Timothy Ferris Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

The model of the natural world we build in our minds by such a process will forever be inadequate, just a little cathedral in the mountains. Still it is better than no model at all.

Timothy Ferris
Gertrude Stein said of modern art, "A picture may seem extraordinarily strange to you and after some time not only does it not seem strange but it is impossible to find what there was in it that was strange." Quantum physics isn't like that. The longer you look at it, the stranger it gets.

Timothy Ferris
Our ignorance, of course, has always been with us, and always will be. What is new is our awareness of it, our awakening to its fathomless dimensions, and it is this, more than anything else, that marks the coming of age of our species. Space may have a horizon and time a stop, but the adventure of learning is endless.

Timothy Ferris
There could be more life out there than we've ever imagined — for if the universe has taught us anything, it is that reality is richer and more resourceful than our wildest dreams.

Timothy Ferris
Galaxies are so big that once you get up to their scale, the universe starts to take on an almost country-cottage intimacy.

Timothy Ferris
Newton viewed space and time as separate and absolute. As conceived by Einstein they are united in a flexible continuum that responds to the presence of matter. The stars and planets wrap the spacetime continuum around themselves, in a sense, each sitting in the center of a sort of spacetime whirlpool.

Timothy Ferris
More discoveries have been made by scientists burning to prove a cherished theory than by disinterested observers who sat back and asked of the universe, "OK, so what can you show me?"

Timothy Ferris
Science is distinguished not for asserting that nature is rational, but for constantly testing claims to that or any other affect by observation and experiment.

Timothy Ferris
Science is not perfect, but neither is it just one more sounding board for human folly.

Timothy Ferris
Life, like the universe, rounds off to darkness where it runs out of time, and contemplation of one's death is perhaps the mainspring of astronomy and other human strivings.

Timothy Ferris
Here we are, without eyes and our minds and our curiosity, six billion passengers aboard a tiny blue boat, bobbing and wheeling our way around one vast Catherine wheel among many. Time now to leave the Milky Way and explore the realms of the galaxies.

Timothy Ferris
We who came down from out of the forest seek to grow a forest of knowing among the stars.

Timothy Ferris
The odd thing about string theory was very odd indeed. It required that the universe have at least ten dimensions. As we live in a universe of only four dimensions, the theory postulated that the other dimensions... had collapsed into structures so tiny that we do not notice them.

Timothy Ferris
The history of the cosmos is arrayed in the sky for those who care to read it.

Timothy Ferris
Let us pause to slake our thirst one last time at symmetry's bubbling spring.

Timothy Ferris
Stargazers, like musicians, typically learn on inferior instruments.

Timothy Ferris
When it comes to a frontier science like cosmology, where the scope of inquiry stretches out to the distant galaxies and down to the subatomic jitterbug from which they emerged, conservatism is not decidedly a virtue nor imagination a vice.

Timothy Ferris
Telescopes are like musical instruments, in that you get out of them what you put into them.

Timothy Ferris
Nothing is more egalitarian than the night sky.

Timothy Ferris
We live in a changing universe, and few things are changing faster than our conception of it.

Timothy Ferris