Top 166 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Astronomers - Page 2

May we attribute to the color of the herbage and plants, which no doubt clothe the plains of Mars, the characteristic hue of that planet, which is noticeable by the naked eye, and which led the ancients to personify it as a warrior?

Like buried treasures, the outposts of the universe have beckoned to the adventurous from immemorial times...

The reward of the young scientist is the emotional th rill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience The reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape.

When the long awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, I believe that it will prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science but a mighty and totally unexpected quantum jump.

The moons of Uranus seem to have got a twist.

A hypothesis or theory is clear, decisive, and positive, but it is believed by no one but the man who created it. Experimental findings, on the other hand, are messy, inexact things, which are believed by everyone except the man who did that work.

Not everything that’s cool is science, but everything in science is cool.

After all, to get the whole universe totally wrong in the face of clear evidence for over 75 years merits monumental embarrassment and should induce a modicum of humility.

May it not be that the brighter stars are like our Sun, the upholding and energizing centers of systems of living beings?

Intelligent Design has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn't originally mean at all. It's another form of the God of the gaps. It's bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.

Our solar system is fantastically bizarre. There are worlds with features we never imagined. Storms larger than planets, moons with under-surface oceans, lakes of methane, worldlets that swap places...and that's just at Saturn.

Some think that solar work is pretty well played out. In reality, it is only beginning.

If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War, lumped them together and blew them up at the same time, that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment.

One of the more popular activities was “Talk-O-Matic”. Five people at a time could write messages, and read each other's messages, on the same screen. Today, Internet chat rooms work on the same principle. One of the remarkable new features of this page was that you could log in with an invented name, and pretend you were anyone you wanted - any name, any age, any gender. One favorite trick was to log in using the name of someone else already logged into the page, simply to confuse everyone else.

I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery, but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.

There are men who would be afraid to commit themselves on the doctrine that castor oil is a laxative.

Theories crumble, but good observations never fade.

It would appear... that moral phenomena, when observed on a great scale, are found to resemble physical phenomena; and we thus arrive, in inquiries of this kind, at the fundamental principle, that the greater the number of individuals observed, the more do individual peculiarities, whether physical or moral, become effaced, and leave in a prominent point of view the general facts, by virtue of which society exists and is preserved.

It's amazing to me that not only can we put a probe around Saturn and get images of its moons, but our math and physics are so freaking accurate we can say, "Hey, you know what? On this date at this time if we turn Cassini that way we'll see a moon over 2 million kilometers away pass in front of another one nearly 3 million kilometers away." Every morning, I have a 50/50 chance of finding my keys. That kinda puts things in perspective.

Science is the only self-correcting human institution, but it also is a process that progresses only by showing itself to be wrong.

There is nothing personal in the thunderclap of understanding. The lightning that releases it comes from outside oneself.

Some people try to tell me that science will never answer the big questions we have in life. To them I say: baloney! The real problem is your questions aren't big enough.

Chaos is but unperceived order; it is a word indicating the limitations of the human mind and the paucity of observational facts. The words ‘chaos,’ ‘accidental,’ ‘chance,’ ‘unpredictable,’ are conveniences behind which we hide our ignorance.

No matter how many times something has been observed, it cannot be believed until it has been observed again.

What intelligent being, what being capable of responding emotionally to a beautiful sight, can look at the jagged, silvery lunar crescent trembling in the azure sky, even through the weakest of telescopes, and not be struck by it in an intensely pleasurable way, not feel cut off from everyday life here on Earth and transported toward that first step on celestial journeys?

I have begun to feel that there is a tendency in 20th Century science to forget that there will be a 21st Century science, and indeed a 30th Century science, from which vantage points our knowledge of the universe may appear quite different than it does to us. We suffer, perhaps, from temporal provincialism, a form of arrogance that has always irritated posterity.

Sometimes, even by accident, the universe makes beauty, and we can stand back in awe of it. Even better - we can figure out why. Science! I love this stuff.

It is well to fetter the wings of our fancy and restrain its flights. It is quite possible we may have formed entirely erroneous ideas of what we actually see. The greenish gray patches may not be seas at all, nor the ruddy continents, solid land. Neither may the obscuring patches be clouds of vapor. Man is too quick at forming conclusions. Let him but indistinctly see a thing, or even be undecided as to whether he does actually see it and he will then and there set himself to theorizing, and build immense castles of conjecture on a foundation, of whose existence he is by no means certain.

That hemisphere of the moon which faces us is better known than the earth itself; its vast desert plains have been surveyed to within a few acres; its mountains and craters have been measured to within a few yards; while on the earth's surface there are 30,000,000 square kilometres (sixty times the extent of France), upon which the foot of man has never trod, which the eye of man has never seen.

The Universe is cool enough without making up crap about it.

'By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and the void,' announced Democritus. The universe consists only of atoms and the void; all else is opinion and illusion. If the soul exists, it also consists of atoms.

Your reward will be the widening of the horizon as you climb. And if you achieve that reward you will ask no other.

Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist.

The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote...

Le Verrier-without leaving his study, without even looking at the sky-had found the unknown planet [Neptune] solely by mathematical calculation, and, as it were, touched it with the tip of his pen!

What, then, is this blue sky, which certainly does exist, and which veils from us the stars during the day?

Understanding different planets in their environments is still really important. So if these planets are dead lifeless worlds, it will still be useful for us.

Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul.

It is quite possible we may have formed entirely erroneous ideas of what we actually see. The greenish gray patches may not be seas at all, nor the ruddy continents, solid land. Neither may the obscuring patches be clouds of vapor.

The average man. The emergence of the concept.

Some piously record 'In the beginning God', but I say 'In the beginning hydrogen'.

Over the past eighteen years I have acted as a scientific consultant to the U.S. Air Force on the subject of unidentified flying objects - UFO's. As a consequence of my work on the voluminous air force files and, to a greater extent, of personal investigation of many puzzling cases and interviews with witnesses of good repute, I have long been aware that the subject of UFO's could not be dismissed as mere nonsense.

It is in the name of Jesus, himself become God, that fanaticism ignominiously condemned to the stake men like Giodano Bruno, Vanini, Étienne Dolet, John Huss, Savanarola, and numerous other heroic victims; that the Inquisition ordered Galileo to belie his conscience; that thousands and thousands of unfortunates accused of witchcraft were burnt alive in popular ceremonies; it was with the express benediction of Pope Gregory XIII that the butchery of St. Bartholomew drenched Paris in blood.

Humanity and life are reflected in the stars, and the Universe itself is poetry.

If the existence of human beings leads to nothing, what is all this comedy about?

If humankind - from humble farmers in the fields and toiling workers in the cities to teachers, people of independent means, those who have reached the pinnacle of fame or fortune, even the most frivolous of society women - if they knew what profound inner pleasure awaits those who gaze at the heavens, then France, nay, the whole of Europe, would be covered with telescopes instead of bayonets, thereby promoting universal happiness and peace.

The supernatural does not exist.

The universe is so immense that it appears immutable, and that the duration of a planet such as that of the earth is only a chapter, less than that, a phrase, less still, only a word of the universe’s history.

Every physical fact, every expression of nature, every feature of the earth, the work of any and all of those agents which make the face of the world what it is, and as we see it, is interesting and instructive. Until we get hold of a group of physical facts, we do not know what practical bearings they may have, though right-minded men know that they contain many precious jewels, which science, or the expert hand of philosophy will not fail top bring out, polished, and bright, and beautifully adapted to man's purposes.

It is certainly a wonderful, a brain-staggering conception... that our own stellar universe may be but one of hundreds of thousands of similar universes... Familiarity with these mighty concepts most certainly does not breed contempt, does not dull our awe at the mightiness of the universe in which we play so small a part. It is very doubtful if any of those who are seriously studying the heavens ever lose their feeling of reverence for this supremely wonderful universe and for Whoever or Whatever must be behind it all.

They say that even the brightest star won't shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that.

Picture yourself during the early 1920's inside the dome of the Mount Wilson Observatory. ... Humason is showing Shapley stars he had found in the Andromeda Nebula that appeared and disappeared on photographs of that object. The famous astronomer very patiently explains that these objects could not be stars because the Nebula was a nearby gaseous cloud within our own Milky Way system. Shapley takes his handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the identifying marks off the back of the photographic plate.

All humans are brothers. We came from the same supernova

It’s dead obvious that creationism isn’t science, or even bad science. It’s nonsense. But I’ve long stated it’s also bad religion, because it doesn’t just take faith, it also takes a phenomenal disregard of reality.

I'm tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.

I'm tired of ignorance held up as inspiration.

The whole procedure [of shooting rockets into space] . . . presents difficulties of so fundamental a nature, that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially impracticable, in spite of the author's insistent appeal to put aside prejudice and to recollect the supposed impossibility of heavier-than-air flight before it was actually accomplished. An analogy such as this may be misleading, and we believe it to be so in this case.

Starlight is falling on every square mile of the earth's surface, and the best we can do at present is to gather up and concentrate the rays that strike at area 100 inches in diameter.

Each wave of sightings adds to the accumulation of reports which defy analysis by present methods... An investigative process in depth is necessary here if, after twenty years of confusion, we want some answers.

The stars begin to fade like guttering candles and are snuffed out one by one. Out in the depths of space the great celestial cities, the galaxies cluttered with the memorabilia of ages, are gradually dying. Tens of billions of years pass in the growing darkness ... of a universe condemned to become a galactic graveyard.