Great Throughts Treasury

"Some molecules - ammonia, carbon dioxide, water - show up everywhere in the universe, whether life is present or not. But others pop up especially in the presence of life itself. Among the biomarkers in Earth's atmosphere are ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays, vapor from mineral solvents, escaped coolants from refrigerators and air conditioners, and smog from the burning of fossil fuels. No other way to read that list: sure signs of the absence of intelligence."

"Some morning while you?re eating breakfast and you need something new to think about, though, you might want to ponder the fact that you see your kids across the table not as they are but as they once were, about three nanoseconds ago."

"Some of the most productive times in the histories of nations have been when they were badly stressed ? economically, politically, culturally or socially. It's possible to be stressed to a point that more creativity is stimulated than would otherwise be the case. I think it is true that necessity is the mother of invention."

"Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival."

"Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted."

"Space in general gave us GPS - that's not specifically NASA, but its investments in space."

"Space enthusiasts are the most susceptible demographic to delusion that I have ever seen."

"Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt."

"Some people think emotionally more often than they think politically. Some think politically more often than they think rationally. Others never think rationally about anything at all. No judgment implied. Just an observation."

"Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached."

"Space programs are a force operating on educational pipelines that stimulate the formation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians... They're the ones that make tomorrow come. The foundations of economies... issue forth from investments we make in science and technology."

"Stars die and reborn? They get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All was cooked in the fiery hearts of long vanished stars? The cosmos is also within us. We?re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

"Stephen Hawking's been watching too many Hollywood movies. I think the only kind aliens in Hollywood are the ones created by Steven Spielberg - 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' and 'E.T.,' for example. All other aliens are trying to suck our brains out."

"That is, cosmic dark matter enjoys about six times the mass of all the visible matter."

"Suppose a hole were dug from one side of Earth, through the center, and out the other side. What would happen to a man if he jumped into the hole? When he got to the middle of the Earth would he keep falling or would he stop? He would be vaporized by the 11,000ø Fahrenheit temperature of the pressurized molten iron core. Ignoring this complication, he would gain speed continuously from the moment he jumped into the hole until he reached the center of Earth where the force of gravity is zero. But he will be traveling so fast that he will overshoot the center and slow down continuously until he reached zero velocity at the exact moment he emerges on the other side. Unless somebody grabs him, he will fall back down the hole and repeat his journey indefinitely. A one-way trip through Earth would take about forty-five minutes."

"That makes me want to grab people on the street and say, "have you heard this?""

"Still, our knowledge of the planets was meager, and where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination."

"The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust."

"The actual recipe for the asteroid belt? Take a mere 2.5 percent of the Moon?s mass (itself, just 1/81 the mass of Earth), crush it into thousands of assorted pieces, but make sure that three-quarters of the mass is contained in just four asteroids. Then spread them all across a 100-million-mile-wide belt that tracks along a 1.5-billion-mile path around the Sun."

"The astronomy embodied in Stonehenge is not fundamentally deeper than what can be discovered with a stick in the ground. Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what?s going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all."

"The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience."

"The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think."

"The caricature of science is that we hold tight to the theories we have, and shun challenges to them. That's just not true. In fact, we hold our highest rewards for those scientists who can prove others wrong. And by the way, they are famous in their own lifetimes. We don't wait until they're dead."

"The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself."

"The chances that your tombstone will read 'Killed by Asteroid' are about the same as they'd be for 'Killed in Airplane Crash.'"

"The cross pollination of disciplines is fundamental to truly revolutionary advances in our culture."

"The exact orbit of Earth is controlled by the Sun?s mass and the mass of all remaining planets. An object?s mass and its distance is all we need to know to completely determine the effects of its gravity on Earth."

"The Earth took one hell of a beating in its first billion years, fragments of orbiting debris collided and coalesced, until they snowballed to form our Moon."

"The first colony on Mars is not going to be built by a private company. How are you going to make money? You're not."

"The day gets about one second longer every 67,000 years."

"The first trillionaire in the world will be the person who mines asteroids."

"The evidence all points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo."

"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

"The four most common chemically active elements in the universe?hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen?are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us."

"The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth ? that we have culture."

"The history of exploration across nations and across time is not one where nations said, 'Let's explore because it's fun.' It was, 'Let's explore so that we can claim lands for our country, so that we can open up new trade routes; let's explore so we can become more powerful.'"

"The idea that science is just some luxury that you'll get around to if you can afford it is regressive to any future a country might dream for itself."

"The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations."

"The humblest person in this world is the astrophysicist. Because we are face to face with our ignorance every single day."

"The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars- the high mass ones among them- went unstable in their later years- they collapsed and then exploded- scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy- guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems- stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up- many people feel small, cause their small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars."

"The methods and tools of science perennially breach barriers, granting me confidence that our epic march of insight into the operations of nature will continue without end."

"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree."

"The missing skepticism is the problem."

"The moment when someone attaches you to a philosophy or a movement, then they assign all the baggage and all the rest of the philosophy that goes with it to you. And when you want to have a conversation, they will assert that they already know everything important there is to know about you because of that association. And that's not the way to have a conversation."

"The Moon is a souvenir of that violent epoch. If you stood on the surface of that long ago Earth, the Moon would have looked a hundred times brighter. It was ten times closer back then, locked in a much more intimate gravitational embrace."

"The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all."

"The more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world."

"The most creative people are motivated by the grandest of problems that are presented before them."

"The most accessible field in science, from the point of view of language, is astrophysics. What do you call spots on the sun? Sunspots. Regions of space you fall into and you don?t come out of? Black holes. Big red stars? Red giants. So I take my fellow scientists to task. He?ll use his word, and if I understand it, I?ll say, Oh, does that mean da-da-da-de-da?"

"The most boring constellation: Triangulum Australis. A profound lack of imagination ? any 3 stars in the sky makes a triangle"