50 quotes found
“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”
“There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. Thats perfectly all right: its the aperture to finding out whats right. Science is a self-correcting process.”
“What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by ...”
“The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out ...”
“The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galac...”
“When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.”
“And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.”
“We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.”
“For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each otherAnaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.”
“Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war?”
“What do you do when you are faced with several different gods each claiming the same territory? The Babylonian Marduk and the Greek Zeus was each considered master of the sky and king of gods. You ...”
“Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.”
“One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, d...”
“We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative conno...”
“A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.”
“Something very strange is going on in the depths of space.”
“We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. And if we are a speck in the immensity of space, ...”
“The laws of nature cannot be randomly reshuffled at the cusps [of an oscillating universe]. If the universe has already gone through many oscillations, many possible laws of gravity would have been...”
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
“We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein.”
