188 quotes found
“You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison."Wh...”
“The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space.”
“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 phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason an...”
“There's no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don...”
“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...”
“Some piously record 'In the beginning God', but I say 'In the beginning hydrogen'.”
“When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.”
“The stars, they are as the sun. Each star. Every star. And those spheres- they are worlds, realms, each one different yet the same.”
“Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless ...”
“One can only wonder what the motivation is for Mauna Kea astronomers to subject their nighttime support staff to extremely long and fatiguing night shifts when they are easily avoidable.”
“When I look at the night sky, I'm overwhelmed by the enormity of the universe. But this doesn't make me question my significance in God's eyes, no. Instead, it makes me drop to my knees in awe of G...”
“The Universe was opaque until 380.000 years after the Big Bang.”
“We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself outand we have only just begun.”
“People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.”
“Let's see if I got this right," she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires...”
“Until a thing was seen, could it be said to exist? And if his eye through the telescope were the one that brought a certain star into existence, did not that make him a creator?”
“The sciences are not sectarian. People do not persecute each other on account of disagreements in mathematics. Families are not divided about botany, and astronomy does not even tend to make a man ...”
“In the progressive growth of astronomy, physics or mechanical science was developed, and when this had been, to a certain degree, successfully cultivated, it gave birth to the science of chemistry.”
“This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of...”
