Great Throughts Treasury

"286 octillion cars would not fit on our planet?s surface. Would require 10-quadrillion fully paved Earths to park them all."

"A bullet fired level from a gun will hit ground at same time as a bullet dropped from the same height. Do the Physics."

"(1) the number of stars in the Milky Way that survive sufficiently long for intelligent life to evolve on planets around them; (2) the average number of planets around each of these stars; (3) the fraction of these planets with conditions suitable for life; (4) the probability that life actually arises on these suitable planets; and (5) the chance that life on such a planet evolves to produce an intelligent civilization, by which astronomers typically mean a form of life capable of communicating with ourselves."

"A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment?not because people have lost interest, but because people cannot imagine a world without them."

"Adults, who outnumber kids four or five to one, are in charge. We wield the resources, run the world, and completely thwart kids' creativity."

"A scientist is just a kid who never grew up."

"According to the song, Rudolph?s nose is shiny, which means it reflects rather than emits light. Useless for navigating fog."

"After your first job, is anyone asking you what your GPA was? No, they don't care. They ask you: Are you a good leader? Do people follow you? Do you have integrity? Are you innovative? Do you solve problems? Somebody's got to do that homework and redesign the educational system so that it can actually train people to be successful in life."

"Ages for which you?re in the ?prime? of your life: 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 73 79 83 89 97 101"

"After 7 or 8 billion years of such enrichment, an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born in an undistinguished region (the Orion arm) of an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo supercluster). The gas cloud from which the Sun formed contained a sufficient supply of heavy elements to spawn a few planets, thousands of asteroids, and billions of comets."

"After 50 years of television, there?s no other conclusion the aliens could draw, but that most humans are neurotic, death-hungry, dysfunctional idiots."

"Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe. Today, how easy it is to presume that one universe is all there is. Yet emerging theories of modern cosmology, as well as the continually reaffirmed improbability that anything is unique, require that we remain open to the latest assault on our plea for distinctiveness: multiple universes, otherwise known as the multiverse, in which ours is just one of countless bubbles bursting forth from the fabric of the cosmos."

"After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all?"

"After the 9/11 attacks, when President George W. Bush, in a speech aimed at distinguishing the U.S. from the Muslim fundamentalists, said, 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' The problem is two-thirds of all the stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. This would confound the point that he was making."

"All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet. Once you investigate that, you find out that Disney's dog Pluto was sketched the same year the cosmic object was discovered. And Pluto was discovered by an American."

"All of the full moons for the entire year are special in that they have particular names."

"All the nine-planet people out there: Get over it. There's eight."

"Although I'm not actually embarrassed by this, I tend not to read books that have awesome movies made from them, regardless of how well or badly the movie represented the actual written story."

"Any astrophysicist does not feel small looking up at the universe; we feel large."

"All tweets are tasty. Any tweet anybody writes is tasty. So, I try to have each tweet not simply be informative, but have some outlook, some perspective that you might not otherwise had."

"Allow intelligent design into science textbooks, lecture halls, and laboratories, and the cost to the frontier of scientific discovery?the frontier that drives the economies of the future?would be incalculable. I don't want students who could make the next major breakthrough in renewable energy sources or space travel to have been taught that anything they don't understand, and that nobody yet understands, is divinely constructed and therefore beyond their intellectual capacity. The day that happens, Americans will just sit in awe of what we don't understand, while we watch the rest of the world boldly go where no mortal has gone before."

"All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA."

"Although we have no guarantee that the Copernican principle can guide us correctly in all scientific investigations, it provides a useful counterweight to our natural tendency to think of ourselves as special. Even more significant is that the principle has an excellent track record so far, leaving us humbled at every turn: Earth does not occupy the center of the solar system, nor does the solar system occupy the center of the Milky Way galaxy, nor the Milky Way galaxy the center of the universe. And in case you believe that the edge is a special place, we are not at the edge of anything, either."

"And behold the greatest mystery of them all: an unopened can of diet Pepsi floats in water while an unopened can of regular Pepsi sinks."

"Any time scientists disagree, it's because we have insufficient data. Then we can agree on what kind of data to get; we get the data; and the data solves the problem. Either I'm right, or you're right, or we're both wrong. And we move on. That kind of conflict resolution does not exist in politics or religion."

"Apollo in 1969. Shuttle in 1981. Nothing in 2011. Our space program would look awesome to anyone living backwards thru time."

"As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded."

"As a citizen, as a public scientist, I can tell you that Einstein essentially overturned a so strongly established paradigm of science, whereas Darwin didn't really overturn a science paradigm."

"Artificial selection turned the wolf into the shepherd, and the wild grasses into wheat and corn. In fact, almost every plant and animal that we eat today was bred from a wild, less edible ancestor. If artificial selection can work such profound changes in only ten or fifteen thousand years, what can natural selection do operating over billions of years? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of life."

"As a scientist, I want to go to Mars and back to asteroids and the Moon because I'm a scientist. But I can tell you, I'm not so naive a scientist to think that the nation might not have geopolitical reasons for going into space."

"'As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all space-borne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?' Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I?d prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar."

"As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there."

"As an American, I grew up in an era where we led the world in everything. Everything!"

"As Einstein once wrote (more ringingly in German than in this English translation by one of us [DG]) to honor Isaac Newton: Look unto the stars to teach us how the master?s thoughts can reach us each one follows Newton?s math silently along its path."

"As history has shown, pure science research ultimately ends up applying to something. We just don't know it at the time."

"As they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion... Although just as in hostage negotiations, it's probably best to keep both sides talking to each other."

"As religion is now practiced and science is now practiced, there is no intersection between the two. That is for certain. And it's not for want of trying. Over the centuries, many people - theologians as well scientists - have tried to explore points of intersection. And anytime anyone has declared that harmony has risen up, it is the consequence of religion acquiescing to scientific discovery. In every single case."

"Astrobiologists now believe that the existence of life throughout the universe requires: 1. a source of energy; 2. a type of atom that allows complex structures to exist; 3. a liquid solvent in which molecules can float and interact; and 4. sufficient time for life to arise and to evolve."

"Astro-educators remain busy undoing damage caused by 1973 hit album ?Dark Side of the Moon.? Nope. All sides get sunlight."

"Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct."

"Beyond that horizon lie parts of the universe that are too far away. There hasn?t been enough time in the 13.8 billion year history of the universe for their light to have reached us."

"Being at the top of your game intellectually, philosophically, politically, is not a forever thing."

"Average time between full moons is 29.53 days. Which means February will occasionally not get one, and will never have two."

"Big ideas, big ambitious projects need to be embedded within culture at a level deeper than the political winds. It needs to be deeper than the economic fluctuations that could turn people against an expensive project because they're on an unemployment line and can't feed their families."

"By the way, were we to find life-forms on Venus, we would probably call them Venutians, just as people from Mars would be Martians. But according to rules of Latin genitives, to be of Venus ought to make you a Venereal. Unfortunately, medical doctors reached that word before astronomers did. Can?t blame them, I suppose. Venereal disease long predates astronomy, which itself stands as only the second oldest profession."

"'Boldly going where hundreds have gone before' does not make headlines."

"But you can?t be a scientist if you?re uncomfortable with ignorance, because scientists live at the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. This is very different from the way journalists portray us. So many articles begin, ?Scientists now have to go back to the drawing board.? It?s as though we?re sitting in our offices, feet up on our desks?masters of the universe?and suddenly say, ?Oops, somebody discovered something!? No. We?re always at the drawing board. If you?re not at the drawing board, you?re not making discoveries. You?re not a scientist; you?re something else. The public, on the other hand, seems to demand conclusive explanations as they leap without hesitation from statements of abject ignorance to statements of absolute certainty."

"Carl Sagan spoke fluently between biology and geology and astrophysics and physics. If you move fluently across those boundaries, you realize that science is everywhere; science is not something you can step around or sweep under the rug."

"Computers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, they've beaten our top human chess champions."

"Consider this pronouncement, inscribed on an Assyrian tablet circa 2800 B.C.: Our earth is degenerate these days . . . bribery and corruption abound, children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching."