Hubble Quotes

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.

I've been going insane reading my students' papers. Apparently several of them think the Hubble Space Telescope is used to search the universe for hubbles." ~ Ithana Aaronson

Now go to bed, you crazy night owl! You have to be at NASA early in the morning. So they can look for your penis with the Hubble telescope.

Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book.

In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars.

You mean to tell me you're mourning the loss of someone who never existed?

Edwin Hubble, who continues to give me great faith in humanity, because he started out as a lawyer and then became an astronomer.

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science. —EDWIN P. HUBBLE (1889–1953), The Nature of Science

The unspooling of the skein of the genome has effectively abolished racism and creationism, and the amazing findings of Hubble and Hawking have allowed us to guess at the origins of the cosmos. But how much more addictive is the familiar old garbage about tribe and nation and faith.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

But in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the landmark observation that wherever you look, distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us. In other words, the universe is expanding.

Kit leaned forward. “But if you’re up to something, know that I’m ready. The days of Kit the Clueless are over. I’m watching you guys like a . . . like a . . . like a really good watcher of things.” He cocked his head. “An owl, maybe?” “Up to something?” I flapped a breezy hand. “Pshh. Relax.” “Kit’s not so good with similes,” I said, wiping down a steel counter. “I would’ve gone with a hawk, or maybe the Hubble telescope. I guess owl works.

Observations always involve theory.

With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary—the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation.

Faced with the blazing magnificence of the everyday, the artist is both humbled and provoked. There are photographs now of events on an unimaginable scale [...] When we look at these images, there is, yes, legitimate wonderment at our own lengthening reach and grasp. But it would be vain indeed to praise our puny handiwork--the mastery of the Hubble wielders, the computer enhancers, the colorizers, all the true-life-fantasist counterparts of Hollywood's techno-wizards and imagineers--when the universe is putting on so utterly unanswerable a show. Before the majesty of being, what is there to do but hang our heads?

The Hubble telescope swoops the other way. Halley’s Comet shoots back behind the trees as the Humvees roll, again, into Iraq.

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted aurora near the poles of both Saturn and Jupiter. And on Earth, the aurora borealis and australis (the northern and southern lights) serve as intermittent reminders of how nice it is to have a protective atmosphere.

If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful—and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding—than any creation or “end of days” story. If you read Hawking on the “event horizon,” that theoretical lip of the “black hole” over which one could in theory plunge and see the past and the future (except that one would, regrettably and by definition, not have enough “time”), I shall be surprised if you can still go on gaping at Moses and his unimpressive “burning bush.

Maybe in the future this theory will be disproven. But two great cosmological discoveries of this century—Hubble’s law, and observation of the cosmic microwave background–show that the big bang theory is currently the most plausible explanation for the origin of the universe.

After that, he drank all the rest of the sherry, and Mr. Hubble drank the port, and the two talked (which I have since observed to be customary in such cases) as if they were of quite another race from the deceased, and were notoriously immortal.

For two billion years, the world knew peace. Only with the invention of gender—specifically males, those tail-fanners, horn-lockers, chest-pounders—did Earth begin its slide toward self-extinction. Perhaps this explains Edwin Hubble’s discovery that all known galaxies are moving away from Earth, as if we are a whole planet of arsenic. Hoffstetler comforts himself that, on this morning, all such self-contempt is worth it. Until Mihalkov can authorize the extraction, Occam’s dogs need bones on which to chew.

We are in one galaxy called the Milky Way. When you look at the Milky Way’s next-door neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, your telescope is a time machine taking you back two and a half million years. There’s a cluster of five galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, which we see through the Hubble telescope spectacularly colliding with each other. But we see them colliding 280 million years ago. If there are aliens in one of those colliding galaxies with a telescope powerful enough to see us, what they are seeing on Earth, at this very moment, here and now, is the early ancestors of the dinosaurs. Are

We saw to the edge of all there is - So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

More caffeine and sugar and I’d be photo-bombing the Hubble.

While Roscoe made cups of coffee for Charlie Hubble and Finlay sat in the rosewood office,

What you might not have come across is the fact that Hubble is basically a photoreconnaissance satellite whose cameras point upward at the heavens rather than downward at Earth.

If you'd cured Henry the Seventh's TB with a course of ethambutol, or given Isaac Newton an hour's access to the Hubble telescope, or shown an off-the-shelf 3-D printer to the regulars at the Captain Marlow in the 1980s, you would have had the M-word thrown your way, too. Some magic is merely normality that you're not yet used to.

Our modern picture of the universe dates back to only 1924, when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble demonstrated that ours was not the only galaxy. There were in fact many others, with vast tracts of empty space between them.

God knows we all have to at least try to justify our behavior so we don't feel too guilty about it later.

Grandpa, in his male armchair, deaf aid occasionally whistling and pipe making a hubble-bubble noise as he sucked on it, would shake his head over DAILY EXPRESS, which described to him a world where truth and justice were constantly imperilled by the Communist Threat. In her softer, female armchair - in the red corner - Grandma would tut-tut away over DAILY WORKER, which described to her a world where truth and justice, in their updated versions, were constantly imperilled by Capitalism and Imperialism.

Yolo.

Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years.

Annie Jump Cannon (left) and Henrietta Leavitt, whose unsung labours and incisive deductions made Hubble’s breakthroughs possible.

One of the most beautiful photographs of a galactic black hole is the one taken by the Hubble space telescope of the galaxy NGC 4261.

Our modern picture of the universe dates back to only 1924, when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble demonstrated that ours was not the only galaxy.

They don’t understand that religion and science are there to serve different purposes. We need science to understand how everything on this planet and beyond works – us, nature, everything we see around us. That’s fact – no one with a working brain can question that. But we also need religion. Not for ridiculous counter-theories about things that science can prove. We need it for something else, to fill a different kind of need. The need for meaning. It’s a basic need we have, as humans. And it’s a need that’s beyond the realm of science. Your scientists don’t understand that it’s a need they can’t fulfill no matter how many Hadron colliders and Hubble telescopes they build- and your preachers don’[t understand that their job is to help you discover a personal, inner sense of meaning and not behave like a bunch of zealots intent on converting the rest of the planet to their rigid, literalist view of how everyone should live their lives.

In the years that followed there erupted a dispute that would run and run, between Allan Sandage, heir to Hubble at Mount Wilson, and Gérard de Vaucouleurs, a French-born astronomer based at the University of Texas.

The whole world is one table by a window in a café-bar in Manchester and the person sitting opposite me. If joy could be seen by the Hubble, tonight scientists would record a peculiar iridescence on an island north of the equator.

Especially," said Mr. Pumblechook, "be grateful, boy, to them which brought you up by hand." Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, "Why is it that the young are never grateful?" This moral mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, "Naterally wicious." Everybody then murmured "True!" and looked at me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.

But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that's not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that's exactly right every time.

How do fields express their principles? Physicists use terms like photons, electrons, quarks, quantum wave functions, relativity, and energy conservation. Astronomers use terms like planets, stars, galaxies, Hubble shift, and black holes. Thermodynamicists use terms like entropy, first law, second law, and Carnot cycle. Biologists use terms like phylogeny, ontology, DNA, and enzymes. Each of these terms can be considered to be the thread of a story. The principles of a field are actually a set of interwoven stories about the structure and behavior of field elements, the fabric of the multiverse.

If you'd cured Henry the Seventh's TB with a course of ethambutol, or given Isaac Newton an hour's access to the Hubble telescope, or shown an off-the-shelf 3-D printer to the regulars at the Captain Marlow in the 1980s, you would have had the M-word thrown your way, too. Some magic is merely normality that you're not used to.

We all know so goddamn well what's best for other people that it seems unnecessary we get to know them before imposing our will on them.

Hubble died of a heart attack in 1953. One last small oddity awaited him. For reasons cloaked in mystery, his wife declined to have a funeral and never revealed what she did with his body. Half a century later the whereabouts of the century’s greatest astronomer remain unknown. For a memorial you must look to the sky and the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 and named in his honor.

Historically, discoveries of pure science are slow to reach the mainstream compared with those of the applied sciences, which noisily announce themselves with new medicines and gadgets. The Hubble has proved an exception, remaking, in a single generation, the popular conception of the universe. It has accomplished this primarily through the aesthetic force of its discoveries, which distill the difficult abstractions of astrophysics into singular expressions of color and light, vindicating Keats’s famous couplet: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Though philosophy has hardly registered it, the Hubble has given us nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning with what is. The telescope compels the mind to contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite.

There’s a cluster of five galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, which we see through the Hubble telescope spectacularly colliding with each other. But we see them colliding 280 million years ago. If there are aliens in one of those colliding galaxies with a telescope powerful enough to see us, what they are seeing on Earth, at this very moment, here and now, is the early ancestors of the dinosaurs.

As long as there have been humans, we have searched for our place in the Cosmos. In the childhood of our species (when our ancestors gazed a little idly at the stars), among the Ionian scientists of ancient Greece, and in our own age, we have been transfixed by this question: Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy which is a member of a sparse cluster of galaxies, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night. Since Aristarchus, every step in our quest has moved us farther from center stage in the cosmic drama. There has not been much time to assimilate these new findings. The discoveries of Shapley and Hubble were made within the lifetimes of many people still alive today. There are those who secretly deplore these great discoveries, who consider every step a demotion, who in their heart of hearts still pine for a universe whose center, focus and fulcrum is the Earth. But if we are to deal with the Cosmos we must first understand it, even if our hopes for some unearned preferential status are, in the process, contravened. Understanding where we live is an essential precondition for improving the neighborhood. Knowing what other neighborhoods are like also helps. If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. We embarked on our cosmic voyage with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

The sphere to end all spheres—the largest and most perfect of them all—is the entire observable universe. In every direction we look, galaxies recede from us at speeds proportional to their distance. As we saw in the first few chapters, this is the famous signature of an expanding universe, discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929. When you combine Einstein’s relativity and the velocity of light and the expanding universe and the spatial dilution of mass and energy as a consequence of that expansion, there is a distance in every direction from us where the recession velocity for a galaxy equals the speed of light. At this distance and beyond, light from all luminous objects loses all its energy before reaching us. The universe beyond this spherical “edge” is thus rendered invisible and, as far as we know, unknowable. There’s a variation of the ever-popular multiverse idea in which the multiple universes that comprise it are not separate universes entirely, but isolated, non-interacting pockets of space within one continuous fabric of space-time—like multiple ships at sea, far enough away from one another so that their circular horizons do not intersect. As far as any one ship is concerned (without further data), it’s the only ship on the ocean, yet they all share the same body of water.

PREFACE Cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole, including its birth and perhaps its ultimate fate. Not surprisingly, it has undergone many transformations in its slow, painful evolution, an evolution often overshadowed by religious dogma and superstition. The first revolution in cosmology was ushered in by the introduction of the telescope in the 1600s. With the aid of the telescope, Galileo Galilei, building on the work of the great astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, was able to open up the splendor of the heavens for the first time to serious scientific investigation. The advancement of this first stage of cosmology culminated in the work of Isaac Newton, who finally laid down the fundamental laws governing the motion of the celestial bodies. Instead of magic and mysticism, the laws of heavenly bodies were now seen to be subject to forces that were computable and reproducible. A second revolution in cosmology was initiated by the introduction of the great telescopes of the twentieth century, such as the one at Mount Wilson with its huge 100-inch reflecting mirror. In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble used this giant telescope to overturn centuries of dogma, which stated that the universe was static and eternal, by demonstrating that the galaxies in the heavens are moving away

That's why I try to keep KF hidden from my parents. My family is really paranoid about internet strangers. You know the type; every person on the internet is a pedophile and wants to meet up with you and molest you and dismember you slowly in their basement.

Hubble was lucky in a way. The Hubble Space Telescope could easily have been given another name had certain events turned out differently: if someone had not prematurely died (Keeler), if someone else had not taken a promotion (Curtis), or if another (Shapley) was not mulishly wedded to a flawed vision of the cosmos. The discovery of the modern universe is a story filled with trials, errors, serendipitous breaks, battles of wills, missed opportunities, herculean measurements, and brilliant insights. In other words, it is science writ large.

Dashed if I don't think he's begun to get queer in his attic! Well, what I mean is, hubble-bubble! I don't set up as one of these clever coves, but I've got more sense in my knowledge-box than to say such an addle-brained thing as that! Seems to me it don't make a ha'porth of difference whether you keep the dashed mill, or whether you don't, because that's where all your gingerbread came from, whichever way you look at it. And don't you tell me it's repugnant to him to have you coming down with the derbies, because all I've got to say to that is, Gammon!

Of course, it would have been even more exciting if Einstein had trusted his original equations and simply announced that his general theory of relativity predicted that the universe is expanding. If he had done that, then Hubble’s confirmation of the expansion more than a decade later would have had as great an impact as when Eddington confirmed his prediction of how the sun’s gravity would bend rays of light. The Big Bang might have been named the Einstein Bang, and it would have gone down in history, as well as in the popular imagination, as one of the most fascinating theoretical discoveries of modern physics.52

Hubble then made an even more amazing discovery. By measuring the red shift of the stars’ spectra (which is the light wave counterpart to the Doppler effect for sound waves), he realized that the galaxies were moving away from us. There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: (1) because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; (2) because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another. It became clear that the second explanation was the case when Hubble confirmed that, in general, the galaxies were moving away from us at a speed that was proportional to their distance from us. Those twice as far moved away twice as fast, and those three times as far moved away three times as fast. One way to understand this is to imagine a grid of dots that are each spaced an inch apart on the elastic surface of a balloon. Then assume that the balloon is inflated so that the surface expands to twice its original dimensions. The dots are now two inches away from each other. So during the expansion, a dot that was originally one inch away moved another one inch away. And during that same time period, a dot that was originally two inches away moved another two inches away, one that was three inches away moved another three inches away, and one that was ten inches away moved another ten inches away. The farther away each dot was originally, the faster it receded from our dot. And that would be true from the vantage point of each and every dot on the balloon. All of which is a simple way to say that the galaxies are not merely flying away from us, but instead, the entire metric of space, or the fabric of the cosmos, is expanding. To envision this in 3-D, imagine that the dots are raisins in a cake that is baking and expanding in all directions. On

Using the Mount Wilson Observatory, Harlow Shapley redefined our relationship to the cosmos, showing that the sun was not at the center of the Milky Way. Using it, Edwin Hubble created the whole field of cosmology, redefining again our place in the universe, our understanding of its vastness, and our ideas about its creation. Those discoveries did not bear any direct financial returns. They did not add to the national defense. But they did something far more important: they changed our lives and the way we think about ourselves. They are among the most profound discoveries of science, and they had no financial justification whatsoever. They were seeking truth and beauty amid chemistry and light.

Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book. Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something on the order of two hundred exabytes of information, roughly equal to “the entire digital content of today’s world,” according to Nature Neuroscience.*1 If that is not the most extraordinary thing in the universe, then we certainly have some wonders yet to find.

Humanity was lost," Dad said. "And lonely. I don't think they even realized just how lonely they were. And so they began to build again, making machines that looked more and more like them. Even surrounded by so many of their kind, they still searched for a connection. They were like gods, in a way, in the power of their creation. At first it was Hubble. Then Discovery. And Curiosity. Explorer and Endeavor and Spirit. The humans gave them names and sent them away beyond the stars in search of that connection they so desperately wished for." "Why?" Nurse Ratched asked. "It seems illogical. Why did they not just speak to each other if they were lonely?" "They did," Dad said. "Or they tried, at least. But they hated as much as they loved. They feared what they didn't understand. Even as they built us, they pushed for more. And the further they went, the less control they had. They accused each other of treachery. They poisoned the earth. They had time to change their ways, but they didn't. And their anger grew until it exploded in fire. Most of them died. But we remained, because our flesh wasn't their flesh. Our bodies were not their bodies. Our minds weren't their minds." He shook his head. "And yet, I love them still." He looked at Vic. "Because for all their faults, they created us. They gave us names. They loved us.

It had been a quiet few days for Hungry Paul since his Yahtzee conversation with Leonard, quiet days not being uncommon in his schedule. This had given him the opportunity to ponder the expansion and contraction of the universe as observed in localised form in the life of his best friend. Edwin Hubble, had he looked inside Leonard with his telescope, would have recorded that everything was just as the universe would ordain it. The thing is, for Hungry Paul the world was a complicated place, with people themselves being both the primary cause and chief victims of its complexity. He saw society as a sort of chemistry set, full of potentially explosive ingredients which, if handled correctly could be fascinating and educational, but which was otherwise best kept out of reach of those who did not know what they were doing. Though his life had been largely quiet and uneventful, his choices had turned out to be wise ones: he had already lived longer than Alexander the Great, and had fewer enemies, too. But he had now become awakened by the thought that, no matter how insignificant he was when compared to the night sky, he remained subject to the same elemental forces of expansion. The universe, it seemed, would eventually come knocking. And so it was that over a mid-morning scone he read a short article in the local freesheet with a sense of cosmic destiny.

Then came a series of wondrous discoveries, beginning in 1924, by Edwin Hubble, a colorful and engaging astronomer working with the 100-inch reflector telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory in the mountains above Pasadena, California. The first was that the blur known as the Andromeda nebula was actually another galaxy, about the size of our own, close to a million light years away (we now know it’s more than twice that far). Soon he was able to find at least two dozen even more distant galaxies (we now believe that there are more than 100 billion of them). Hubble then made an even more amazing discovery. By measuring the red shift of the stars’ spectra (which is the light wave counterpart to the Doppler effect for sound waves), he realized that the galaxies were moving away from us. There were at least two possible explanations for the fact that distant stars in all directions seemed to be flying away from us: (1) because we are the center of the universe, something that since the time of Copernicus only our teenage children believe; (2) because the entire metric of the universe was expanding, which meant that everything was stretching out in all directions so that all galaxies were getting farther away from one another. It became clear that the second explanation was the case when Hubble confirmed that, in general, the galaxies were moving away from us at a speed that was proportional to their distance from us. Those twice as far moved away twice as fast, and those three times as far moved away three times as fast.

In the mid-twentieth century, the subfield of cosmology—not to be confused with cosmetology—didn’t have much data. And where data are sparse, competing ideas abound that are clever and wishful. The existence of the CMB was predicted by the Russian-born American physicist George Gamow and colleagues during the 1940s. The foundation of these ideas came from the 1927 work of the Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître, who is generally recognized as the “father” of big bang cosmology. But it was American physicists Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman who, in 1948, first estimated what the temperature of the cosmic background ought to be. They based their calculations on three pillars: 1) Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity; 2) Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that the universe is expanding; and 3) atomic physics developed in laboratories before and during the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bombs of World War II. Herman and Alpher calculated and proposed a temperature of 5 degrees Kelvin for the universe. Well, that’s just plain wrong. The precisely measured temperature of these microwaves is 2.725 degrees, sometimes written as simply 2.7 degrees, and if you’re numerically lazy, nobody will fault you for rounding the temperature of the universe to 3 degrees. Let’s pause for a moment. Herman and Alpher used atomic physics freshly gleaned in a lab, and applied it to hypothesized conditions in the early universe. From this, they extrapolated billions of years forward, calculating what temperature the universe should be today. That their prediction even remotely approximated the right answer is a stunning triumph of human insight.

Discovery first flew in 1984, the third orbiter to join the fleet. It was named for one of the ships commanded by Captain James Cook. Space shuttle Discovery is the most-flown orbiter; today will be its thirty-ninth and final launch. By the end of this mission, it will have flown a total of 365 days in space, making it the most well traveled spacecraft in history. Discovery was the first orbiter to carry a Russian cosmonaut and the first to visit the Russian space station Mir. On that flight, in 1995, Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot an American spacecraft. Discovery flew twelve of the thirty-eight missions to assemble the International Space Station, and it was responsible for deploying the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. This was perhaps the most far reaching accomplishment of the shuttle program, as Hubble has been called the most important telescope in history and one of the most significant scientific instruments ever invented. It has allowed astronomers to determine the age of the universe, postulate how galaxies form, and confirm the existence of dark energy, among many other discoveries. Astronomers and astrophysicists, when they are asked about the significance of Hubble, will simply say that it has rewritten the astronomy books. In the retirement process, Discovery will be the “vehicle of record,” being kept as intact as possible for future study. Discovery was the return-to-flight orbiter after the loss of Challenger and then again after the loss of Columbia. To me, this gives it a certain feeling of bravery and hope. ‘Don’t worry,’ Discovery seemed to tell us by gamely rolling her snow-white self out to the launchpad. 'Don’t worry, we can still dream of space. We can still leave the earth.’ And then she did.

As long as there have been humans, we have searched for our place in the Cosmos. In the childhood of our species (when our ancestors gazed a little idly at the stars), among the Ionian scientists of ancient Greece, and in our own age, we have been transfixed by this question: Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy which is a member of a sparse cluster of galaxies, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night. Since Aristarchus, every step in our quest has moved us farther from center stage in the cosmic drama. There has not been much time to assimilate these new findings. The discoveries of Shapley and Hubble were made within the lifetimes of many people still alive today. There are those who secretly deplore these great discoveries, who consider every step a demotion, who in their heart of hearts still pine for a universe whose center, focus and fulcrum is the Earth. But if we are to deal with the Cosmos we must first understand it, even if our hopes for some unearned preferential status are, in the process, contravened. Understanding where we live is an essential precondition for improving the neighborhood. Knowing what other neighborhoods are like also helps. If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. We embarked on our cosmic voyage with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

Take solace in that, regardless of the fact that the love you had in your mind was lost, it was fairer than any, and you can take that with you forever.

Hubble!

Edwin Hubble proved that the universe was expanding in 1929, confirming

With Cosmos, Sagan sought to counter the fear and distrust of applied science, and to inspire the kind of basic science wonder that Hubble’s lectures and the moon landing once had. The series was enormously successful. For the first time since Hubble, a huge audience was engaged in exploring the grand questions about life, nature, the structure of the universe, and what it might all mean.

To me, it is far nobler to create my own meaning derived from that around me, using my critical faculties, than to accept unquestioningly the meaning that a superdeity has enforced upon me. The same with beauty and the universe around us. There is something worth dwelling on in that notion that we don’t need for a god to cause and define that universe—that beauty, that spectacle—when we are appreciating it. Whether it be an incredibly complex yet symmetrical mathematical equation, a butterfly’s wings or the expansive Hubble space telescope pictures of nebulae and clouds of space dust and gases, there is much to marvel at in the universe. It’s even more marvelous that there is no painter at nature’s easel.

Equipado com seus cinco sentidos, o homem explora o universo ao seu redor e dá à aventura o nome de ciência.

Knowing that R. L.’s death at nineteen is not his end, Mrs. O’Brien and Jack can trust the nuns. Those who live in the way of grace may die young. They may die horribly. But they never come to a bad end because death is not the end. We are quite a ways beyond Heidegger here. Whatever other influence he had on Malick’s vision, Malick doesn’t accept that death is the limit, that time has a final horizon beyond which the rest is silence. Beyond death there is reconciliation, reunion, hope. Beyond death, there are sunflowers. The sunflower is a perfect image for the way of grace. Its name is suggestive of heavenly glory. In color and shape, it is a reflex of the burning suns of what might be an infinite universe. Malick uses Hubble Telescope pictures of deep space, but one doesn’t have to have a telescope to see the glory shine. Suns grow in the backyard, if we our eyes are open windows. Sunflowers follow the sun through the day, the perfect botanical expression of the way of grace that receives the glory. It’s the perfect Heideggerian flower that never forgets Being. But Malick does something stunning with his sunflowers. The first shot of is a close-up of a single flower, as Mrs. O’Brien speaks of the way of grace. We can see others dancing in the wind behind, but we concentrate on this one. At the end of the film, the camera pulls back, a brilliant blue sky fills the top two-thirds of the screen, and we see a breathtaking field of sunflowers. Through the suffering and loss that the movie depicts, the single sunflower of grace blossoms into a field of sunflowers. It’s Job, surrounded by his second family that he can love. It’s Brothers Karamazov. It’s the Agnus Dei and all seeds that go into the earth to die, so they can produce fruit.

How many stories do you think that are in the world? Seven, eight? I can't remember how many. I read in a magazine somewhere that there are only a certain number of stories ever told [...]. You and I both know what's coming, don't we? It's a predictable story. It's been played out at hubbles and palaces around the world since the beginning of time. There are no new stories, Mrs. B." "But this is your story, Janice, and I believe you need to tell it." "Do I? Will it make any difference? I can't change the ending." "That's where I think you're wrong.

En fotografías tomadas por el telescopio espacial Hubble se han encontrado regiones del espacio que aparecen distorsionadas, como si la luz de las galaxias distantes pasara a través de un vidrio o una lente. La única explicación de este fenómeno que se tiene hasta el momento, es la de un efecto de lente gravitacional en el que los rayos de luz se curvan por la presencia de inmensas cantidades de materia invisible. Se conjetura que dicha materia es materia oscura, con lo cual se tendría mayor evidencia para concluir su existencia (p. 35)

The model used by Hubble for contact lenses and Dollar Shave Club for blades is the simplest form. You buy what the supplier already produces, put your brand name on it, add your marketing special sauce, and target the weakness of the established players—price, convenience, image, whatever.

In the end, Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, Hubble, and other direct-to-consumer start-ups are innovating not with a fundamentally different or better product but with better something else: a better price, better value, a better experience, better customer service.

For billions and billions of years, while the planet Earth was spinning through space, the process of evolution took place. There were minerals, then plants, then animals, all formed from atoms created in the stars. The planet had been floating in space for 4.5 billion years before modern humans showed up. It is worth noting that before humans showed up, life on Earth for the other species stayed pretty much the same. Food, shelter, and survival were the name of the game. Things haven’t really changed that much for them. The monkeys lived in trees for tens of millions of years, just as they do now. The fish swam in the waters for hundreds of millions of years, just as they do now. Everything on Earth stayed pretty much the same until you humans showed up with your human mind. You discovered electricity and made the nighttime bright. You built giant skyscrapers and machinery that never existed before. You even dug into the earth, extracted minerals, and developed advanced materials like silicon chips. Then you built a rocket ship, got in, and flew to the moon. Compare that to what any other animals have done. They are living exactly the same as they did a thousand years ago, a hundred thousand years ago, a million years ago. You’re not. You used to live in caves; now you’re planning to live on Mars. What did that? Did God hide a rocket ship, and you found it somewhere? No, your mind did that. Your mind figured out everything was made of atoms, then you figured out how to split the atom. The human mind actually figured out how the universe was made, all the way down to the quantum level. Your mind put up the Hubble Space Telescope that can see back to the beginning of creation. The Hubble can pick up light that has been traveling through space for more than thirteen billion years. This allows us to see what was happening thirteen billion years ago. Can you even think about that? The fact is you can because you have a human mind.

Our main problem over the past few days and weeks,’ he said, ‘has lain in trying to connect the various phenomena. In fact, there wasn’t any obvious connection until a jelly-like substance started to crop up. Sometimes it appeared in small quantities, sometimes in larger amounts, but always with the distinguishing characteristic that it disintegrated rapidly on contact with air. Unfortunately the discovery of the jelly only added to the mystery, given its presence in crustaceans, mussels and whales - three types of organism that could hardly be more different. Of course, it might have been some kind of fungus, a jellified version of rabies, an infectious disease like BSE or swine fever. But, if so, why would ships be disappearing or crabs transporting killer algae? There was no sign of the jelly on the worms that infested the slope. They were carrying a different kind of cargo - bacteria that break down hydrates and cause methane gas to rise. Hence the landslide and the tsunami. And what about the mutated species that have been emerging all over the world? Even fish have been behaving oddly. None of it adds up. In that respect, Jack Vanderbilt was right to discern an intelligent mind behind the chaos. But he overestimated our ability - no scientist knows anything like enough about marine ecology to be capable of manipulating it to that extent. People are fond of saying that we know more about space than we do about the oceans. It’s perfectly true, but there’s a simple reason why: we can’t see or move as well in the water as we can in outer space. The Hubble telescope peers effortlessly into different galaxies, but the world’s strongest floodlight only illuminates a dozen square metres of seabed. An astronaut in a spacesuit can move with almost total freedom, but even the most sophisticated divesuit won’t stop you being crushed to death beyond a certain depth. AUVs and ROVs are only operational if the conditions are right. We don’t have the physical constitution or the technology to deposit billions of worms on underwater hydrates, let alone the requisite knowledge to engineer them for a habitat that we barely understand. Besides, there are all the other phenomena: deep-sea cables being destroyed at the bottom of the ocean by forces other than the underwater slide; plagues of jellyfish and mussels rising from the abyssal plains. The simplest explanation would be to see these developments as part of a plan, but such a plan could only be the work of a species that knows the ocean as intimately as we do the land - a species that lives in the depths and plays the dominant role in that particular universe.

What a snoozefest! He went on like that for about a million hundred hours. I had no idea what he was talking about. My shirt was itchy. My tie was choking me. I thought I was gonna die. All I could think about was when Mayor Hubble would stop talking so we could go eat some Peeps.

Doctor, in wartime the military has the right to requisition all civilian equipment. Besides, you people didn’t grind a single lens component or design a single screw of the Hubble II. You’re just there to enjoy its success, so it’s not your place to complain.” Fitzroy yawned, as if it was tiring work dealing with this pack of nerds.

But in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the landmark observation that wherever you look, distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us. In other words, the universe is expanding

Next to her a calico cat puffed away at a hubble-bubble. Puss’s watch cost more than his vest, and his vest cost more than his boots, and his boots cost more than a house. If you stripped him naked and sold off his costume, you’d walk away with enough money to retire—though if you left him alive you wouldn’t have long to enjoy it. The only thing that could rival Puss’s vanity was his sadism.

In several spiral nebulae, including the one called Andromeda, Edwin Hubble had identified a type of star, called Cepheid variables. His observations in 1922 and 1923 proved these star spirals were much too distant to be part of our Milky Way. They had to be entire galaxies outside our own. Many in the astronomy establishment—most notably Harlow Shapley—had opposed this idea. Hubble’s discovery was announced on New Year’s Day 1925. Eventually it changed the prevailing view of the universe. Hubble’s calculations put the distance of Andromeda at about 1 million light-years, several times the distance Shapley estimated for the outer limits of the Milky Way. Back at Harvard, Shapley read Hubble’s letter and remarked to a colleague, Here is the letter that has destroyed my universe.

You can’t find him, can you?” I said. “You’re useless, Kliner. You’re a useless piece of shit. You think you’re some kind of a smart guy, but you can’t find Hubble. You couldn’t find your asshole if I gave you a mirror on a stick.

The human brain produces in 30 seconds as much data as the NASA Hubble Space telescope has produced in its lifetime

Ayrıca, yeni kuramsal ve gözlemsel sonuçlan ekleyerek kitabı güncelleme fırsatı bulmuş olduk. Zamanın Daha Kısa Tarihi, fizik kuvvetlerini birleştiren eksiksiz bir kuramın bulunmasıyla ilgili son gelişmeleri de anlatıyor. Özellikle sicim kuramında meydana gelen gelişmeleri ve fizik kuramlarının birliğine işaret eden görünürde farklı kuramların benzerliklerini ya da "ikiliğini" anlatıyor. Gözlemsel açıdan, Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) ve Hubble Uzay Teleskopu tarafından yapılan yeni ve önemli gözlemleri de kitapta bulacaksınız.

Hubble’s observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense.

The stuff of life, in other words, arose in places and times somewhat more accessible to our telescopic investigations. Since most of us spend our lives confined to a narrow strip near Earth’s surface, we tend to think of the cosmos as a lofty, empyrean realm far beyond our reach and relevance. We forget that only a thin sliver of atmosphere separates us from the rest of the universe. But science continues to show just how intimately connected life on Earth is to extraterrestrial processes. In particular, several recent findings have further illuminated the cosmic origins of life’s key ingredients. Take the element phosphorus, for example. It is a critical constituent of DNA, as well as of our cells, teeth and bones. Astronomers have long struggled to trace its buildup through cosmic history, because the imprint of phosphorus is difficult to discern in old, cool stars in the outskirts of our galaxy. (Some of these stellar “time capsules” contain the ashes of their forebears, the very first generation of stars that formed near the dawn of time.) But in a paper published in December in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a research team reported that it had measured the abundance of phosphorus in 13 such stars, using data taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. Their findings highlight the dominant role of so-called hypernovae, explosions even more energetic than supernovae that spell the demise of massive stars, in making the elements

Semayı biz kendi elimizle kurduk ve sürekli genişletmekteyiz." (Zâriyât sûresi, 51/47) Bu genişleme ister Einstein'ın anladığı mânâda, ister Edwin Hubble'in Güneş Sisteminin dahil olduğu galaksiden, nebülözlerin uzaklaşması şeklinde olsun fark etmez. Önemli olan Kur'ân'ın, ana temaya parmak basıp, tecrübî ilimlerin çok önünde zirveleri tutup onlara ışık neşretmesidir.

We can create the world where we are with the ones we want to love so easily.

...cortesía del titánico, ciclópeo, telescopio Hubble. El ojo de vidrio más poderoso de la humanidad, mirando por el coño del cosmos. El quinto coño. Que, en rigor, anda por la región astronómica NGC6611.

Sognò che quella bestia lo gettava giù nel pozzo, quello che affondava nel suolo della grotta. Stava precipitando in esso, privo di forma e senza peso, non però in un baratro sotterraneo o un lago nel sottosuolo, ma nello spazio esterno, verso il cosmo. Accelerò attraverso i campi stellari oltre il potente sguardo del telescopio Hubble. La sua proiezione astrale zoomò verso una macchia di nera oscurità fra scintillanti punti luminosi e, nell’avvicinarsi, la chiazza si allargò in un vasto e terrificante alone esteso in lungo e in largo a comprendere in esso molti sistemi solari; una galassia minore e indipendente che gorgogliava avvolta su se stessa. Un ondeggiante coagulo contenente schiere di mondi morti, ognuno nel suo guscio sottilissimo. Dentro a quei vuoti pianeti, ben al di sotto delle superfici sterili, regnavano le tenebre. Mari di caldo sangue ne ricolmavano gli antri più interni. I Figli dell’Antica Sanguisuga, il cui autentico nome era soltanto un ringhio incomprensibile che riecheggiava dentro alla sua mente, vivevano nei sanguinolenti flutti torcendosi su rive d’ossa dure come il diamante, e in milioni di tunnel intarsiati e decorati di altre ossa, quelle mietute a uno stuolo di vittime in verdi e azzurri mondi maturi al punto giusto, proprio come la Terra. I Figli colavano e si contorcevano in rumorosi tumuli, e persino nel sogno Don ringraziava Dio di non poterne scorgere che un’impressione vaga. Poiché erano composti della stessa sostanza di cui sono fatti gli incubi; abominazioni verminose in possesso di vili e incalcolabili intelletti che indossavano carni e spine dorsali d’uomini, e di bestie, per schermarsi dal sole e poter camminare in posizione eretta anziché limitarsi allo strisciare..

The unexpected dinner invitation from the budgerow started Mr Doughty off on a journey of garrulous reminiscence. 'Oh my boy!' said the pilot to Zachary, as they stood leaning on the deck rail. 'The old Raja of Raskhali: I could tell you a story or two about him--Rascally-Roger I used to call him!' He laughed, thumping the deck with his cane. 'Now there was a lordly nigger if ever you saw one! Best kind of native--kept himself busy with his shrub and his nautch-girls and his tumashers. Wasn't a man in town who could put on a burra-khana like he did. Sheeshmull blazing with shammers and candles. Paltans of bearers and khidmutgars. Demijohns of French loll-shrub and carboys of iced simkin. And the karibat! In the old days the Rascally bobachee-connah was the best in the city. No fear of pishpash and cobbily-mash at the Rascally table. The dumbpokes and pillaus were good enough, but we old hands, we'd wait for the curry of cockup and the chitchky of pollock-saug. Oh he set a rankin table I can tell you--and mind you, supper was just the start: the real tumasher came later, in the nautch-connah. Now there was another chuckmuck sight for you! Rows of cursies for the sahibs and mems to sit on. Sittringies and tuckiers for the natives. The baboos puffing at their hubble-bubbles and the sahibs lighting their Sumatra buncuses. Cunchunees whirling and tickytaw boys beating their tobblers. Oh, that old loocher knew how to put on a nautch all right! He was a sly little shaytan too, the Rascally-Roger: if he saw you eyeing one of the pootlies, he'd send around a khidmutgar, bobbing and bowing, the picture of innocence. People would think you'd eaten one too many jellybees and needed to be shown to the cacatorium. But instead of the tottee-connah, off you'd go to a little hidden cumra, there to puckrow your dashy. Not a memsahib present any the wiser--and there you were, with your gobbler in a cunchunee's nether-whiskers, getting yourself a nice little taste of a blackberry-bush.' He breathed a nostalgic sigh. 'Oh they were grand old goll-mauls, those Rascally burra-khanas! No better place to get your tatters tickled.' Zachary nodded, as if no word of this had escaped him.

Edwin Hubble escaped the glare of ‘Orange county’ by retreating to a mountaintop observatory north of Pasadena, where he recorded the motions of the galaxies that led to his discovery of the expanding universe. But it wasn’t sodium that caused him difficulties. Potassium burns with a mauve flame which can sometimes be seen in a gunpowder explosion or when lighting a match. One night Hubble was excited to detect a potassium spectrum while he examined the galaxies through the world’s most powerful telescope. But it soon became apparent that the reading must be false. Eventually Hubble realized that the equipment had picked up the light from the potassium in the match that he had used to light his pipe.

at present the Big Bang theory is accepted by science beyond any serious doubt. What happened in the observable universe after this Big Bang is what is called today the “standard cosmological model”; we could call it the CBA (current best approach) to cosmology, the best hypothesis available. The Big Bang Theory is the most important theory of all cosmology and, we might say, of all physics. The General Theory of Relativity, quantum cosmology, the Hubble expansion, the inflationary theory, the discoveries by Penzias and Wilson of background radiation, the black holes, and many other discoveries and ideas are included in and confirm the Big Bang Theory. This theory puts an end to the Newtonian assumptions of a universe that is boundless in time and in mass.

in 1931 Edwin Hubble invited Einstein to the observatory of the Hooker Telescope near Pasadena, California, and showed him that, in fact, the universe was expanding. Einstein then pronounced one of his most famous sentences: “Now I see the necessity of a beginning,” a lofty phrase followed by another equally famous but more earthly remark, “That was the biggest blunder of my whole life,”113 referring to the gravitational constant that he had devised in order to adjust the Theory of Relativity. In an ironic twist, the gravitational constant then proved to exist, although not in the magnitude that Einstein attributed to it. We will see this further on.

En 1929, el astrónomo estadounidense Edwin P. Hubble publicó un trabajo en el que demostraba que las galaxias alejadas de la Tierra se estaban alejando más de ella y que cuanto más alejadas estaban, más rápidamente lo hacían.

Bubbles Hubble? Mrs. Bubbles came running over. She looked like one of those ladies in a shampoo commercial who swirls her hair around in slow motion.

used to call their moveable gathering . “Come to the Covenant, you’re welcome, brother.” I mean, Jesus Christ, I don’t know how important this is in their terms, but if I’m asked to go, I’ll go. Quite honestly you couldn’t see a thing, the place would be covered in smoke. They used to smoke the chalice, a coconut with a huge earthenware jar on top and about half a pound of weed in it and a rubber pipe coming out the end. It was a question of who could smoke more than anybody else. The daring chaps would fill the coconut with white rum like a hubbly bubbly and smoke it through the rum. You set the earthenware container ablaze, bursting into flames with clouds of smoke. “Fire burn, Jah wonderful!” Who was I to defy local custom? OK, I’ll try and hang in here. This is powerful weed. Funnily enough, I never flaked out. That’s why I think I impressed them. I was a smoker for quite a few years before that, but never that amount. It was just like a dare, in a way. You know, watch whitey fall to the floor. And I was telling myself, not gonna go to the floor, not gonna go to the floor.

Hubble Manor has thirty-four bedrooms,” said the or derve guy, “a library, a helicopter pad, twenty-three bathrooms . . .” Twenty-three bathrooms?! Was he joking? My house only has two bathrooms. Mayor Hubble must have to go to the bathroom all the time. He should see a doctor about that instead of putting bathrooms all over his house. “. . . and four half bathrooms,” said the or derve guy. “Half bathrooms?” I asked. “Why would anybody want half of a bathroom? What could you do with half a toilet bowl?” “A half bathroom is a powder room, sir,” the guy told me. Powder room? “Mayor Hubble needs a whole room to hold powder?” I asked. “Why can’t he just keep powder in a little box like normal

So how do we see so many things that are so far away that they’re receding from us at more than the speed of light, and, in fact, always have been? If something is moving away at more than the speed of light, a light beam emitted from it is getting farther away from us, not closer. The trick is that the light we’re picking up left the source long ago, when the universe was smaller and the expansion was actually slowing. So a light beam that started out being carried by the expansion of space away from us (even though it was emitted in our direction) eventually was able to “catch up” as the expansion slowed and it reached a part of the universe that was close enough for the recession speed to be less than the speed of light. It entered our Hubble radius from the outside.

The entirety of our observable universe is an irrelevant pocket of dust in the wider cosmos, which extends way beyond the visible horizon and is conceivably infinite in extent, and I think society has come to terms with this sort of physical irrelevance. It’s hard to look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image, containing over ten thousand galaxies in a piece of the night sky you’d cover very comfortably with an outstretched thumb, and feel important. Our spiritual demotion, however, is an entirely different matter. By spiritual demotion, I mean the realisation that our very existence has no more significance than our physical location. This is surely the case if life is the inevitable result of the action of the same set of natural laws that formed the stars and planets. Earth must be one of countless billions of living worlds in the Milky Way galaxy alone. This is absolutely not to suggest that our civilisation is not worth celebrating and fighting to preserve – it is my view that civilisations may be extremely rare, even if life is common.