Astrophysics Quotes

Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to spanWhen it gathers to egg once more

Working on the summit of Mauna Kea was comparable to working on the hospital pulmonary ward with sick people sucking on oxygen cylinders.

Steven Magee

Oxygen deprivation and supplemental oxygen are both bio-hazards for Mauna Kea workers

Steven Magee

This fits in with what I saw in staff in astronomical facilities and was reporting to the management team: 10-14% Oxygen: Emotional upset, abnormal fatigue, disturbed respiration.

Steven Magee

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

Very high altitude astronomy only works by ignoring established biological science

Steven Magee

Astrophysics. 'It's a super-long shot' is practically the motto of our profession.

Marko Kloos

Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

Douglas Adams

When discharging industrial gas into the indoor environment in high altitude astronomy, we never wore breathing respirators that fed us oxygenated air at above the legally required 19.5% oxygen levels.

Steven Magee

When I worked in astronomy, I routinely observed young college and university students working with liquid nitrogen and breathing nitrogen gas as they discharged it into the indoor environment at high altitude.

Steven Magee

Astronomy staff that routinely discharged industrial gas into the indoor environment at high altitudes did not wear oxygen deficiency monitors or protective breathing respirators.

Steven Magee

Industrial liquid gas containers were left open and venting gas into the indoor environment in high altitude astronomy. On reflection, I realized that I routinely observed mental and physical effects that match those of a low oxygen environment in staff that I supervised.

Steven Magee

From a philosophical point of view, Leibniz's most interesting argument was that absolute space conflicted with what he called the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII). PII says that if two objects are indiscernible, then they are identical, i.e. they are really one and the same object. What does it mean to call two objects indiscernible? It means that no difference at all can be found between them--they have exactly the same attributes. So if PII is true, then any two genuinely distinct objects must differ in at least one of their attributes--otherwise they would be one, not two. PII is intuitively quite compelling. It certainly is not easy to find an example of two distinct objects that share all their attributes. Even two mass-produced factory goods will normally differ in innumerable ways, even if the differences cannot be detected with the naked eye.Leibniz asks us to imagine two different universes, both containing exactly the same objects. In Universe One, each object occupies a particular location in absolute space.In Universe Two, each object has been shifted to a different location in absolute space, two miles to the east (for example). There would be no way of telling these two universes apart. For we cannot observe the position of an object in absolute space, as Newton himself admitted. All we can observe are the positions of objects relative to each other, and these would remain unchanged--for all objects are shifted by the same amount. No observations or experiments could ever reveal whether we lived in universe One or Two.

Samir Okasha

Pluto is dead, I know as I observed the Terminator that was sent to kill it

Steven Magee

The astronomical community need to start acknowledging jet aircraft contrails to be the problem that they really are!

Steven Magee

Over-the-counter ‪‎drug‬ ‪‎abuse‬ or addiction was a problem that I observed at Mauna Kea

Steven Magee

If you ask people where they're from, they will typically say the name of the city where they were born, or perhaps the place on Earth's surface where they spent their formative years. Nothing wrong with that. But an astrochemically richer answer might be, "I hail from the explosive jetsam of a multitude of high-mass stars that died more than 5 billion years ago.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We’re tiny. We don’t matter. We’re here for a second and then gone the next. We’re a sneeze in the life of the universe.

Danny Wallace

I have been through the OSHA system twice and I can confirm that I did not have the right to a safe workplace or whistle-blower protection on either occasion.

Steven Magee

When I worked in high altitude astronomy, the worst sickness that I experienced was not at the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea Observatory (MKO) in Hawaii, it was at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in Arizona at the much lower altitude of 6,875 feet. Due to my very high altitude experiences, I knew that this strange sickness was not primarily caused by altitude sickness and was most likely Sick Building Syndrome (SBS). After reporting various behavioral problems in all of the staff to the management team, my contract was not renewed, I was unable to legally protect the health and safety of the workers that I was responsible for, troubleshooting of this environmental problem stopped and I left in a sickened state for my next position before I could find the root cause.

Steven Magee

When the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) found out that Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were going to visit the site to assist in bringing it into legal compliance, they freaked out! They insisted that the visit had to be canceled and the result was that I eventually became so sick from the toxic workplace environment that I had no option but to leave.

Steven Magee

But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.

George Smoot

All high mathematics serves to do is to beget higher mathematics.

Ashim Shanker

Since only a narrow range of the allowed values for, say, the fine structure constant will permit observers to exist in the Universe, we must find ourselves in the narrow range of possibilities which permit them, no matter how improbable they are. We must ask for the conditional probability of observing constants to take particular ranges, given that other features of the Universe, like its age, satisfy necessary conditions for life.

John D. Barrow

Do you ever look up at the stars and try to contemplate the ends of the universe?

Ruth Ahmed

One of the biggest lies that is currently being told in the USA workplace is on the legally required OSHA poster: All workers have the right to a safe workplace.

Steven Magee

In high altitude astronomical facilities we routinely discharged large amounts of nitrogen gas into closed spaces. We were never informed by the astronomy management team about the abnormally low oxygen environments that the use of liquid nitrogen creates, how long term exposure to it manifests itself in human health and the resulting abnormal mental behaviors.

Steven Magee

The toxicity of medical and industrial gas to the human depends on where it is used. A gas that is regarded as safe in a well ventilated environment at sea level may be a toxic gas in an indoor environment at high altitude.

Steven Magee

My memories of my time in high altitude astronomy indicate that there were no oxygen concentration monitors or alarms in the areas that liquid nitrogen was in use at the high altitude astronomical facilities where I had worked.

Steven Magee

Earth was the winner of the ultimate lotto, with 500 million to one odds, this one planet, of comparable, size to its other 17 billion siblings, became the life force of the universe itself. But the inhabitants of earth did not just inherit life, they inherited all that life has to offer a sentient species. It offers them —as a gift— love, joy, surprise, wonder, friendship, as well as spirituality, art, literature, music, and most importantly morality. A morality that is capable of reaching beyond its species to that of other living creatures on this shared fishbowl called Earth.

Leviak B. Kelly

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.

Raymond Loewy

The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception.

Ashim Shanker

Abnormal radiation exposure and oxygen starvation teaches you that reality is just a perception that is derived from your immediate environmental conditions.

Steven Magee

There were no witnesses to what was about to happen. 'Happen' didn't yet exist. Reality was timeless. Space also didn't exist. The distance between two points was immeasurable. The points themselves could be anywhere, hovering and bouncing. Infinity tangled into itself. There was no here and now. Only Being.

Marcelo Gleiser

Snow cleaning of the world's largest telescope mirrors was an impressive sight. The optics technicians would climb into a huge telescopic boom lift and spray immense clouds of cold carbon dioxide snow and gas onto the ten meter diameter mirrors high above the floor indoors. It would cause some of the accumulated dirt to magically fall off, leaving it less dirty.

Steven Magee

At the W.M. Keck Observatory on the very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, there was no routine monitoring of mental functioning, blood oxygen levels, blood pressure or heart rate of workers.

Steven Magee

During my time in high altitude astronomy, I routinely witnessed workers breathing medical oxygen, industrial carbon dioxide, nitrogen and helium gas as part of their daily work routine.

Steven Magee

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. 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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo Sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected.Yes, Einstein was a badass.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

In 2002, having spent more than three years in one residence for the first time in my life, I got called for jury duty. I show up on time, ready to serve. When we get to the voir dire, the lawyer says to me, “I see you’re an astrophysicist. What’s that?” I answer, “Astrophysics is the laws of physics, applied to the universe—the Big Bang, black holes, that sort of thing.” Then he asks, “What do you teach at Princeton?” and I say, “I teach a class on the evaluation of evidence and the relative unreliability of eyewitness testimony.” Five minutes later, I’m on the street. A few years later, jury duty again. The judge states that the defendant is charged with possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine. It was found on his body, he was arrested, and he is now on trial. This time, after the Q&A is over, the judge asks us whether there are any questions we’d like to ask the court, and I say, “Yes, Your Honor. Why did you say he was in possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine? That equals 1.7 grams. The ‘thousand’ cancels with the ‘milli-’ and you get 1.7 grams, which is less than the weight of a dime.” Again I’m out on the street.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysics Quotes

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