Famous Astronomical Quotes

It is sometimes said that we should never believe a scientific theory until it is verified by experiment. But a famous astronomer has also stated that we should never believe an observation until it is confirmed by a theory.

For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past. The vision of the future as an infinite playground, with an unending sequence of mysteries to be understood by an unending sequence of players exploring an unending supply of information, is a glorious vision for scientists. Scientists find the vision attractive, since it gives them a purpose for their existence and an unending supply of jobs. The vision is less attractive to artists and writers and ordinary people. Ordinary people are more interested in friends and family than in science. Ordinary people may not welcome a future spent swimming in an unending flood of information. A darker view of the information-dominated universe was described in the famous story “The Library of Babel,” written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941.§ Borges imagined his library, with an infinite array of books and shelves and mirrors, as a metaphor for the universe. Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition: We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

the most famous of all those who had an acquaintance with cryptology in the Middle Ages was an English customs official, amateur astronomer, and literary genius named Geoffrey Chaucer.

At the beginning of his famous TV series, Cosmos, the American astronomer and cosmologist Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be”. That is not a statement of science, to be put in the same category as, for example, the scientific statement that gravity obeys an inverse-square law. Sagan’s statement is simply an expression of his atheistic belief. The problem is, many people give to all statements by scientists the authority rightly due to science, simply because they are stated by a scientist.

Jacquetta Hawkes famously wrote that 'Every age gets the Stonehenge it deserves', by which she meant that Stonehenge has been a Druid temple, a landing site for flying saucers, or an astronomical calendar, according to the interests of the times. The same could be said about our stories about Vikings, and they have been alternately, noble savages, raiders, marauders and rapists, peaceful traders, entrepreneurs, explorers, early democrats, or IKEA sales personnel, according to what we want them to be.

One nice touch about Christy’s discovery was that it happened in Flagstaff, for it was there in 1930 that Pluto had been found in the first place. That seminal event in astronomy was largely to the credit of the astronomer Perdval Lowell. Lowell, who came from one of the oldest and wealthiest Boston families (the one in the famous ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while Cabots spoke only to God), endowed the famous observatory that bears his name, but is most indelibly remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals built by industrious Martians for purposes of conveying water from polar regions to the dry but productive lands nearer the equator. Lowell’s other abiding conviction was that there existed, somewhere out beyond Neptune, an undiscovered ninth planet dubbed, Planet X. Lowell based this belief on irregularities he detected in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, and devoted the last years of his life to trying to find the gassy giant he was certain was out there. Unfortunately, he died suddenly in 1916, at least partly exhausted by his quest and the search fell into abeyance while Lowell’s heirs squabbled over his estate. However, in 1929, partly as a way of deflecting attention away from the Mars canal saga (which by now had become a serious embarrassment), the Lowell Observatory directors decided to resume the search and to that end hired a young man from Kansas named Clyde Tombaugh. Tombaugh had no formal training as an astronomer, but he was diligent and he was astute, and after a year’s patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto, a faint point of light in a glittery firmament. It was a miraculous find, and what made it all the more striking was that the observations on which Lowell had predicted the existence of a planet beyond Neptune proved to be comprehensively erroneous. Tombaugh could see at once that the new planet was nothing like the massive gasball Lowell had postulated, but any reservations he or anyone else had about the character of the new planet were soon swept aside in the delirium that attended almost any big news story in that easily excited age. This was the first American-discovered planet and no one was going to be distracted by the thought that it was really just a distant icy dot. It was named Pluto at least partly because the first two letters made a monogram from Lowell’s initials. Lowell was posthumously hailed everywhere as a genius of the first order, and Tombaugh was largely forgotten, except among planetary astronomers, who tend to revere him.

Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. “You’ve heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?” he says. “Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.” By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation.

astronomical fees, of course—any day now. Please don’t get sucked into that mess. In 1986, [Brooks] famously predicted that there were no silver bullets: that by 1996, no single technology or management technique would offer a tenfold increase in productivity, reliability, or simplicity. None did. Agile development isn’t a silver bullet, either. In fact, I don’t recommend adopting agile

Now at last she understood that science was not merely an affair of dry equations and dull text-books, but had a poetry and a magic of its own. A new world had been opened up before her—it was a world she could enter if she wished. She had never realised, until Professor Martin had mentioned it casually, how many well-known women astronomers there had been—right back to the most famous of them all, Caroline Herschel, who had helped her brother Sir William record his observations during the long winter nights, even when the ink was freezing in its well. In the twentieth century more and more women had made their names in this rapidly advancing field of science, until in some of its branches they had outnumbered the men. All these facts had been quite unknown to Daphne, and they were beginning to fire her with a new ambition.

Despite Tokyo’s astronomical land prices, anyone within earshot of real power commands a room the size of a basketball court in which to host those famous consensus-building sessions. If you want to measure a Japanese man’s clout, get him to show you his conference room.