Astronomers From The United States

"The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects that we can not yet imagine."

"We often frame our understanding of what the space telescope will do in terms of what we expect to find, and actually it would be terribly anticlimactic if in fact we find what we expect to find. … The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined."

"Every time we get slapped down, we can say, Thank you Mother Nature, because it means we're about to learn something important."

"I may be a minority of one in advocating that one should NOT separate science and politics—partly because I am old enough to remember the Weimar Republic before 1934..."

"We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of a world it is — at least in its physical aspects."

"If the apparent magnitudes of the nebulae are corrected merely for the effect of the red-shift in diminishing the energy of their observed light, we have seen that Hubble claims that the system is uniformly spread out in space. If, however, the nebulae are receding, an additional dimming factor arises, and the corresponding correction for distance when incorporated in the calculation destroys the homogeneity. Instead, the number of nebulae per unit volume of space now appears to increase as we recede towards the confines of the visible universe. Rightly or wrongly, Hubble maintains that such a picture would imply that we were in a privileged position in the universe, being in the region lease densely populated with nebulae. On these, and other grounds, he is inclined, therefore, to reject the Doppler-interpretation of the red-shifts and to regard the nebulae as stationary."

"I chucked the law for astronomy, and I knew that even if I were second-rate or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered."

"She deserved the Nobel Prize for her work."

"The whole thing is so much bigger than I am, and I can't understand it, so I just trust myself to it; and forget about it."

"...there must be no favored location in the universe, no center, no boundary; all must see the universe alike. And, in order to ensure this situation, the cosmologist postulates spatial isotropy and spatial homogeneity."

"The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons."

"Eventually, we reach the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows and search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial."

"Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive."

"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science."

"Since all of the possibilities of a terrestrial origin have been either ruled out or seem improbable, and since the possibility of an extraterrestrial origin has not been able to be ruled out, I must conclude that an ETI (ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) might have sent the signal that we received as the Wow! source. Of course, being a scientist, I await the reception of additional signals like the Wow! source that are able to be received and analyzed by many observatories. Thus, I must state that the origin of the Wow! signal is still an open question for me. There is simply too little data to draw many conclusions. In other words, as I stated above, I choose not to "draw vast conclusions from 'half-vast' data"."

"A person not familiar with all of the special knowledge about a particular instrument should not try to draw too many conclusions from printed data. Such data typically contains certain assumptions about the equipment not necessarily known to outsiders."

"If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, "It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.""

"What I have discovered in 20 years of studying the universe, from here to there to everywhere, is that the universe is complicated, and when things happen, it is almost never like ‘A happened and therefore B’. No, A happened and therefore B, C, D and E, but then there is this thing F, and that had a 10% effect, and that prompted G to go back and tip over A, and it is always like this – everything is interconnected. And so a lot of these far-right fundamentalist religion people, and a lot of these people who are anti-global warming, anti-evolution, anti-science, what they do is they take advantage of the fact that things are complicated, and their lives are based on things being simple – if we do this, then this will happen – if we invade Iraq, we will be treated as liberators, if we pray, then good things will happen, and this stuff is wrong. But we have a culture where people are brought up to believe in simplicity, and if A then B. And so when you point out that scientists say the earth is warming, but we had a really devastating winter this year, then these people will say “oh, obviously global warming is wrong”. No, global warming can cause worse winters locally. It’s complicated. But people don’t want to hear “it’s complicated”, and boy, the conspiracy theorists and anti-scientists take full advantage of that."

"They say that even the brightest star won't shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that."

"Other job markets may lay claim to the title, but astronomy is actually the world's oldest profession."

"Just like people, stars can be important without being terribly bright."

"It’s amazing to me that not only can we put a probe around Saturn and get images of its moons, but our math and physics are so freaking accurate we can say, "Hey, you know what? On this date at this time if we turn Cassini that way we’ll see a moon over 2 million kilometers away pass in front of another one nearly 3 million kilometers away."Every morning, I have a 50/50 chance of finding my keys. That kinda puts things in perspective."

"However, science isn't just about showing when you're right; it's also about showing when you're wrong."

"I’m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact."

"I believe that an understanding of our place in the wider universe and the methods of science are part of the birthright of everyone living on our planet."

"It is the great glory of the quest for human knowledge that, while making some small contribution to that quest, we can also continue to learn and to take pleasure in learning."

"… one of the most detrimental (and least discussed) effects of the crisis in science education in the world today is that we are creating a population increasingly unable to think skeptically about a wide range of issues."

"Rubin, in collaboration with Kent Ford, became the key figure in extending rotation curves based on optical-wavelength studies to large galactic radii, where their prevalent flatness dovetailed neatly with results from radio-wavelength observations. Rubin’s life story is one of perseverance in the face of occupational and societal obstacles. ... Rubin’s story illustrates the resistance of the scientific community to altering an established paradigm—that light is the essential gauge of mass in the universe."

"Science is competitive, aggressive, demanding. It is also imaginative, inspiring, uplifting."

"We have peered into a new world and have seen that it is more mysterious and more complex than we had imagined. Still more mysteries of the universe remain hidden. Their discovery awaits the adventurous scientists of the future. I like it this way."

"There is one alternative to dark matter, and that is the assumption that Newton's laws don't hold over distances as great as galaxies. But we know that Newton's laws hold over a very large domain. And virtually one hundred percent of the physics and astronomy community believes that there is matter in the universe that does not radiate."

"Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions."

"It is well known that I am available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers."

"How stars move tell us that most matter in the universe is dark. When we see stars in the sky, we're only seeing five or 10 percent of the matter that there is in the universe."

"I'm not a theologian, and I must say honestly that Vatican astronomers' views [on astronomy] are entirely in accord with ours. I'm not aware of any Church positions that contradict modern science. In my own life, my science and my religion are separate. I'm Jewish, and so religion to me is a kind of moral code and a kind of history. I try to do my science in a moral way, and, I believe that, ideally, science should be looked upon as something that helps us understand our role in the universe."

"I live and work with three basic assumptions, 1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman. 2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women. 3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women."

"Each one of you can change the world, for you are made of star stuff, and you are connected to the universe."

"To my mind, what Vera discovered is both more specific and more profound than the dark matter paradigm it helped to create. What she discovered observationally is that rotation curves are very nearly flat, and continue to be so to indefinitely large radius. Over and over again, for every galaxy in the sky. It is a law of nature for galaxies, akin to Kepler’s laws for planets. Dark matter is an inference, a subsidiary result. It is just one possible interpretation, a subset of amazing and seemingly unlikely possibilities opened up by her discovery."

"I think of the time that Vera and I were spending in cold telescope domes, the wind blowing, coyotes howling off on the mesa, we would have been happy to have a warm room to sit in, whether it was in Flagstaff or a lab back home."

"When we have observed the Sun most intensively, its behavior may have been unusually regular and benign."

"I had been taught that while the Sun indeed affects the upper and outer atmosphere of the Earth, purported connections with the troposphere and weather and climate were uniformly wacky and to be distrusted. I still believe that to some extent, for there is a hypnotism about cycles that seems to attract people. It draws all kinds of creatures out of the woodwork. The claims that were made for associations between weather events and the Sun I thought were pretty preposterous. One of those that turned up was this notion that Gene told me about. About the work of Walter Maunder 100 years before, when he had thought that there was a prolonged period of time in the 1600s when the Sun wasn’t so active."

"Regarding the claims of Maunder and Sporer: "I started by trying to make it go away, mostly because of a prejudice about sun-weather relationships, and what I thought was true about the sun. In time I realized that there was a more profound and philosophical message in the Maunder Minimum: that people want the Sun to be more constant and regular than perhaps it is.""

"We had adopted a kind of solar uniformitarianism," solar physicist John (Jack) Eddy suggested in retrospect. "As people and as scientists we have always wanted the Sun to be better than other stars and better than it really is."

"The Maunder minimum corresponds almost precisely with the coldest excursion of the 'little ice age', a period of unusual cold in Europe from the 16th century through the early 19th century. In the coldest extremes of that period the average temperature was about one degree Celsius colder than it is now, according to the British climatologist Hubert H. Lamb. In that period the Alpine glaciers advanced farther than they had since the last major glaciation 15,000 years ago. In that period too the Norse colony in southwestern Greenland perished to a man, cut off from the rest of the world by pack ice that year after year failed to thaw."

"It would seem that Maunder and Sporer were right and that most of the rest of us have been wrong. As is often the case in the onrush of modern science, we had too quickly forgotten the past, forgotten the less-than-perfect pedigree of the sunspot cycle and the fact that it too once came as a surprise. We had adopted a kind of solar uniformitarianism, contending that the modern behavior of the sun represented the normal behavior of the sun over a much longer span of time."

"“I am most indebted to E N Parker for calling my attention to Maunder's papers, and for personal encouragement in all the work reported here.”"

"The reality of the 'Maunder Minimum' and its implications of basic solar change may be but one more defeat in our long and losing battle to keep the sun perfect, or, if not perfect, constant, and if inconstant, regular. Why we think that sun should be any of these when other stars are not is more a question for social than for physical science."

"I have reexamined the contemporary reports and new evidence which has come to light since Maunder's time and conclude that this 70-year period was indeed a time when solar activity all but stopped. This behavior is wholly unlike the modern behavior of the sun which we have come to accept as normal, and the consequences for solar and terrestrial physics seem to me profound."

"It has long been though that the sun is a constant star of regular and repeatable behavior. Measurements of the radiative output, or solar constant, seem to justify the first assumption, and the record of periodicity in sunspot numbers is taken as evidence of the second. Both records, however, sample only the most recent history of the sun."

"Were God to give us, at last, the cable, or patch-cord that links the Sun to the Climate System it would have on the solar end a banana plug, and on the other, where it hooks into the Earth—in ways we don’t yet know—a Hydra-like tangle of multiple 24-pin parallel computer connectors. It is surely at this end of the problem where the greatest challenges lie."