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| StargazerTony | The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. -Albert Einstien | | |
| A.V.DARKSKY | All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.- GALILEO | | |
| StargazerTony | "A star shines on the hour of our meeting." | | |
| A.V.DARKSKY | Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe. - GALILEO | | |
| calastro | Advances are made by answering questions.
Discoveries are made by questioning answers...
Bernard Haisch, astrophysicist and the editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration | | |
| calastro | Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
- Sarah Williams | | |
| calastro | Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke | | |
| calastro | The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.
- Arthur C. Clarke | | |
| StargazerTony | It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other. -PLATO | | |
| StargazerTony | Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is. - Lichtenberg 1742-1799 | | |
| StargazerTony | Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is. Walt Whitman | | |
| StargazerTony | I thought "The Martians have arrived!", but then I realised that I was looking at pollen slightly out of focus. -Patrick Moore | | |
| StargazerTony | Black holes are where God divided by zero. -Steven Wright | | |
| StargazerTony | Galileo Galilei said, when he was ordered by the Catholic Church to disavow his belief that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around (subscribing to the theory of Copernicus), "To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them to not see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover." | | |
| calastro | Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another - Plato | | |
| calastro | Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology - Rebecca West | | |
| calastro | Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. - Edsger Dijkstra | | |
| calastro | When Moses was alive, these pyramids were a thousand years old Here began the history of architecture. Here people learned to measure time by a calendar, to plot the stars by astronomy and chart the earth by geometry. And here they developed that most awesome of all ideas - the idea of eternity. - Walter Cronkite | | |
| calastro | A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works, and the education of the will is the flowering and result of all this geology and astronomy - Ralph Waldo Emerson | | |
| calastro | Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets. - Stephen Leacock | | |
| calastro | Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy: the mad daughter of a wise mother - Voltaire | | |
| calastro | Let no one expect anything of certainty from astronomy, lest if anyone take as true that which has been constructed for another use, he go away...bigger fool than when he came to it. - Copernicus | | |
| calastro | Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me, why plowing, building, ruling and the rest, or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest, by cursed Cain's race invented be, and blest Seth vexed us with Astronomy. - John Donne | | |
| calastro | It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are. - Edward O. Wilson | | |
| calastro | Theory, of course, is all right, but observation and measurements are basic. - P. van de Kamp | | |
| calastro | The Earth is a nice, stable platform, for a telescope. - P van de Kamp | | |
| calastro | There are no stars on a potato farm. - C. Yastrzemski | | |
| calastro | "Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and planets." - Literary Lapses, A
Manual Of Education | | |
| calastro | "TELESCOPE, n. A device having a relation to they eye similar to that of the
telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless
details. Luckily, it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice." - Ambrose
Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary. | | |
| calastro | “As a pale phantom with a lamp,
Ascends some ruin's haunted stair,
So glides the moon along the damp,
Mysterious chamber of the air.” - Henry Longfellow, Moonlight | | |
| calastro | TELESCOPE, n. A device having a relation to they eye similar to that of the
telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless
details. Luckily, it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice." - Ambrose
Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary. | | |
| calastro | OBSERVATORY, n. A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of
their predecessors. - Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary | | |
| calastro | "The night has a thousand eyes And the day but one..." - F.W. Bourdillon, Light | | |
| calastro | "Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the
better ordering of the universe." - Attributed to Alfonso "The Wise" of Castille (1221-
84) | | |
| calastro | "Damn the solar system. Bad light, planets too distant, pestered with comets. I could
make a better one myself." - Lord Jeffrey, quoted by John Barrow | | |
| calastro | "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces [the heavens] terrifies me." - Blaise Pascal | | |
| calastro | "How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when it is clearly Ocean." - Attributed to
Sir Arthur C. Clarke | | |
| calastro | "In the night sky when the air is clear, there is a cosmic Rorschach test awaiting us."
- Carl Sagan | | |
| calastro | "I can personally attest that fecal and urine spills can break the monotony of even the
dullest days in space." - William Pogue, How Do You Go To The Bathroom In Space? | | |
| calastro | "You seen one Earth, you've seen them all." - Harrison Schmidt, walking on the Moon
during Apollo 17. Quoted by Gene Cernan | | |
| calastro | "There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light,
She set out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned home the previous night." - Relativity, England's Punch magazine, December 19,1923 | | |
| calastro | "Who cares about the half a second after the Big Bang? What about the half a second
before?" - Fay Weldon, quoted by Paul Davies | | |
| calastro | "Black holes are the bungholes of space." - Beavis And Buthead TV show | | |
| calastro | "Your theory is crazy - but not crazy enough to be true." - Sir Arthur C.
Clarke | | |
| calastro | "The sky speaks in celestial objects; the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the stars are
its vocabulary. The sky's grammar is what these objects do ....The whole sky is a
stage, and the things we see there are players. They make their entrances and exits,
take their bows and return for repeat performances." - E. C. Krupp | | |
| calastro | "You can pick a bright star from your doorstep and call it anything you like - for
free." - Sky & Telescope, August 2000 | | |
| calastro | "I don't take any notice of the laws of physics; they're so inconvenient." - Q, Star Trek:
The Next Generation | | |
| calastro | "If it's green and wiggles, it's biology If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's
physics." - Source unknown | | |
| calastro | "Now, there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is
that no instruction book came with it." - R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual For
Spaceship Earth | | |
| calastro | "In all the history of mankind, there will only be one generation that will be the first
to explore the solar system, one generation for which, in childhood, the planets are
distant and indistinct discs moving through the night sky and for which, in old age,
the planets are places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration." - Carl Sagan | | |
| calastro | "I now know how Lewis and Clark must have felt when they began exploring the
West. It's fantastic!" - Gerald Soffen, Viking Project Scientist, speaking at a press
conference, June 23,1976 | | |
| calastro | "No matter how often you knock on nature's door, she won't answer in words you can
understand. She'll vibrate and moan like a violin, but you musn't expect a song." - Ivan
Tugenev | | |
| calastro | "Von Braun himself had quipped that the first US astronauts to reach the Moon might
have to pass through Russian customs. For the first decade of its history, the principle
job of NASA was to ensure that American space travellers would not require a visa."
- Tom Crouch | | |
| calastro | "Polaris is like some politicians - famous but not too bright." - Planetarian, Ed
Frederick, Alden Omnisphere, New England Science Center | | |
| calastro | "Newton saw an apple fall and discovered the Laws of Gravity. Eve made an apple
fall and discovered the Gravity of Law." - Alexander King | | |
| calastro | "Infinity is where things happen that don't." - Quoted by W.W. Sawyer, Prelude To
Mathematics | | |
| calastro | "Many a night I saw the Pleiades, rising through the mellow shade, glitter like a
swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid." - Alfred Lord Tennyson | | |
| calastro | "Nature, apparently, can make a gorgeous hexagon [in a beehive] but she cannot (or
did not deign to) make a year with a nice even number of days or lunations." - Stephen
Jay Gould | | |
| calastro | "Nature and Nature's laws
lay hid in the night.
God said, 'Let Newton be!'
And all was light."
- Alexander Pope, Epitaph Intended For Isaac Newton | | |
| calastro | "I once built a solar system [in Earth orbit] using a blob of orange juice as the sun,
and M&Ms as the planets." - Space shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane | | |
| calastro | "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what
nobody has thought." - Albert von Szent-Gyorgi | | |
| calastro | "I find, in discussions with first graders and hippie communities, congressmen and
cab drivers, that there is an enormous, untapped reservoir of interest and excitement in
things astronomical." - Carl Sagan | | |
| calastro | "Of all the meteors in the sky,
There's none like Comet Halley,
We see it with the naked eye,
And periodically."
- H.H. Turner | | |
| calastro | "Arithematic and geometry, those wings on which the astronomer soars as high as
heaven." - Robert Boyle | | |
| calastro | "I am a detective in search of a criminal - the cosmological constant. I know he exists,
but I do not know his appearance." - Sir Arthur Eddington | | |
| calastro | "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of
conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." - Mark Twain | | |
| calastro | "Science," Ann Druyan notes, “is forever whispering in our ears, ‘Remember, you're
very new at this. You might be mistaken. You've been wrong before.'" - Carl Sagan | | |
| calastro | "[Comet] apparitions are dangerous because people make them so. Comets kill people
by self-fulfilling superstitions, when those who read them as telegrams from the gods
or the Devil turn in panic to homicide or suicide." - Nigel Calder | | |
| calastro | "The comet was so called because it had hair on it, I believe, but in late years the
bald-headed comet is giving just as good satisfaction everywhere." - Bill Nye | | |
| calastro | "An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his
profession, and who manages to avoid them." - Wernher Heisenberg | | |
| calastro | "If 1 have seen further, it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." - Sir Isaac Newton | | |
| calastro | "Mortals, rejoice that there existed so great an ornament of the human race!" - Part of
the epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey, London | | |
| calastro | "The stage of the sky presents a free show. It will amaze, entertain, amuse and
intrigue for a lifetime." - James Kaler | | |
| calastro | "His knees should bend and his neck should curl his back should twist and his face
should scowl. One eye should squint and the other protrude. And this should be his
customary attitude." - Harlow Shapely and Winslow Upton, describing a typical
astronomer, Popular Astronomy, Harvard Observatory Pinafore Volume 38, Number
3, March 1930 | | |
| calastro | "I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through
the atom, and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars."
- Sir Arthur Eddington | | |
| calastro | "Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." - Wernher Von
Braun | | |
| calastro | "He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars and locked the secret in a pocket
watch." - Dava Sobel, describing John Harrison's solving of the longitude problem | | |
| calastro | "I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd
way." - Sir Arthur Eddington | | |
| calastro | "The sun's rim dips,
The stars rush out,
At one stride comes the dark."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner | | |
| calastro | "You may think it's a long way down to the chemist [drug store], but that's peanuts to
space." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy | | |
| calastro | "Einstein had a little theory,
It had something to do with relativity,
Well, Einstein put that theory to the test,
That's why he looks confused
And his hair's a mess."
- The New Rhythm and Blues Quartet | | |
| calastro | "The sky is a canvas on which is drawn the loveliest art." - James Kaler, The Ever-
Changing Sky | | |
| calastro | "To mistrust science and deny the validity of the scientific method is to resign your
job as a human. You'd better go look for work as a plant or wild animal." - P.J.
O'Rourke | | |
| calastro | "Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love you want to tell
the world." - Carl Sagan | | |
| calastro | "Einstein said that if quantum mechanics is right, then the world is crazy. Well,
Einstein was right. The world is crazy." - Daniel Greenberger | | |
| calastro | "The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persis-
tent." - Albert Einstein | | |
| calastro | "The beauty of the Earth from orbit is something difficult to capture in words, but the
soul has no difficulty in celebrating the experience. It's your wedding night, your chil-
dren's births, your first Little League home run and every childhood Christmas rolled
into one." - Mike Mullane | | |
| calastro | "Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home." - Carl
Sagan | | |
| calastro | "Before I went to the Moon, I was a rotten s.o.b. Now I'm just an s.o.b." - Alan
Sheppard | | |
| calastro | "[Astronomer] The only night watchman who doesn't sleep on the job." - Evan Esar | | |
| calastro | "Energy = milk chocolate square." - Source unknown | | |
| calastro | "... perusing the Great Volume of the Author of Nature ..." - William Herschel, on
viewing the night sky | | |
| calastro | "We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis." - Bergen
Evans | | |
| calastro | "Just because you know a thing is true in theory, does not mean that it is true in fact."
- Harry Harrison | | |
| calastro | "When Einstein went to Mount Wilson and posed for photographs at the 100-inch
telescope, Hubble gave his usual explanation about how the giant telescope was used
to determine the structure of the universe. 'Well, well,' said Mrs. Einstein, 'My
husband does that on the back of an envelope.'" - Quoted by Ronald Florence | | |
| calastro | "There are two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand is Einstein, and on the
other is all the rest." - Rudolf Ladenberg | | |
| calastro | "As surely as the Sun has risen this morning, and as surely as it will set this evening,
the human race is going to the stars." - Robert Zimmerman | | |
| calastro | "The running away of the galaxies doesn't mean they have a kind of aversion from
us." - Sir Arthur Eddington | | |
| calastro | "Light brings us the news of the Universe." - Sir William Bragg | | |
| calastro | "I would rather believe in ghosts than in hyperbolic meteors." - Sir Arthur Eddington | | |
| calastro | "No point is more central than this, that empty space is not empty. It is the seat of the
most violent physics." - John Wheeler | | |
| calastro | "I have a horror of sunsets. They are so romantic, so operatic." - Marcel Proust | | |
| calastro | "Pity the poor neutron,
He thought he was a proton,
But he wasn't positive."
The Physics Teacher, Volume 22, Number 5, May 5,1984 | | |
| calastro | "In physics you don't have to go round making trouble for yourself - Nature does it for
you." - Frank Wilczek | | |
| calastro | "Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight
up." - Fred Hoyle | | |
| calastro | "Space tells mater how to move, and matter tells space how to curve." - Gravitation (p.
23) | | |
| calastro | "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Lord Darlington, in
Oscar Wilde's play, Lady Windermere's Fan, Act Three | | |
| calastro | "Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." - John Wheeler | | |
| calastro | "Time is just one damn thing after another." - Source unknown | | |
| calastro | "The Moon is a different thing to each of us." - Frank Borman, speaking aboard Apollo
8 in lunar orbit, December 24, 1968 | | |
| calastro | "Can we actually 'know' the Universe? My God, it's hard enough trying to find your
way around in Chinatown." - Woody Alien | | |
| calastro | "It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but
it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists, it
operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money." - H.L.
Mencken | | |
| calastro | "I may not understand it, but it sure looks important to me." - lan Stewart | | |
| calastro | "The solar system is a clock with nine hands. The ends of those hands are the planets.
We live on the end of one of its moving hands." - Fred Schaaf | | |
| calastro | "The universe is just a fleeting idea in God's mind - a pretty uncomfortable thought if
you've just put a down payment on a house." - Woody Alien | | |
| calastro | "The universe is simmering down, like a giant stew left to cook for four billion years.
Sooner or later we won't be able to tell the carrots from the onions." - Arthur Bloch | | |
| calastro | "The center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere." - Giodarno
Bruno | | |
| calastro | "The universe: a device devised for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers." - Sir
Arthur C. Clarke | | |
| calastro | "Isaac Newton is in the driver's seat now." - Jim Lovell, halfway to the Moon in Apollo
13 | | |
| calastro | "We hope to explain the universe in a simple equation you can wear on your T-shirt."
- Leon Lederman | | |
| calastro | "The universe was dictated, but not signed." - Source unknown | | |
| calastro | "A vacuum is a heck of a lot better than some of the stuff Nature replaces it with."
- Tennessee Williams | | |
| calastro | "Missed it? Don't worry - nature will make more." - Jon U. Bell, Hallstrom
Planetarium, Indian River Community College, Fort Pierce, Florida | | |
| calastro | "Astronomers have a saying: To the general public, astronomy is just three things -
the man in the Moon, the rings of Saturn and Halley's Comet." - Quoted by John
Goldsmith | | |
| calastro | "Seeing a partial solar eclipse is like being the bridesmaid; seeing a total eclipse is
like being the bride." - Roger Tuthill, Sky & Telescope, December 1999 | | |
| calastro | "Jim Lovell said, many years after his flight, that being cooped up in Gemini 7 for
such a long mission was akin to spending two weeks in a latrine, particularly after one
of the urine collection bags burst." - Quoted by Eugene Cernan | | |
| calastro | "Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy. A very stupid daughter of a
very wise mother." - Voltaire | | |
| calastro | "The heavens are the eyes' widest and grandest field in which to adventure." - Fred
Schaaf | | |
| calastro | "I don't pretend to understand the universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am."
- Thomas Carlyle | | |
| calastro | "NASA - Nice And Safe Attitude." - A T-shirt slogan once seen at Disney World in Florida | | |
| calastro | "The only thing wrong with immortality is that it tends to go on forever."
- Herb Caen | | |
| Redhawk | "The Speed of Light - it's not just a good idea, it's the law!" - anonymous | | |
| Redhawk | "We are sterdust, we are golden, we are billion-year old carbon" - Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock" | | |
