Quotes by Astronomers - Page 9

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Carl Sagan
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
Isaac Newton
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Carl Sagan
We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
Carl Sagan
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei
Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of the millennia, much less the aeons. What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
Carl Sagan
There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause, there is no First Cause. … This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.
Robert Jastrow
But we have no [Marian] apparitions cautioning the Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centered Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany — two matters of considerable moral as well as historical import....Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning “witches” and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is [the Virgin] Mary always admonishing the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope?
Carl Sagan
All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.
Carl Sagan
And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; an if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted.
Carl Sagan
Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation, but they are driven by the nature of their profession to seek explanations for the origin of life that lie within the boundaries of natural law.
Robert Jastrow
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
Robert Jastrow
Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proved that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks: What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion.
Robert Jastrow
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 might also decide, since they had quite different attributes, that one of them was merely invented by the priests. But if one, why not both? And so it was that the great idea arose, the realization that there might be a way to know the world without the god hypothesis; that there might be principles, forces, laws of nature, through which the world could be understood without attributing the fall of every sparrow to the direct intervention of Zeus.
Carl Sagan
All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.
Carl Sagan
Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science.
Carl Sagan
Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together,
Carl Sagan
Probability theory is nothing more than common sense reduced to calculation. -1819
Pierre-Simon Laplace
If you still believe that aliens would travel hundreds of light years to carve temporary graffiti in our wheat, then your imagination is one of the seven wonders of the world, and should be bronzed.
Seth Shostak
The school systems, it seems to me have a attitude of discouragement of asking fundamental questions, if a 5 or 6 year old asks why the moon is round or why the grass is green? The usual adult answer, at least in my experience is to discourage the child.what color did you expect the moon to be? square? what color you expect the grass to be?blue?Instead of saying that those are interesting questions and lets try to find the answers or maybe nobody knows the answers and when you grow up you would be able to discover the answers.It would be very healthy for human species if we could have less discouragement and more scientists.– Carl Sagan(In an interview with Magnus Magnusson, 1988)
Carl Sagan
Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war?
Carl Sagan
If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?
Carl Sagan
I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great.
Carl Sagan
There are many hypotheses in physics of almost comparable brilliance and elegance that have beenrejected because they did not survive such a confrontation with experiment. In my view, the human condition would be greatly improved if such confrontations and willingness to reject hypotheses were a regular part of our social, political, economic, religious and cultural lives.
Carl Sagan
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants
Isaac Newton
Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's dream come true.
Carl Sagan
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 of creation.
Carl Sagan
For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other—Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.
Carl Sagan
Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.
Carl Sagan
It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptancebetokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires.
Carl Sagan
Observation: I can’t see a thing.Conclusion: Dinosaurs.
Carl Sagan
It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It was only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence.
Allan Rex Sandage
It is now almost possible to assign color combinations, based on the colors of clouds and sky, to every planet in the Solar System—from the sulfur-stained skies of Venus and the rusty skies of Mars to the aquamarine of Uranus and the hypnotic and unearthly blue of Neptune. Sacre-jaunt, sacre-rouge, sacre-vert. Perhaps they will one day adorn the flags of distant human outposts in the Solar System, in that time when the new frontiers are sweeping out from the Sun to the stars, and the explorers are surrounded by the endless black of space. Sacre-noir.
Carl Sagan
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, we also occupy an instant in the expanse of ages.
Carl Sagan
I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me in trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
Carl Sagan
The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes--most of which took place before humans, before mammals, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence.
Carl Sagan
God invented space so that not everything had to happen in Princeton.
Martin J. Rees
We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.
Carl Sagan
eorum omnium actiones in se invicem
Isaac Newton
Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. 'To Fly' brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many denominations witness 'Blue Planet' and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth's environment
Carl Sagan
If there was one overriding element to Faraday's character, it was humility. His 'conviction of deficiency,' as he called it, stemmed in part from his deep religiosity and affected practically every facet of his life. Thus Faraday approached both his science and his everyday conduct unhampered by ego, envy, or negative emotion. In his work, he assumed the inevitability of error and failure; whenever possible, he harnessed these as guides toward further investigation. Faraday adhered to no particular school of scientific thought. Nor did he flinch when a favored hypothesis fell to the rigors of experiment.
Alan W. Hirshfeld
Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science.
Carl Sagan
The others would then fall silent and she would continue about doped gallium arsenide detectors, or the ethanol content of the galactic cloud W-3. The quantity of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was more than enough to maintain the present population of the Earth, if every adult were a dedicated alcoholic, for the age of the solar system. The tamada had appreciated the remark.
Carl Sagan
(T)he increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts.
Galileo Galilei
We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.
Carl Sagan
These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.
Carl Sagan
On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth
Carl Sagan
Science asymptotically approaches reality.
Philip Plait
Consider again that dot [Earth]. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan
And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.
Carl Sagan
How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts?Was the eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?...and these things being rightly dispatch’d, does it not appear from phænomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent...?
Isaac Newton
Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.
Isaac Newton
Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.
Carl Sagan
When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.
Carl Sagan
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 galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.
Carl Sagan
Some piously record 'In the beginning God', but I say 'In the beginning hydrogen'.
Harlow Shapley
Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Carl Sagan
In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.
Carl Sagan
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 their lives in the course of a single day.
Carl Sagan