Death By Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries Quotes
"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science." - Edwin P. Hubble
"The distinction between knowledge of objects and phenomena, which operate within the parameters of known physical laws, and knowledge of the physical laws themselves is central to any perception that science might be coming to an end."
"Each discovery of science therefore adds a rung to a ladder of knowledge whose end is not in sight because we are building the ladder as we go along."
"The good thing about the laws of physics is that they require no law enforcement agencies to maintain them."
"The remarkable feature of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them."
"After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion."
"For sensitive egos, that could still be okay. Surely the vast system of stars and nebulae to which we belong comprised the entire universe."
"The urge to pull back is strong, but so, too, is the urge to push ahead."
"If the steps are indeed random, distance from the lamppost will slowly accumulate."
"While you cannot predict exactly how far from the lamppost any particular drunk person will be... you can reliably predict the average distance if you managed to convince a large number of drunken subjects to randomly walk for you in an experiment."
"With a step size of one centimeter, a photon must execute nearly 5 sextillion steps to 'random walk' the 70-billion centimeters from the Sun’s center to its surface."
"The inside of a star is a hurly-burly of atoms, electrons, and aether waves."
"The atoms and electrons for all their hurry never get anywhere; they only change places."
"Only one out of every half-billion photons that emerge from the Sun actually heads toward Earth."
"In the study of the cosmos, it’s hard to come up with a better tale than the centuries-long history of attempts to understand the planets."
"Humanity had its first telescopic encounter with the celestial wanderers during the winter of 1609–10."
"Lowell’s imagination ran amok, and he dedicated himself to the observation and mapping of the Red Planet’s network of waterways."
"On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air."
"Venus, named after the goddess of beauty and love, turns out to have a thick, almost opaque atmosphere."
"Jupiter also deflects plenty of comets that head toward Earth."
"Spacecraft have explored a dozen or so comets and asteroids."
"The universe reveals a peculiar romance between antiparticles and particles."
"The speed of light in empty space is a universal constant, no matter the speed of the light-emitting source."
"The gravitational pull of the outside balls would tug on the dumbbell and twist the wire from which it was suspended."
"Air resistance affects the trajectory of all these balls, but regardless of what set them in motion or where they might land, their basic paths are described by a simple equation found in Newton’s Principia."
"Newton reasoned that if the speed were high enough, a stone would travel Earth’s entire circumference, never hit the ground, and return to smack you in the back of the head."
"The world’s first ballistic missile was the V-2 rocket, designed by a team of German scientists under the leadership of Wernher von Braun."
"The most extreme example of an elongated orbit is the famous case of the hole dug all the way to China."
"Beyond one or two other well-behaved cases, the gravitational interaction of three or more objects eventually makes their trajectories go bananas."
"For those objects, as well as for the space shuttle, the wayward wrenches of spacewalking astronauts, and other hardware in LEO, one trip around the planet takes about 90 minutes."
"The range of measured densities within our universe is staggeringly large."
"Each element left its own pattern of lines—its own calling card—in the spectrum being studied."
"The most significant improvement of our feeble senses is the extension of our sight into the invisible bands of what is collectively known as the electromagnetic spectrum."
"In any case, you could probably sell seats to watch the encounter between Andromeda’s supermassive black hole and ours, as whole galaxies go ballistic."
"Life, far from being rare and precious, may be as common as planets themselves."
"To declare that Earth must be the only planet with life in the universe would be inexcusably big-headed of us."
"If life is found on another planet, it will be made of a similar mix of elements."
"The universe is not only more peculiar than we suppose, but more peculiar than we can suppose."
"The existence of water in the galaxy is not limited to planets and their moons."
"Nature clearly had no trouble creating the stuff [life]."
"For all we know, the aliens have already concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth."
"Our life-on-Earth bias requires us to hold the existence of liquid water as a prerequisite to life elsewhere."
"Conditions on the planet must allow the temperature to stay within the 180-degree range of liquid water."
"Visible sunlight that manages to pass through its thick atmosphere gets absorbed by Venus’s surface and then reradiated in the infrared part of the spectrum."
"The discovery of simple, unintelligent life-forms elsewhere in the universe would be far more likely and, for me, only slightly less exciting than the discovery of intelligent life."
"With binary and multiple star systems... planet orbits tend to be strongly elongated and chaotic, which induces extreme temperature swings."
"The Drake equation is more accurately viewed as a fertile idea than as a rigorous statement of how the physical universe works."
"The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, if and when it happens, will impart a change in human self-perception that may be impossible to anticipate."
"The radio bubble, as it has come to be called, centers on Earth and continues to expand at the speed of light in every direction."
"The ionosphere reflects neither FM radio nor broadcast television, allowing cities that are relatively near each other to broadcast their own television programs."
"The United States is the most significant contributor among all nations to Earth’s global television profile."
"Any time we communicate with our astronauts or our space probes, all signals that do not intersect the craft’s receiver are lost in space forever."
"A better way to communicate is to send a high-intensity radio signal to a busy place in the galaxy, like a star cluster."
"Science can also predict that something is unpredictable. Such is the basis of chaos."
"For all practical purposes, in the presence of chaos, it is impossible to reliably predict the distant future of the system’s evolution."
"The impact record shows that by the end of 10 million years... an asteroid is likely to have hit Earth with enough energy to kill a billion people."
"The energetics of some famous impacts... such a collision is predicted to occur about once in about 100 million years."
"The only radio signal that cannot be compressed is one that contains completely random information, leaving it indistinguishable from radio static."
"RATHER THAN LET aliens listen to our embarrassing TV shows, why not send them a signal of our own choosing, demonstrating how intelligent and peace loving we are?"
"As the signals move out into space they get weaker and weaker, becoming diluted by the growing volume of space through which it travels."
"What goes up need not come down. All manner of golf balls, flags, automobiles, and crashed space probes litter the lunar surface."
"Days get shorter in the winter and longer in the summer."
"On average, every couple years, somewhere on Earth’s surface, the Moon passes completely in front of the Sun to create a total solar eclipse."
"The Moon also 'comes out' with the Sun in the sky."
"The equinox does not contain exactly 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night."
"If laid end to end, the hundred billion (or so) hamburgers sold by the McDonald’s restaurant chain would stretch around the Earth 230 times."
"To count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls."
"If we are all here, then we must not be all there."
"Ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist on the ever-shifting frontier."
"People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos."
"Knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going."
"Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion."
"The claims of science rely on experimental verification, while the claims of religions rely on faith."
"Great scientific minds...invested their formidable intellects in attempts to deduce the nature of the universe from the statements and philosophies contained in religious writings."
"I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religious document."
"Science is occasionally accused of being a closed-minded or stubborn enterprise."
"Scientists heap their largest rewards and praises upon those who do, in fact, discover flaws in established paradigms."
"The methods of science currently have little or nothing to contribute to ethics, inspiration, morals, beauty, love, hate, or aesthetics."
"If I can't solve a problem, neither can any other person who has ever lived or who will ever be born."
"Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance."
"To deny or erase the rich, colorful history of scientists and other thinkers who have invoked divinity in their work would be intellectually dishonest."
"You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem."