Astronomer Quotes

To look into space is to look back into time, and telescopes are time machines we can ride nearly all the way back to creation itself.

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

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.

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

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

The wisest astronomer living cannot tell us how far the stars reach...for there is no getting to the borders of space.

Ingenious and powerful instruments have been devised, which reveal wonders otherwise unimagined, and the end is not yet. Each new telescopic giant is expected to win fresh laurels in old fields of endeavor, or to make discoveries which shall link its name forever with the stars.

The stars are the crucibles of the Creator.

David Gill (astronomer)
David Gill (astronomer)
The discovery of unknown laws and principles, as well as the explanation of phenomena by laws already known, is one of its [astrophysics] most important objects.

James Edward Keeler
James Edward Keeler
It is a very human tendency to climb a celestial mountain. So it stands for any race, including that of finding individual objects at greater and greater distances.

When Euclid framed his definitions He did not miss "the point"; Space was prescribed by his conditions For angles twain conjoint.

Counting correctly is very difficult, because, so to put it, it requires from the mind a simultaneous hold upon the past, present, and future. Counting, on the other hand, done carefully is the only region of knowledge, even of mathematics, in which we can be perfectly sure we are not talking nonsense.

Seeing a partial eclipse and saying that you have seen an eclipse is like standing outside an opera house and saying that you have seen the opera; in both cases you have missed the main event.

Donald Howard Menzel
Donald Howard Menzel
The electrons are like little organisms, or least hearts, whose synchronous systole and diastole make the life of the universe, perpetually receiving and transmitting energy from an inexhaustible source.

An erg is a very small amount of energy: it is about the amount that a moderately slow mosquito transfers when it collides with your forehead - and this does not include the sting!

Otto Struve
Otto Struve
The erection of artificial worlds in space is inevitable. Once man's breakthrough into space has begun, it will be as inversible as the discovery, colonization, and exploration of new countries during the age of great historical discoveries.

Iosif Shklovsky
Iosif Shklovsky
When we gaze at the starlit heavens, and admire the silvery radiance of the Milky Way, we would fain believe that there is absolute silence and rest, a perfect haven of repose.

Happy is genius, when it lights on a profession entirely consonant to its powers, where the objects successively presented to it are so exactly suited to its nature, that it clings to them as the loadstone to its kindred metal among piles of foreign ores.

Denison Olmsted
Denison Olmsted
Hail! then, ye eyes that penetrate the inmost recesses of the heavens, and gazing upon the bosom of the sun with your sight-assisting tube, have dared to point out the spots on that eternal luminary !

It seems to me that the tendency of our mathematical instruction and... examinations has been of late years to promote the acquisition of a knowledge of formal relations of symbols and the power of readily producing them,

James Challis
James Challis
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
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.

Physics is not a series of disconnected subjects, including Mechanics, Sound, Light, Heat, and Electricity. It is, on the contrary, a body of well-organized truth, forming one great whole; illustrating, as do few other subjects, what Dickens called "the universal dove-tailedness of things."

Henry Crew
Henry Crew
The function of the scientist is to attain new truths by conquering them from the limitless realm of the unknown, and whether they be brilliant or otherwise, none is too small or insignificant in aspect to deserve his earnest search or joyful welcome.

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.