Quotes by Astrophysicists

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
Carl Sagan
Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
Carl Sagan
It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
Carl Sagan
One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dangerous to doctrines less self critical, or with pretensions of certitude.
Carl Sagan
But if the Bible is not everywhere literally true, which parts are divinely inspired and which are merely fallible and human? As soon as we admit that there are scriptural mistakes (or concessions to the ignorance of the times), then how can the Bible be an inerrant guide to ethics and morals? Might sects and individuals now accept as authentic the parts of the Bible they like, and reject those that are inconvenient or burdensome?
Carl Sagan
In some ways, we are traveling in time now. We just happened to be prisoners of the present in the eternal transition from the past to the future.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind.
Carl Sagan
The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.
Carl Sagan
Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
Carl Sagan
We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of thought' is occasionally proffered. This is an exceptionally silly notion especially since the speed of impulses through the neutrons in our brain is about the same as the speed of a donkey cart.
Carl Sagan
Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.
Carl Sagan
But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine beings.
Carl Sagan
In the beginning, there was physics. "Physics" describes how matter, energy, space, and time behave and interact with one another. The interplay of these characters in our cosmic drama underlies all biological and chemical phenomena. Hence everything fundamental and familiar to us earthlings begins with, and rests upon, the laws of physics. When we apply these laws to astronomical settings, we deal with physics writ large, which we call astrophysics.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Let us begin with the fine-structure constant. ... The fine-structure constant is really the ratio of two natural units or atoms of action. ... We obtain action when we multiply energy by time. ... We are challenged to find a unified theory of electric particles and radiation in which the electrostatic type of action and the quantum type of action are traced to their source.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.
Carl Sagan
A bullet fired level from a gun will hit ground at same time as a bullet dropped from the same height. Do the Physics.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Heisenberg's uncertainty relation measures the amount by which the complementary descriptions of the electron, or other fundamental entities, overlap. Position is very much a particle property - particles can be located precisely. Waves, on the other hand, have no precise location, but they do have momentum. The more you know about the wave aspect of reality, the less you know about the particle, and vice versa. Experiments designed to detect particles always detect particles; experiments designed to detect waves always detect waves. No experiment shows the electron behaving like a wave and a particle at the same time.
John Gribbin
Let's grant that the stars are scattered through space, hither and yon. But how hither, and how yon? To the unaided eye the brightest stars are more than a hundred times brighter than the dimmest. So the dim ones are obviously a hundred times farther away from Earth, aren't they?Nope.That simple argument boldly assumes that all stars are intrinsically equally luminous, automatically making the near ones brighter than the far ones. Stars, however, come in a staggering range of luminosities, spanning ten orders of magnitude ten powers of ten. So the brightest stars are not necessarily the ones closest to Earth. In fact, most of the stars you see in the night sky are of the highly luminous variety, and they lie extraordinarily far away.If most of the stars we see are highly luminous, then surely those stars are common throughout the galaxy.Nope again.High-luminosity stars are the rarest. In any given volume of space, they're outnumbered by the low-luminosity stars a thousand to one. It's the prodigious energy output of high-luminosity stars that enables you to see them across such large volumes of space.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.
Carl Sagan
Intuitive: The word conveys, I think, a diffuse annoyance at our inability to understand how we come by such knowledge.
Carl Sagan
Major scientific insights are characteristically intuitive, and equally characteristically described in scientific papers by linear analytical arguments. There is no anomaly in this: it is, rather, just as it should be. The creative act has major right-hemisphere components. But arguments on thevalidity of the result are largely left-hemisphere functions.
Carl Sagan
I should like to preface my remarks with a personal statement in order that my later remarks will not be misunderstood. I consider myself an atheist.
Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar
The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.
Carl Sagan
It is certainly true that all beliefs and all myths are worthy of a respectful hearing. It is not true that all folk beliefs are equally valid - if we’re talking not about an internal mindset, but about understanding of the external reality.
Carl Sagan
Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.
Carl Sagan
Our television signals leave this planet and go out into space...the signals spread out from the earth in spherical waves, a little like ripples in a pond. They travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, and essentially go on forever. The better some other civilizations receivers are, the farther away they could be and still pick up our tv signals. Even we could detect a strong tv transmission from a planet going around the nearest star.' President: 'You mean everything? You mean to say all that crap on television - the car crashes, wrestling, the porno channels, the evening news?
Carl Sagan
We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon), thus disarming its protective force field. I don’t know about you, but back in 1996 I had trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems were different. There is only one solution: the entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer’s system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
When you organize extraordinary missions, you attract people of extraordinary talent who might not have been inspired by or attracted to the goal of saving the world from cancer or hunger or pestilence.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed—if they’re here, I want to know about them.
Carl Sagan
Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished — perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds — on the distant planet Earth.
Carl Sagan
Birds know, better than humans, not to spoil the nest.
Carl Sagan
Everything not forbidden by the laws of nature, he assured her - quoting a colleague down the hall - is mandatory.
Carl Sagan
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon.Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.
Carl Sagan
Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was 'Apollo' really about?
Carl Sagan
I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.
Carl Sagan
Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.
Carl Sagan
Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don’t reply to critics, Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I’m very fond of it; it’s done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away.
Carl Sagan
I think our brain is our soul. I don’t believe in after-life and much less in a sort of buildings-like heaven, where you meet friends, enemies, relatives.
Margherita Hack
MacLean has shown that the R-complex plays an important role in aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritual and the establishment of social hierarchies. Despite occasional welcome exceptions, this seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior.
Carl Sagan
Those mothers with hereditary large pelvises were able to bear large-brained babies who because of their superior intelligence were able to compete successfully in adulthood with the smaller-brained offspring of mothers with smaller pelvises.
Carl Sagan
There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.
Carl Sagan
The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.
Carl Sagan
[an encounter in space] "Some celestial event. No--no words--no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful...I had no idea. I had no idea.
Carl Sagan
Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Eva’s only fault has been the one of wanting to know more, to experiment and search with her own sources the laws of the Universe, of her own body and to refuse the teachings from “above”. Eva, basically, represents the curiosity of science against the passive acceptance that belongs to faith.
Margherita Hack
A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the subatomic energy which, it is known exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service. The store is well nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped. There is sufficient in the Sun to maintain its output of heat for 15 billion years.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a “discovery” of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.
Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar
You could also ask who’s in charge. Lots of people think, well, we’re humans; we’re the most intelligent and accomplished species; we’re in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That’s what’s going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neuroanatomy, political history, and introspection all offer evidence that human beings are quite capable of resisting the urge to surrender to every impulse of reptilian core of brain.
Carl Sagan
Even if we ourselves are not personally scandalized by the notion of other animals as close relatives, even if our age has accommodated to the idea, the passionate resistance of so many of us, in so many epochs and cultures, and by so many distinguished scholars, must say something important about us. What can we learn about ourselves from an apparent error so widespread, propagated by so many leading philosophers and scientists, both ancient and modern, with such assurance and self-satisfaction? One of several possible answers: A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them--without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. With untroubled consciences, we can render whole species extinct--for our perceived short-term benefit, or even through simple carelessness. Their loss is of little import: Those beings, we tell ourselves, are not like us. An unbridgeable gap gas thus a practical role to play beyond the mere stroking of human egos. Darwin's formulation of this answer was: "Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equals.
Carl Sagan
Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?
Carl Sagan
At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
Carl Sagan
There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters to sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august, or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend–substantively and in depth.
Carl Sagan
It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones.
Carl Sagan
In choosing a hypothesis there is no virtue in being timid. I clearly would have been burned at the stake in another age.
Thomas Gold