The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space.

There is nothing particularly special about that location of the centre of mass. If you were to find yourself at the precise spot that is the centre of mass of the earth-moon system, the only...

At the base of the immense pillar, tiny Babylon was in shadow. Then the darkness climbed the tower, like a canopy unfurling upward. It moved slowly enough that Hillalum felt he could count the moments...

How quickly we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story “Nightfall,” about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight...

Innumerable conditions must be exquisitely optimized for the support of humanity and of civilization. Many of them are highly time variable. Evidence showing that a wide variety of independent conditions all reached optimality during the...

But every day I go to work I’m making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.

If the whole world shared such experiences, we would then have common dreams and everybody could begin thinking about tomorrow. And if everybody thinks about tomorrow, then someday we can visit the sky together.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every...

The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the...

The astronomer is, in some measure, independent of his fellow astronomer; he can wait in his observatory till the star he wishes to observe comes to his meridian; but the meteorologist has his observations bounded...

At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchhoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchhoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the...

Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing...

Interviewer: Didn’t Sagan want to believe?Druyan: he didn’t want to believe. he wanted to know.

When I die, I will return to where I first came from. Back to the stars.

A hundred years ago, Auguste Comte, … a great philosopher, said that humans will never be able to visit the stars, that we will never know what stars are made out of, that that’s the...

Don’t STOP until you reach the TOP. When you reach the TOP don’t STOP keep moving UP

Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur.

structure”, that sense of its twisting depths. I remember stars from one horizon to another, making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream.It was a time in my life when I...

Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.

Una científica compañera mía me contaba un reciente viaje que realizó a la meseta de Nueva Guinea, donde visitó una tribu todavía en la edad de piedra que apenas había tenido contactos con la civilización....

Algol is the name of the winking demon star, Medusa of the skies; fair but deadly to look on, even for one who is already dying.Ah, the bright stars of the night.Almost they obliterate the...

We tell them about Earth science, astronomy, plant science and marine science. But what we don’t do is explain what the four basic sciences are and what the building blocks are. We go too broad...

I look forward to the day when the solar system becomes our collective backyard—explored not only with robots, but with the mind, body, and soul of our species.

There are even some stars so remote that their light will reach the Earth only when Earth itself is a dead planet, as they themselves are dead, so that the living Earth will never be...

Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.

At every level in our inventory, nothing seems special about our Earth, our Sun, our Galaxy, our Local Group. Evidently, mediocrity reigns throughout. Such is our niche in the Universe.

The evolutionists, piercing beneath the show of momentary stability, discovered, hidden in rudimentary organs, the discarded rubbish of the past. They detected the reptile under the lifted feathers of the bird, the lost terrestrial limbs...

Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy...

You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind–monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison.”What monsters may they...

Timing is easy to predict through the movement of the stars as they give the propensity of pure potential.

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the...

In Anton Chekhov’s play the Three Sisters, sister Masha refuses ‘to live and not know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why the stars are in the sky. Either you know and you’re...

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

With my naked eye, on nights the moon climbs slowly, sometimes so dusted with rust and rose, brown, and gold tones that it nearly drips earth colors and seems intimately braided with Earth, it feels...

I esteem myself happy to have as great an ally as you in my search for truth. I will read your work … all the more willingly because I have for many years been a...

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it...

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

One of the most striking results of modern investigation has been the way in which several different and quite independent lines of evidence indicate that a very great event occurred about two thousand million years...

Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite ‘telescope envy’ at gatherings of amateur astronomers.

Light brings us the news of the Universe.

At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took...

Though we might like to think so, humankind is not at any special, unique or privileged location in the gargantuan, perhaps infinite, Universe.

There is talk of a new astrologer [Nicolaus Copernicus] who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in...

Napoleon, when hearing about Laplace’s latest book, said, ‘M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator.’Laplace responds, ‘Je n’avais...

Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be … But i expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same.

Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?[Lutheran theologian Abraham Calovius illustrating his objection to heliocentrism due to the Bible’s support of geocentrism]

Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted...

I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded...

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is...

shooting” showers of blazing dust and ice, we have always found beauty. And in this beauty, the overwhelming size of the universe has seemed less ominous, earth’s own beauty more incredible. If indeed the numbers...