Bacteria are about as different from viruses as metronomes are from giraffes.
Every year, a thousand letters arrive in Jerusalem addressed to God.
Uranium is 40 times more common than silver and 500 times more common than gold.
The giant palm salamander can stick its tongue out 50 times faster than you can blink.
Every day, the human body makes 300 billion new cells, three times as many as there are galaxies in the universe.
See other: Quite Interesting Facts
Edmund ‘This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit of our own behaviour,—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under ursa major; so that it follows I am rough and lecherous.—Tut!’
– Reed International Books Ltd. 1992. The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare London, Great Britain: Chancellor Press (1996) p. 836
Helena
As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God?
Galene
The God of most monotheists is believed to be an uncreated entity.
Sappho
To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. The truth is that no one knows how or why the universe came into being. It is not clear that we can even speak coherently about the creation of the universe, given that such an event can be conceived only with reference to time, and here we are talking about the birth of space-time itself.
Helena
The physicist Stephen Hawking, for instance, pictures space-time as a four dimensional, closed manifold, without beginning or end (much like the surface of a sphere). Having said that, any intellectually honest person will admit that he does not know why the universe exists. Scientists, of course, readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not. Continue reading
“Why does the Universe go to all the trouble of existing?”
– Stephen Hawking
“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”
– Albert Einstein
“The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination, but the combination is locked in the safe.”
– Peter de Vries
“Put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, and it will be more closely packed with sand than space is with stars.”
– James Jeans
“I have always thought it curious how poorly humility is reconciled with the egocentric belief that the Universe has been created with you in mind and that its creator takes a constant interest in your sordid personal affairs.”
– Willem Etsenmaker
Knowledge Guild 