Great Throughts Treasury

"Cosmic objects with elements named in their honor: Sun (helium), Mercury (mercury), Earth (telerium), Moon (selenium)"

"Cool stars are red. Tepid stars are white. Hot stars are blue. Very hot stars are still blue. How about the very, very hot places, like the 15-million-degree center of the Sun? Blue. To an astrophysicist, red-hot foods and red-hot lovers both leave room for improvement."

"'Cosmos' wouldn't deserve its place in primetime evening network television were it not a landscape on which compelling stories were told. People, when they watch TV in the evening, want to see stories, and science simply tells the best stories."

"Cosmologists have plenty of ego ? how can a person not be ego-driven when it's your job to deduce what brought the universe into existence? But without data, their explanations were just tall tales. In this modern era of cosmology, each new observation, each morsel of data wields a two-edged sword: it enables cosmology to thrive on the kind of foundation that so much of the rest of science enjoys, but it also constrains theories that people thought up when there wasn't enough data to say whether they were wrong or not. No science achieves maturity without it. Let there be cosmology."

"Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope."

"Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking a new thought that has never been thought before and expressing it somehow. It could be with art, a sculpture, music or even in science. The difference, however, between scientific creativity and any other kind of creativity, is that no matter how long you wait, no one else will ever compose "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony" except for Beethoven. No matter what you do, no one else will paint Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Only Van Gogh could do that because it came from his creativity. Whereas in science, you can't just make stuff up and presume that it is a proper account of nature. At the end of the day, you have to answer to nature. Since everyone has nature to answer to, your creativity is simply discovering something about the natural world that somebody else would have eventually discovered exactly the same way. They might have come through a different path, but they would have landed in the same place. Even though we name theorems and equations after the people who discover them ? Newton's laws of gravity, Kepler's laws of planetary motion ? somebody else would have discovered them afterward. It's that simple. Your creativity is not a boundless creativity."

"'Cosmos' is an occasion to bring everything that I have, all of my capacity to communicate. We may go to the edge of the universe, but we're going to land right on you: in your heart, in your soul, in your mind. My goal is to have people know that they are participants in this great unfolding cosmic story."

"Curious that a bulletproof vest does not protect the neck, head, or groin. I consider these body parts important."

"Curious fact that those who never fail are also those who never truly succeed."

"Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not."

"Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive"

"Dear Merlin, How empty is empty space? ARTHUR LEVY HOUSTON, TEXAS When a rabbit disappears into thin air at a magic show nobody tells you the thin air already contains over 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quintillion) atoms per cubic centimeter. The very best laboratory vacuum chambers have as few as 10,000 atoms per cubic centimeter. Interplanetary space gets down to about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter while interstellar space is as low as 0.5 atoms per cubic centimeter. The award for nothingness, however, must be given to intergalactic space. There it is difficult to find more than 0.0000001 atoms per cubic centimeter. It has been postulated that outside the universe, where there is no space, there is no nothing. We might call this hypothetical region (where we are certain to find multitudes of rabbits) nothing-nothing"

"Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program."

"Curiously, light-loving GREEN plants reject the Sun?s GREEN light, reflecting it back at you, which is why they look GREEN"

"Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?"

"Darwin's theory of evolution is a framework by which we understand the diversity of life on Earth. But there is no equation sitting there in Darwin's 'Origin of Species' that you apply and say, 'What is this species going to look like in 100 years or 1,000 years?' Biology isn't there yet with that kind of predictive precision."

"Does it mean, if you don?t understand something, and the community of physicists don?t understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here?s a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn?t understand [and now we do understand] .... If that?s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that?s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that?s how you want to come at the problem."

"Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?"

"Doing what has never been done before is intellectually seductive, whether or not we deem it practical."

"Don?t know if it?s good or bad that a Google search on ?Big Bang Theory? lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe"

"Dreams about the future are always filled with gadgets."

"Each component of this trinity of human endeavor?science, religion, and art?lays powerful claim to our feelings of wonder, which derive from an embrace of the mysterious. Where mystery is absent, there can be no wonder."

"During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore?in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their "low contracted prejudices." And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment?until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace the cosmic perspective."

"During the heat of the space race in the 1960s, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it needed a ballpoint pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of approximately $1 million US. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on earth. The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil."

"Effective Car Commercials: Now every time I pass a KIA ?Soul? in the street I?m disappointed the driver is not a Hamster."

"Earth can be bad for your health too. On land, grizzly bears want to maul you; in the oceans, sharks want to eat you. Snowdrifts can freeze you, deserts dehydrate you, earthquakes bury you, volcanoes incinerate you. Viruses can infect you, parasites suck your vital fluids, cancers take over your body, (and) congenital diseases force an early death. And even if you have the good luck to be healthy, a swarm of locusts could devour your crops, a tsunami could wash away your family, or a hurricane could blow apart your town."

"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"

"Even the successful 1985 Bret Easton Ellis book (and 1987 film) Less Than Zero, which tracks the falling from grace of wealthy Los Angeles teens, could not be imagined with the logically equivalent title: Negative."

"Ever see DebatingTeams? They don?t know in advance what side of a case they?re required to argue. They make the best Lawyers."

"Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close."

"Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature."

"Every account of a higher power that I?ve seen described, of all religions that I?ve seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence."

"Every breed of dog you?ve ever seen was sculpted by human hands."

"Every living thing is a masterpiece, written by nature and edited by evolution."

"Every day, I wake up and I say, 'Why... how... did I end up with 1.7 million Twitter followers?' It's freaky to me, every day, but that tells me that there's an appetite out there that had previously been underserved. There's an inner geek in us all, an inner bit of curiosity that people are discovering, and they like it."

"Every person you?ve ever heard of lies right in there. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, everything in the history books happened here in the last 14 seconds of the cosmic calendar."

"Everyone should have their mind blown once a day."

"Everything we do, every thought we've ever had, is produced by the human brain. But exactly how it operates remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries, and it seems the more we probe its secrets, the more surprises we find."

"For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you."

"For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn't just bigger, it was better. There were mountains and valleys and craters and shadows. And it came alive."

"For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested."

"For generations, Americans have expected something new and better in their lives with every passing day?something that will make life a little more fun to live and a little more enlightening to behold. Exploration accomplishes this naturally. All we need to do is wake up to this fact."

"For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains."

"For most of human civilization, the pace of innovation has been so slow that a generation might pass before a discovery would influence your life, culture or the conduct of nations."

"Geek e-mail signoff: No trees were killed to send this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced."

"Fortunately, there's another handy driver that has manifested itself throughout the history of cultures. The urge to want to gain wealth. That is almost as potent a driver as the urge to maintain your security. And that is how I view NASA going forward - as an investment in our economy."

"God is an ever receding pocket of? scientific ignorance."

"God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as? time moves on."

"George Bush, within a week of this [the 9/11 attacks], gave us a speech, attempting to distinguish 'we' from 'they' ? and how does he do it?.... He says "Our god" ? of course it?s actually the same God ? but that's a detail, lets hold that minor fact aside for the moment. Allah of the Muslims is the same God as the God of the Old Testament so he says ? "Our God is the God who named the stars" ? Here's the problem with his comment ? The problem is: two-thirds of all stars that have names, have Arabic names. I don't think he knew this. That would confound the point that he was making."

"Great scientific minds, from Claudius Ptolemy of the second century to Isaac Newton of the seventeenth, invested their formidable intellects in attempts to deduce the nature of the universe from the statements and philosophies contained in religious writings?. Had any of these efforts worked, science and religion today might be one and the same. But they are not."