Robert Jastrow Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

Sometime in the first billion years, life appeared on the earth's surface. Slowly, the fossil record indicates, living organisms climbed the ladder from simple to more advanced forms.

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

Robert Jastrow
The critical first billion years, during which life began, are blank pages in the earth's history.

Robert Jastrow
The universe cannot go on forever as it now is, and neither can it have existed in its present condition from all eternity.

Robert Jastrow
Such clouds [gaseous matter] are the stuff out of which stars and planets are made. Appearing, disappearing, and appearing again in endless succession since the beginning of time in the Cosmos, they mark the first step on the path to life.

Robert Jastrow
Thus, the facts indicate that the Universe will expand forever. We still come across pieces of mass here and there in the Universe, and someday we may find the missing matter, but the consensus at the moment is that it will not be found. According to the available evidence, the end will come in darkness.

Robert Jastrow
When the earth came into existence, it was a naked body of rock without air or water; but a subtle transformation taking place in the depths of the planet would soon change that.... The earth was ready; it waited for life.

Robert Jastrow
The physical universe never has any choice - it must inevitably move along a single road to a predestined end.

Robert Jastrow
The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a machine.

Robert Jastrow
At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Robert Jastrow
Within the isolated galaxies, the old stars burn out one by one, and fewer and fewer new stars are formed to replace them. Stars are the source of the energy by which all beings live. When the light of the last star is extinguished, the Universe fades into darkness, and all life comes to an end.

Robert Jastrow
Every star is continually radiating energy away into space, and we have no knowledge of any appreciable part of this radiation coming back or of the stars replenishing their sources of energy in any way. The universe is running down like a clock which no one winds up.

Robert Jastrow
The stars seem immutable, but they are not. They are born, evolve and die like living organisms.

Robert Jastrow
According to the astronomical evidence, the elements that make up the body of the earth are found in abundance throughout the Cosmos. Innumerable earth-like planets must exist in other solar systems.

Robert Jastrow
The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms.

Robert Jastrow
The Universe can be best pictured, although still very imperfectly and inadequately, as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what, for want of a wider word, we must describe as a mathematical thinker.

Robert Jastrow
When a scientist writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers. In my case it should be understood from the start that I am an agnostic in religious matters. My views on this question are close to those of Darwin, who wrote, "My theology is a simple muddle. I cannot look at the Universe as the result of blind chance, yet I see no evidence of beneficent design in the details."

Robert Jastrow