated knowledge. It is information rich. Logically, then, in its retrograde tracking, it would divest itself of its knowledge: teach rather than learn, so that when it arrived at the other end, it would be information poor, even info empty.

— Philip K. Dick

Some piously record 'In the beginning God', but I say 'In the beginning hydrogen'.

— Harlow Shapley