Place

"The diminutive scale of the early models of the cosmos resulted from the assumption that the earth sits, immobile, in the center of the universe. If the earth does not move, then the stars do: the starry sphere must rotate on its axis once a day in order to bring the stars trooping overhead on schedule, and the larger the sphere, the faster it must rotate. Were such a cosmos very large, the speed mandated for the celestial sphere would become unreasonably high. The stars of Ptolemy's universe already were obliged to hustle along at better than ten million miles per hour, and were the celestial sphere imagined to be a hundred times larger it would have to be turning faster than the velocity of light. One did not have to be an Einstein, or even to know the velocity of light, to intuit that was too fast—a point that had begun to worry cosmologists by the sixteenth century. All geocentric, immobile earth cosmologies tended to inhibit appreciation of the true dimensions of space."—Timothy Ferris (page 34)

"But just as Darwin and Copernicus and the biological scientists and physical scientists have removed us from our special perch, they've also done something else: they've connected us to the rest of life, connected us to the rest of the planet, and connected us to the cosmos beyond. To me, that's a very profound gift." —Neil Shubin (link)

"…biologists and geologists have learned a priceless lesson: by bringing natural phenomena into time, by making them dynamical and contingent, we make possible a more complete and more rational understanding of them. What I am proposing is that a similar shift must take place in our understanding of physics and cosmology. The laws of nature themselves, like the biological species, may not be eternal categories, but rather the creations of natural processes occurring in time. […] a theory of a whole universe, if it is to be consistent with what we know of quantum theory and relativity, must be a theory of a complex, self-organized universe."—Lee Smolin (pages 18-19)