Astronomer Quotes

Margaret Fuller: I accept the Universe. Thomas Carlyle: Gad! she'd better!

All nature is one, but for convenience of classification we have divided our knowledge into a number of sciences which we usually regard as quite distinct from each other.

Observations buried in a desk are no observations.

Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander
Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander
It is no secret that our lives are patterned by personal experience, and by our observations of the experience of others. So it is with the entire human family, staring outward from a place that we know to others that we do not. Our knowledge of home helps us to understand the ways of planets beyond our ken.

An isolated sensation teaches us nothing, for it does not amount to an observation. Observation is a putting together of several results of sensation which are or are supposed to be connected with each other according to the law of causality, so that some represent causes and others their effects.

Thorvald N. Thiele
Thorvald N. Thiele
An astronomical observatory of today looks more like a factory plant than an abode for philosophers. The poetry of constellations has given way to the lure of plate libraries, and the angel of cosmogenic speculation has been caught in a cobweb of facts insistently clamoring for explanations.

The unsolved problems of Nature have a distinctive fascination, though they still far outnumber those which have even approximately been resolved.

Henry Norris Russell
Henry Norris Russell
The orbital analysis leads, therefore, to a perturbing mass of only 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter. We shall interpret this result as a companion of Barnard's star, which therefore appears to be a planet.

Well beyond the tropostrata There is a region stark and stellar Where, on a streak of anti-matter Lived Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.

To save my soul I can't believe in the canals as Schiaparelli draws them.... I verily believe... that the canals as depicted by Schiaparelli are a fallacy and that they will be so proved before many oppositions are past.

Edward Emerson Barnard
Edward Emerson Barnard
The hypothesis of plant life... appears still the most satisfactory explanation of the various kinds of dark markings and their complex seasonal and secular changes.

Gerard Kuiper
Gerard Kuiper
The Mars we are trying to explore does not exist.

The radio sky is no carbon copy of the visible sky; it is a new and different firmament, one where the edge of the universe stands in full view and one which bears the telltale marks of a violent past.

The old dream of wireless communication through space has now been realized in an entirely different manner than many had expected. The cosmos' short waves bring us neither the stock market nor jazz from distant worlds. With soft noises they rather tell the physicist of the endless love play between electrons and protons.

The whole procedure [of shooting rockets into space]. presents difficulties of so fundamental a nature, that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially impracticable, in spite of the author's insistent appeal to put aside prejudice and to recollect the supposed impossibility of heavier-than-air flight before it was actually accomplished.

The cosmos is not unlimited, but is limited, as is clear from its being administered throughout by Nature. For it is impossible for Nature to belong to anything unlimited, since Nature must control what it belongs to.

When new or rarely seen things awaken in our minds more wonder than those which are common and ordinary, our desire to learn their causes should be aroused accordingly, and with it our wish to put to test those things reported to us by others or supplied by our own minds.

Science does not, I think, give a positive answer to questions concerning the immortality of the human soul...

Asaph Hall
Asaph Hall
Oh thick wits. Oh blind watchers of the sky.
In Latin: O crassia ingenia, O coecos coeli spectatores.

Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe
The sky is beautiful and vast and harbors many secrets. Inventory of Cosmic Mysteries

Yet if we go into space, let us do so humbly, in the spirit of cosmic piety. We know very little. We are face to face with the great unknown and have no right to assume that we are alone in the Solar System.

The discovery of spiral arms and — later — of molecular clouds in our Galaxy, combined with a rapidly growing understanding of the birth and decay process of stars, changed interstellar space from a stationary "medium" into an "environment" with great variations in space and time.

Hendrik C. van de Hulst
Hendrik C. van de Hulst
From the stars has come the matter of our world and of our bodies, and it is to the stars that we will someday return.

The modern, and to my mind the true, theory is that mathematics is the abstract form of the natural sciences; and that it is valuable as a training of the reasoning powers, not because it is abstract, but because it is a representative of actual things.

Truman Henry Safford
Truman Henry Safford
Ultimately, the origin of the universe is, and always will be, a mystery.