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We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.
Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry.
In 1957, I was studying the Pleiades star cluster at Harvard University's radio observatory. On one occasion, we saw an added feature in the data. It turned out to be an amateur radio enthusiast near the observatory, but at the time, I thought we had detected clear evidence of another civilisation.
We're hard-wired by 200,000 years of evolution to be sensitive to the idea that someone might be watching us. They might be predators, after all. An uneasy feeling is perfectly natural if you suspect that someone has you in their ocular sights, whether it's a ghost or just some guy at the bus stop.
Since the Renaissance, a concept called 'progress' has been baked into our society. Progress - founded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it. That's what separates us from the beasts.
The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.
There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.
The first voyagers to the stars will be creatures whose life cycle is matched to the voyage: the aeons involved in traversing the galaxy are not daunting to immortal beings. By the end of the third millennium, travel to other stars could be technically feasible. But would there be sufficient motive?
Five centuries from now - barring unimaginable catastrophe - the moon will be developed real estate. There's economic incentive to exploit the moon - the helium-3 will be useful in powering fusion reactors, and the rare earth elements could supplant the limited terrestrial supply of these materials.
The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science's great 'open frontiers.' These are parts of the intellectual map where we're still groping for the truth - where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe 'here be dragons.'
The benefits of medical research are real - but so are the potential horrors of genetic engineering and embryo manipulation. We devise heart transplants, but do little for the 15 million who die annually of malnutrition and related diseases. Our cleverness has grown prodigiously - but not our wisdom.
Exploration is an oft-lauded human activity, and one that resonates in the same way that music and good stories do. It's hard-wired into our species (and into many others), no doubt because it has survival value. Exploration occasionally rewards those who accept its risks, usually with new resources.
When I graduated high school, nearly a half-million people subscribed to 'Popular Electronics' magazine. Soldering up some radio or hi-fi amplifier on the basement workbench was not just a personal passion - a lot of young people were doing the same. The magazine expired in 1999 for lack of interest.
The principal reason for the universe's poker face is that its constituents are far away. Stars careen through space, and galaxies spin at speeds thousands of times faster than a jet plane. But given their distance, you'd need the patience of Job to notice much change in their appearance or position.
I can actually build my equipment at the back end of the telescope such that it takes the data from all of the separate antennas and adds the signal together with different time delays and different phase shifts - it's as if I were picking out up to eight individual pixels in this large field of view.
It's hard to imagine anything more interesting than learning how we're woven into the enormous tapestry of existence. Where did our universe come from? How special is our world, and how special are we? We allocate tens of billions of dollars annually to NASA, NSF and academia in search of the answers.
The total number of people that do a job that has the same description as mine in the entire world is fewer than 10. There's a lot of effort looking for life in space - that's a lot of what NASA does, but they're not necessarily looking for the kind of life that can hold up its side of a conversation.
Nevertheless, (Jefferson) believed that the habit of skepticism is an essential prerequisite for responsible citizenship. He argued that the cost of education is trivial compared to the cost of ignorance, of leaving government to the wolves. He taught that the country is safe only when the people rule.
My long-time view about Christianity is that it represents an amalgam of two seemingly immiscible parts-the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul. Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much left when he was done, but it was an inspiring document.
The central region of the Milky Way, known as the bulge, is stuffed with literally tens of billions of stars. And most of these are old - considerably older than our Sun or its neighbors - because this part of the galaxy formed first. Consequently, bulge stars are generally deficient in heavy elements.
National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
One [idea] was that the Universe started its life a finite time ago in a single huge explosion, and that the present expansion is a relic of the violence of this explosion. This big bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory even before detailed examination showed that it leads to serious difficulties.
It is mistaken to claim that global problems will be solved more quickly if only researchers would abandon their quest to understand the universe and knuckle down to work on an agenda of public or political concerns. These are not 'either/or' options - indeed, there is a positive symbiosis between them.
It might seem paradoxical that the biggest scientific instruments of all are needed in order to probe the very smallest things in nature. The micro-world is inherently 'fuzzy' - the sharper the detail we wish to study, the higher the energy that is required and the bigger the accelerator that is needed.
Humans have existed only for the last 0.001 percent of cosmic time. All of which says that - unless the Homo sapiens brain is the one-and-only instance of cogitating machinery - nearly all the intelligence that's out there is beyond our level. And that intelligence is more than just a little bit beyond.
The understanding between a non-technical writer and his reader is that he shall talk more or less like a human being and not like an Act of Parliament. I take it that the aim of such books must be to convey exact thought in inexact language... he can never succeed without the co-operation of the reader.
That kind of skeptical, questioning, "don't accept what authority tells you" attitude of science - is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don't think you can have one without the other.
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.
In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors.
The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence - hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite.
Religions contradict one another-on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods.
To most people in the UK, indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up US and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.
It used to be controversial whether smoking caused lung cancer, it used to be controversial whether HIV caused AIDS. Now, there are a few mavericks who deny those things. In the case of climate change, I think the debate is going the same way in that there is a strong consensus that it is a serious matter.
And we should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to concepts on the fringe of science fiction. Flaky American futurologists aren't always wrong. They remind us that a superintelligent machine is the last instrument that humans may ever design - the machine will itself take over in making further steps.
By 2020, most home computers will have the computing power of a human brain. That doesn't mean that they are brains, but it means that in terms of raw processing, they can process bits as fast as a brain can. So the question is, how far behind that is the development of a machine that's as smart as we are?
The next time you check your moves in the mirror and reflect on how special you are, consider that somewhere in this universe or in another parallel universe, your double might be doing the same. This would be the ultimate Copernican Revolution. Not only are we not special, we could be infinitely ordinary.
Let me say that I don't see any conflict between science and religion. I go to church as many other scientists do. I share with most religious people a sense of mystery and wonder at the universe and I want to participate in religious ritual and practices because they're something that all humans can share.
The era during which only governments could put hardware on the Moon is coming to an end. There are 26 private teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize - to be awarded for sending a robotic spacecraft to this nearby world that can roam at least 500 meters, and send back data such as a photo.
By about age 12, I would prefer to stay up and watch the stars than go to sleep. I started learning. I started going to the library and reading. But it was initially just watching the stars from my bedroom that I really did. There was just nothing as interesting in my life as watching the stars every night.
Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded.
Mars still remains the astrobiology community's number one choice for 'nearest rock with life,' but there are many researchers who argue that the moons of Jupiter are better bets. In particular, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto are all thought to hide vast oceans of liquid water beneath their icy, outer skins.
'What was there before the Big Bang?' That's a question that both kids and adults love to pose to anyone who seems sympathetic. After all, if the universe has only been around for roughly 14 billion years, isn't it legitimate to ask what was in existence before the mother-of-all-events cranked up the cosmos?
It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand.
Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
Not far from the meeting's venue, at one of the famed Observatory Club tea meetings, Fred once started a talk by saying, 'Oh, Ooh, basically a star is a pretty simple thing.' And from the back of the room was heard the voice of R. O. Redman, saying, 'Well, Fred, you'd look pretty simple too, from ten parsecs!
Everything, however complicated - breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests - is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn't offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.
To most people in the U.K., indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up U.S. and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.
You may not see massive UFO exhibits at your local science museum, but there's no dearth of saucer stories infesting my email. Every day, I receive several reports of alien sightings, extraterrestrial plans for Earth, and agitated screeds about the reluctance of scientists to take the whole subject seriously.
The strongest signals leaking off our planet are radar transmissions, not television or radio. The most powerful radars, such as the one mounted on the Arecibo telescope (used to study the ionosphere and map asteroids) could be detected with a similarly sized antenna at a distance of nearly 1,000 light-years.
Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea, and hypothesis-which is tantamount to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism-especially rejection of new ideas before they are adequately tested-and you're not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also closed to the advance of science. A judicious mix is what we need.