Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment.

Just the idea that we, these little collections of atoms and molecules, are part of the world, but a part that can look at the rest of the world and figure it out in a self-referential way, is kind of breathtaking.

The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe.

Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment.

The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.

We seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us. We do not want to be reduced to accepting the strange features of our universe as brute facts.

There is no such thing as outside the universe, as far as we can tell.