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"Stars are fires that burn for thousands of years. Some of them burn slow and long, like red dwarfs. Others-blue giants-burn their fuel so fast they shine across great distances, and are easy to see. As they start to run out of fuel, they burn helium, grow even hotter, and explode in a supernova. Supernovas, they're brighter than the brightest galaxies. They die, but everyone watches them go."
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Personal Development
"I'm afraid our sun is nothing like whatever defined."
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Personal Development
"This sight... is by far the noblest astronomy affords."
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Personal Development
"Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe, that was almost an article of faith among scientists."
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Personal Development
"From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour."
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Personal Development
"The vortex. You can see the entire galaxy up there. More stars than you ever knew existed."
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Personal Development
"A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone."
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Personal Development
"My amateur interest in astronomy brought out the term 'magnitude,' which is used for the brightness of a star."
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Personal Development
"We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy."
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Personal Development
"Astronomy's much more fun when you're not an astronomer."
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Personal Development
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"An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to uptime causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the Universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and you be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed."
Philosophy
"We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?"
Ethics
"And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of the second cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind."
Responsibility
"[In] everyday life, it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision."
Memory
"Neuroanatomy, political history, and introspection all offer evidence that human beings are quite capable of resisting the urge to surrender to every impulse of reptilian core of brain."
Science
"You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips out onto the microscope stage. You look at the projected image. The drop is full of life - strange beings swimming, crawling, tumbling; high dramas of pursuit and escape, triumph and tragedy. This is a world populated by beings far more exotic than in any science fiction movie..."
Science
"A typical chromosomal DNA molecule in a human being is composed of about five billion pairs of nucleotides. But since there are four different kinds of nucleotides, the number of bits of information in DNA is four times the number of nucleotide pairs. Thus if a single chromosome has five billion (5 X 10^9) nucleotides, it contains twenty billion (2 X 10^10) bits of information. We also see that if more than some tens of billions (several times 10^10) of bits of information are necessary for human survival, extragenetic systems will have to provide them: the rate of development of genetic systems is so slow that no source of such additional biological information can be sought in the DNA."
Science
"We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
Power
"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense."
Science
"Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out."
History
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