20th-century Astronomer Quotes

Fred Hoyle

Gerard Kuiper

Clyde Tombaugh

Bernard Lovell

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Eugene Merle Shoemaker

Otto Struve

The wastage of the skills and talents of our capable young scientists is a disgrace to the world. The resources exist to put them all to work doing constructive things. Instead of that the substance of the earth is expanded on frivolities, on all kinds of power wasting devices and gas guzzling cars. Worst of all is the expenditure of technical expertise, energy and money on the arms race. Despite the wherewithal to wipe man off the face of the earth, ten times over, there is clamor to squander even more.

Lawrence H. Aller

Newton's own motto, "hypotheses non fingo" was, in a sense, disregarded by Newton himself: he rejected hypotheses only where they violated his own "regula philosophandi", that is to say, his principle of their strict parsimony. In terms of present-day methodology, we reject hypotheses as scientifically meaningless if they are incapable even of indirect test; and we reject them as superfluous or as implausible if they are too complex and artificial to conform with well established canons of inductive probability. But freedom of scientific theorizing must be preserved wherever the conditions of meaningfulness and of economy appear to be satisfied.

I may go down in history as the guy who killed Pluto.

Michael E. Brown

We live in an era when it seems legitimate to try everything conceivable within the known laws of physics, particularly in the absence of data.

Geoffrey Burbidge

"Have we discovered our Galaxy yet?" And I think the answer to this question is "No, not quite". There is plenty of work ahead for the next generation of astronomers.

I have long believed that an experimentalist should not be unduely inhibited by theoretical untidyness. If he insists in having every last theoretical T crossed before he starts his research the chances are that he will never do a significant experiment. And the more significant and fundamental the experiment the more theoretical uncertainty may be tolerated. By contrast, the more important and difficult the experiment the more that experimental care is warranted. There is no point in attempting a half-hearted experiment with an inadequate apparatus.

Robert H. Dicke

Only by doing the best we can with the very best that an era offers, do we find the way to do better in the future.

… one of the most detrimental (and least discussed) effects of the crisis in science education in the world today is that we are creating a population increasingly unable to think skeptically about a wide range of issues.

If eternity is silliness, then infinity of space is sheer madness.

Edward Robert Harrison

The nation that neglects creative thought today will assuredly have its nose ground into the dust of tomorrow.

If the universe is a universe of thought then its creations must have been an act of thought.

Self-study, in a sense of learning by yourself without anybody teaching you anything, has an enormous value.

Every object in the Universe with a temperature above absolute zero radiates in the infrared, so this part of the spectrum contains a great deal of information.

The new and the old methods complete one another on numerous points, and their simultaneous use will increase our knowledge of the outer atmosphere of the Sun much more rapidly.

We have to beef up our searches, which are now pretty dismal, so we can find out about these things before we get hit. … It takes a dramatic event to get people's attention, and we thought the comet crash with Jupiter might have done the job. … we tend to ignore an extraterrestrial hazard that could reduce the planet to rubble. … What we really need is a good scare.

Brian G. Marsden

People have been looking for this dark matter because there is a Nobel prize, for sure, waiting for whoever discovers it.

We do not know the truth. But sometimes we get a glimpse of the shadow of the truth. And where there is a shadow, somewhere there must be light.

Eric Mervyn Lindsay

If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, "It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae."

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you've vanquished.

Alastair Reynolds

We became astronomers thinking we were studying the universe, and now we learn that we are just studying the 5 or 10 percent that is luminous.

Astronomy differs from most sciences in that we cannot do experiments; the astronomer must build up from his existing observations a picture or "model" of the Universe, and then look for further effects which should be observable if his model is correct.

I may be a minority of one in advocating that one should NOT separate science and politics—partly because I am old enough to remember the Weimar Republic before 1934...

Edwin Ernest Salpeter

The development of human awareness of the Universe evolved from the geocentric cosmology of the ancient world via the heliocentric cosmology of the Renaissance and the egocentric cosmology of the nineteenth century, to the ultimate destination of the Big-Bang theory of the expanding Universe.

Cosmology is a science which has only a few observable facts to work with.

Robert Woodrow Wilson

Only Galileo and I really knew how to use a small telescope.