David Christian Quotations

Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.

An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy.

When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.

We, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.

In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.

Big History studies the history of everything, offering a way of making sense of our world and our role within it.

If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.

I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.

Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff.

Learning to domesticate the horse was a sort of energy revolution.

Modern scientific knowledge appeared piecemeal. Historians wrote about human history; physicists tackled the material world; and biologists studied the world of living organisms. But there were few links between these disciplines, as researchers focused on getting the details right.

All religions, all indigenous traditions, all origin stories provide a large map of where you are.

I think what I was after was a unifying story that could bring everything together, that could give me a sense of the whole of history.

Our goal is to see Big History become a normal part of high school curricula. I'd love to see it being taught in lots of languages. A global course.

What we normally define as history doesn't interest me. It's a constraint.

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.

Humans are remarkable: the first species in almost four billion years of life on earth that dominates the biosphere. This gives us the power, in principle, to build societies in which everyone flourishes. But it also creates great dangers because it is not clear that we really understand how to use our potentially devastating powers.

I had this feeling that, somehow, we ought to be teaching not just the history of particular nations or particular regions, but the history of humanity.

Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.

You go to the cosmologists and ask how they tell the history of the universe; you go to the geologists, how do they tell the story of the earth, and the biologists, and then you string them together. And it turns out that when you string them together, if you do it carefully, there's a story that is coherent, engaging, fantastically interesting.

...from schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are.

Maps of Time attempts to assemble a coherent and accessible account of origins, a modern creation myth.

I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".