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It’s by another who believed that democracy requires an informed public of responsible decision-makers.
In addition, science is a delight; evolution has arranged that we take pleasure in understanding—those who understand are more likely to survive.
They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival.
Blue stars are hot and young; yellow stars, conventional and middle-aged; red stars, often elderly and dying; and small white or black stars are in the final throes of death.
The Sun is so far away that its rays are parallel when they reach the Earth. Sticks placed at different angles to the Sun’s rays cast shadows of different lengths. For the observed difference in the shadow lengths, the distance between Alexandria and Syene had to be about seven degrees along the surface of the Earth; that is, if you imagine the sticks extending down to the center of the Earth, they would there intersect at an angle of seven degrees. Seven degrees is something like one-fiftieth of three hundred and sixty degrees, the full circumference of the Earth. Eratosthenes knew that the
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With them he deduced the circumference of the Earth with an error of only a few percent, a remarkable achievement for 2,200 years ago. He was the first person accurately to measure the size of a planet.
Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together.
We know of a three-volume history of the world, now lost, by a Babylonian priest named Berossus. The first volume dealt with the interval from the Creation to the Flood, a period he took to be 432,000 years or about a hundred times longer than the Old Testament chronology. I wonder what was in it.
What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
What a marvelous cooperative arrangement—plants and animals each inhaling the other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.
The evolution of life requires a more or less precise balance between mutation and selection. When that balance is achieved, remarkable adaptations occur.
(One of the epithets given Mars by the ancient Egyptians was sekded-ef em khetkhet, which means “who travels backwards,” a clear reference to its retrograde or loop-the-loop apparent motion.)
If the world was crafted by God, should it not be examined closely? Was not all of creation an expression of the harmonies in the mind of God? The book of Nature had waited more than a millennium for a reader.
Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights.
But only three years after Comte’s death, it was discovered that a spectrum can be used to determine the chemistry of distant objects. Different molecules and chemical elements absorb different frequencies or colors of light, sometimes in the visible and sometimes elsewhere in the spectrum.
it aroused generations of eight-year-olds, myself among them, to consider the exploration of the planets as a real possibility, to wonder if we ourselves might one day voyage to Mars.
If the planet ever is terraformed, it will be done by human beings whose permanent residence and planetary affiliation is Mars. The Martians will be us.
His interests and allegiances were broad. “The world is my country,” he said, “science my religion.”
He felt that poverty in a democracy was preferable to wealth in a tyranny.
A major problem in the contemporary (political) Third World is that the educated classes tend to be the children of the wealthy, with a vested interest in the status quo, and are unaccustomed either to working with their hands or to challenging conventional wisdom. Science has been very slow to take root.
We do not have fusion reactors yet, but they are confidently expected in the new few decades.
We do not have fusion reactors yet, but they are confidently expected in the new few decades. 42 years later...
What we do with our world in this time will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully determine the destiny of our descendants and their fate, if any, among the stars.
The American mathematician Edward Kasner once asked his nine-year-old nephew to invent a name for an extremely large number—ten to the power one hundred (10100), a one followed by a hundred zeroes. The boy called it a googol.
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
What we actually see, however, is almost exclusively red shifts no matter what distant objects beyond the Local Group we point our telescopes to.
If we live in such an oscillating universe, then the Big Bang is not the creation of the Cosmos but merely the end of the previous cycle, the destruction of the last incarnation of the Cosmos.
Traveling through another dimension provides, as an incidental benefit, a kind of X-ray vision.
Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is co-ordinated and used.
Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.
The right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex is mainly responsible for pattern recognition, intuition, sensitivity, creative insights. The left hemisphere presides over rational, analytical and critical thinking. These are the dual strengths, the essential opposites, that characterize human thinking. Together, they provide the means both for generating ideas and for testing their validity.
Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
No civilization can possibly survive to an interstellar spacefaring phase unless it limits its numbers. Any society with a marked population explosion will be forced to devote all its energies and technological skills to feeding and caring for the population on its home planet.
According to some estimates, almost half the scientists and high technologists on Earth are employed full- or part-time on military matters. Those engaged in the development and manufacture of weapons of mass destruction are given salaries, perquisites of power and, where possible, public honors at the highest levels available in their respective societies.
Where physical affection is encouraged, theft, organized religion and invidious displays of wealth are inconspicuous; where infants are physically punished, there tends to be slavery, frequent killing, torturing and mutilation of enemies, a devotion to the inferiority of women, and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life.
