Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
To us large creatures, space-time is like the sea seen from an ocean liner, smooth and serene. Up close, though, on tiny scales, it's waves and bubbles. At extremely fine scales, pockets and bubbles of space-time can form at random, sputtering into being, then dissolving.
Moreover, all our knowledge of organic remains teaches us, that species have a definite existence, and a centralization in geological time as well as in geographical space, and that no species is repeated in time.
A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.
Geological age plays the same part in our views of the duration of the universe as the Earth's orbital radius does in our views of the immensity of space.
There comes a point in your life when you realize how quickly time goes by, and how quickly it has gone. Then it really speeds up exponentially. With that, I think you start to put a lot of things into context; you start to see how huge the world is, and really, the universe.
It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
The big picture doesn't just come from distance; it also comes from time.
When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.
I always think of space-time as being the real substance of space, and the galaxies and the stars just like the foam on the ocean.
When we look out into space, we're looking back in time; the light from a galaxy a billion light-years away, for instance, will take a billion years to reach us. It's an amazing thing. The history is there for us to see. It's not mushed up like the geologic record of Earth. You can just see it exactly as it was.