Chet Raymo Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

We are indeed the detritus of stars, our atoms are the flour of celestial mills, our bodies the backings of solar fires.

Chet Raymo
Coincidence is the evidence of the True Believer.

Chet Raymo
The difference between Skeptics and True Believers is not that Skeptics believe what is sensible and obvious, while True Believers accept what is fanciful and farfetched. Often, it is the other way around.

Chet Raymo
We are not ruled by stars; we and the stars are one.

Chet Raymo
For 5 billion years the sun has exhaled a faint breath as it burns, bathing the Earth in the flux of its exhalations, a wind of atoms and subatomic particles that feeds the Earth's atmosphere and ignites auroras.

Chet Raymo
Someone once quoted Shakespeare to the philosopher W. V. O. Quine: There
are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
To which Quine is said to have responded: Possibly, but my concern is that
there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.

Chet Raymo
Science, like the play of children, satisfies a deep-seated need for escape from the boredom of fixity and the trauma of chaos.

Chet Raymo
Scientific truths are tentative and partial, and subject to continual revision and refinement, but as we tinker with truth in science — amending here, augmenting there — we always keep our ear attuned to the timbre of the web.

Chet Raymo
I weigh out nebulas. I dam up the Milky Way and use it to grind my grain. I put up summer stars like vegetables in jars for my delectation in winter. I have winter stars folded in boxes in the attic for cloudy summer nights.

Chet Raymo
Science is not a collection of facts, nor is science something that happens in the laboratory. Science is something that happens in the head; it is a flight of imagination beyond the constraints of ordinary imagination.

Chet Raymo
We are not playthings of the gods, comet-warned and fearful; we are the comet's offspring, volatile compounds made animate, made conscious.

Chet Raymo
Science is a spider's web. Confidence in any one strand of the web is maintained by the tension and resiliency of the entire web.

Chet Raymo
No more of the universe is visible to our unaided eyes than to the eyes of our Neanderthal ancestors. But science, the product of our imagination, has immensely extended the range of our imagination. Our inward eye can range beyond the dome of visible stars to the unseen realm of the nebulae and galaxies.

Chet Raymo
Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring. And occasionally, at certain disquieting moments in history (Aristarchus, Galileo, Plank, Einstein), a tempest of mystery comes rolling in from the sea and overwhelms our efforts.

Chet Raymo
The night sky is more like a human being, inexhaustibly complex and finally beyond reach. Knowledge only whets our interest and increases our wonder.

Chet Raymo
Delight in the unexpected is part of the lifeblood of science. Almost alone among belief systems, science welcomes the disturbingly new.

Chet Raymo
Give me the ninety-two elements and I'll give you a universe. Ubiquitous hydrogen. Standoffish helium, Spooky boron. No-nonsense carbon. Promiscuous oxygen. Faithful iron. Mysterious phosphorous. Exotic xenon. Brash tin. Slippery mercury. Heavy-footed lead.

Chet Raymo
Science cannot be a repository of ultimate faith: It is a fulcrum upon which we can hope to balance the treasure of our knowledge against the claims of ignorance.

Chet Raymo
Astronomy is a science of faint lights. The excitement of astronomy lies in the way grand knowledge is distilled from barely luminous blurs in the night sky.

Chet Raymo
The night sky possesses an unparalleled power to excite the human imagination. Intimate, yet infinite. Dark, yet full of light. Near, yet unreachably far.

Chet Raymo
Science is not a smorgasbord of truths from which we can pick and choose.

Chet Raymo