Astronomers From The United States

"Long ago there were some physicists who said that the whole universe was made out of energy. We Europeans were so retarded that we didn't notice... energy until 1845. But there were some physicists who... probably 5,000 years ago said the whole universe is made out of energy, and their name for the universe was... "the changing"... [T]hey said if the universe is the changing, there has to be something with respect to which it changes. So there has to be a changeless underneath, and if it's not in time it can't be in space, so it has to be changeless, infinite and undivided. Then their problem was, if what exists is changeless and what we see is changing, how the hell do you do that? ...[T]hey said it could only be by mistake. You can't change the changeless, but you could mistake the changeless for the changing. So they said, we'll have to study mistakes."

"[W]hat we see... is that... the radiation from all those distant galaxies is redshifted, and the farther away they appear to be... the more redshifted... [T]he usual interpretation... is that they're going away. ...So that they would be approaching the speed of light ...at about 15 billion s away. About 15 billion light-years away... their radiation would go to zero energy because of redshifting."

"So I have to replace the Big Bang. ...[L]et's confine ourselves to the observational evidence, and since there is no observational evidence for Creation, we'll leave it out. Now that leaves out the Big Bang people, the mini bang people, the steady-state people, The people... almost everybody."

"Einstein never changed it, the way he put it in his words. He said toward the end of his life, ..."Matter had fallen out of the physics... as a fundamental concept." We're left only with energy. ...That's going to have to be cleaned up. The physicists can't be this retarded permanently."

"When you panic stop... the of your... moving vehicle gets scrambled to heat by in... brake drums... brake shoes... tire[s] and road. ...[I]f, instead... the energy had been run into a ... you could... use... it to restart your car."

"[I]n my model the stuff recycles from the border as brand new spaced all out... and that's the lowest state of entropy known to man. Hydrogen all spaced out is the lowest state of entropy, and then it falls together by gravity and the entropy goes up, and all these other things happen and the entropy keeps going up and going up. ...[W]hen it recycles from the border the negative entropy is back in."

"Now back to the border... where the radiation as seen by us approaches zero. The energy of the particles approaches zero. If the energy of the particles approaches zero, [E = m] the mass of the particles approaches zero. If the mass of the particles approaches zero, [\triangle x\;\triangle mv \ge \hbar] the momentum of the particles approaches zero. The momentum is the mass multiplied by the velocity... If the momentum approaches zero, our uncertainty in the momentum approaches zero. You can't have a big mistake about nothing. ...If the uncertainty in the momentum approaches zero, the uncertainty in where they are [\triangle x] goes to totality, and they can recycle back anywhere. I don't see any way to avoid that, understanding physics the way we understand it now. You would have to change the physics to get out of the mess."

"\triangle x\;\triangle mv \ge \hbarThis we got from Heisenberg in 1927, but he blames it on Einstein. Heisenberg says, ....for more than three ...months they tried to describe the track of an electron across the , which they can see. They tried to describe it in quantum mechanics, and they couldn't ...These are the biggest shots in quantum mechanics, and they couldn't do it. Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger... couldn't do it. ...[H]eisenberg said, then I remembered and suggested what Einstein had ...[said] earlier, "Theory must first say what can be observed" and when I looked at the problem from that side, I had the uncertainty relation."

"Stars are not hot because of ... [but] because [of]... energy of falling... transformed to . The heat [of]... fusion... keeps them from collapsing farther and... getting too hot. But it's... temporary."

"In the absence of time we are left with the changeless, since change can take place only in time. And since smallness and dividedness can exist only in space, in the absence of space we are left with the infinite, the undivided."

"For many years Newton's view swept the field. But why don't corpuscles collide?"

"Suppose we have two space ships [travelling opposite directions]... These people see those clocks [in the other spaceship] are spinning around too fast. These people [in the opposing spaceship] see those clocks [in the first spaceship] are spinning around too fast. After they've passed each other these people see those clocks have slowed down, and those people see those [other] clocks have slowed down. Now whose clocks have slowed down? There is no such thing as how fast a clock is going."

"The importance of a telescope is not how big it is, it's not how well made it is, it's how many people less fortunate than you got to look through it."

"A park ranger once questioned the appropriateness of the telescopes, saying, "The sky is not a part of the park," to which Dobson replied, "No, but the park is part of the sky.""

"A is just a pile of stuff."

"Can we, by now, square science with religion? In particular, can we square relativity and quantum mechanics with Swami Vivekananda's Advaita Vedanta? Since there cannot be two worlds - one for the scientists and one for the mystics - it must be that their descriptions are of the same world but from different points of view. Can we, from the vantage point of the Swami's Advaita (non-dualism), see both points of view? Swami Vivekananda said that science and religion would meet and shake hands. Can we see things from his vantage point? Since the notion of maya or apparition as the first cause of our physics is central to the swami's Advaita, I have chosen as "The Equations of Maya". Can we find them in our physics? According to the philosophy of the Advaita Vedantins, as the swami himself has said, there cannot be two existences, only one. And maya is, as it were, a veil or screen through which that oneness (the Absolute) is seen as this Universe of plurality and change.""

"But how could the ether be sufficiently rigid to transmit the vibrations at the speed of light and yet let the planets pass through it?"

"[A]t the hands of Huygens, Young, and Frensnel, Euler's notion that light might be a ... began to gain ground."

"Then came Faraday... Space was filled with fields, and the fields were filled with energy. ...Maxwell suggested ...light was an electromagnetic wave... through the luminiferous ether."

"Then came Michelson and Morley. ...Then came Planck and Einstein. Light... was quantized... energy... Planck's constant times the (E=hv)."

"In the four dimensional... space-time... separation between the emission... and the absorption events of the photons goes to zero, and even the fish are gone. ...What we see as a light-year away, we see as a year ago, because the time comes in squared with a minus sign."

"Energy is... the nature of... underlying existence showing through in space and time... it... remains constant."

"Negative entropy is a measure of the usableness of the energy. and the of large moving objects is completely usable. energy is not, because [of] the [scrambled] directions of... motions of... particles... That's... . ...[T]emperature is... kinetic energy of the molecules."

"Oh! Be A Fine Girl — Kiss Me!"

"In our troubled days it is good to have something outside our planet, something fine and distant for comfort."

"In the papers published by Hill in the American Journal of Mathematics there is introduced for the first time a very radical and important idea. Up to this time the orbits of the moon and planets were considered as being ellipses which continually change. The problem was to find the changes in the ellipses, or the deviations from the initial ellipses. That is, the ellipse was taken as a first approximation to the orbit of the body under consideration. Hill proposed to take a certain simple type of periodic orbit as a first approximation. He proved the existence of the periodic orbits by numerically integrating the differential equations in numerous special cases by a process known as mechanical quadratures. These were the first periodic orbits of the problem of three bodies having a practical use, and the first ones known to exist beyond the simple ones which were discovered by Lagrange. It should be added that Hill omitted a small part of the disturbing action of the sun, viz., that which is said to depend upon the solar parallax; but his method would have applied without sensible modification to the rigorous problem. In fact, in all his researches, on the problem of three bodies, Darwin used methods which differ from those of Hill only in the variables employed and in inconsequential details."

"For more than sixty years after the publication of the Principia astronomers were puzzled to account for the motion of the lunar perigee, simply because they could not conceive that terms of the second and higher orders, with respect to the disturbing force, produced more than half of it. For a similar reason, the great inequalities of Jupiter and Saturn remained a long time unexplained."

"It was not until 1748 that any computation of the perturbations of Jupiter and Saturn, in accordance with the theory of gravitation, was undertaken. This was by . He appears to have limited himself to the terms which have the mean elongation of the planets of the planets from each other as their argument. Later the terms factored by the simple power of the eccentricities were added by himself, , , , and . But these terms not bringing about a reconciliation between observation and theory, and were led to make their notable researches on the possibility of secular equations in the mean motions of the planet. At length the whole difficulty with Jupiter and Saturn was removed by discovery of the great inequalities in 1786. almost immediately constructed tables which far exceeded in accuracy any previously possessed. They are those that appear in the third edition of Astronomie."

"The application of mathematics to the solution of the problems presented by the motion of the heavenly bodies has had a larger degree of success than the same application in the case of the other departments of physics. This is probably due to two causes. The principal objects to be treated in the former case are visible every clear night, consequently the questions connected with them received earlier attention; while, in the latter case, the phenomena to be discussed must ofttimes be produced by artificial means in the laboratory; and the discovery of certain classes of them, as, for instance, the property of magnetism, may justly be attributed to accident. A second cause is undoubtedly to be found in the fact that the application of quantitative reasoning to what is usually denominated as physics generally leads to a more difficult department of mathematics than in the case of the motion of the heavenly bodies. In the latter we have but one independent variable, the time; while in the former generally several are present, which makes the difference of having to integrate ordinary differential equations or those which are partial."

"If you want some adventure, if you want to work hard, if you want to do work with teams, if you want to see an idea from conception through its ultimate goal, science is a wonderful field to work in. It is highly rewarding."

"One of the things that's just clearly evident is that we here in the U.S. are very special in having a developed country that sill has some amazingly dark skies especially in the western half of the United States. To find skies as dark as what we have out here, in say Europe for instance, you'd have to travel to far northern Scandinavia or you'd have to travel down to northern Africa, so we are very lucky here to have a wonderful transportation network as well as dark skies, so take that opportunity to go out and find those parks in the dark places of our country."

"Once an idea gets turned into a story, people pay attention long enough to listen. And they'll remember it. The images from Dante are far more vivid than the arguments of Aquinas."

"Church officials in the past may have looked with great suspicion on the writings of, say, Teilhard de Chardin; but this same Church did, after all, produce a Teilhard. Even earlier, John Henry Newman was made a cardinal notwithstanding his liberal views. Prominent theologians in every era, going back to the most ancient Church fathers, argued cogently and consistently against a literalist interpretation of scripture. On the other hand, I'm sure you could find closet creationists in the Catholic Church today."

"Even an atheist has to believe that the concept, at least, of "God" does exist, whether or not that concept is true or useful or the best way to approach things."

"Something like 10000 meteorites hit Earth a year. Three-quarters land in the ocean. Given how long they last, and how fast they come down, you might expect to see a meteorite roughly every two square kilometers. But in fact, you don't. They're completely lost."

"Science doesn't stop when it comes up with a nice answer. It looks for more data. It comes up with new ideas. It's willing to admit it's wrong."

"Science books go out of date. We throw the old one away when a newer one comes out, when we have new theories. But we don't throw away our old data; we merely interpret them differently. New theories try to account for old data (and new data) in new ways."

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is my job, my responsibility, as an astronomer to remind people that alien hypotheses should always be a last resort."

"My family was always interested in nature, and that made me curious about it too – we liked to learn about birds and plants and rocks together. It was really fun! In every bird, plant, or rock, there’s a great story waiting to be learned – it’s like watching a really interesting movie or reading a great book. Now, as a professional scientist, it’s my job to learn things about nature. Every day is different from the next, and there’s always something wonderful to learn about the universe and the world around us."

"I'd say that getting started on research early as an undergraduate makes a big difference. If, like me, you don't come from a family background in this area, there are so many exciting things to work on that I knew little about. Undergraduate research upended my preconceived notions of what work in space research is like. I had no idea about what jobs even existed. Working in industry can also be a tremendously valuable experience. Systems engineering work provides a great overview of how spacecraft are built and operated, and seeing the teamwork and cameraderie is inspiring. Teamwork is essential to making missions work; it's like being part of a band or a sports team in that regard. A successful space mission represents hundreds or even thousands of people working together for a common goal, so building teamwork skills is a good idea."

"I also love working for the government (no really!). There is more security working for a government lab and I didn't have to get tenure. The people at NASA are so good -so dedicated, so fun to be with"

"You can have all your scientific method down, all your experiments done accurately and recorded in minute detail. But most of the significant, universe-changing advances in science were not done by methodically plodding ahead with reasonable steps. Things like Einstein's theory of relativity or the foundations of quantum mechanics came about more as hunches. Scientists talk about a theory being elegant - it just feels right. Sometimes you have to just trust your instincts. People often talk about following your head or your heart, but sometimes there's a deeper feeling you follow. Sometimes you follow your guts, your instincts. Scientists are also trained to do that."

"Observations such as the observer effect of quantum mechanics, psychokenesis, remote viewing, anomalous healing, UFOs, abductions, crop circles, precognition, near-death experiences, reincarnation, mediumship, free energy effects have all been investigated and verified as anomalous. It only takes time to integrate the widely scattered data, but once this is done, some patterns begin to emerge. From all this I proposed that we need a bigger box of scientific inquiry to embrace anomalous phenomena - a new science. Among many of these experiments, I found a common denominator some of us call consciousness."

"This situation is intensified by the fact that, in spite of the appearance of polluted cities of the Third World, the United States continues to lead the way in exploiting the environment. With only five percent of the world’s population, we Americans consume one-fourth of the world’s energy and one-third of its raw materials. I am not proud of this. My own sense of grief is especially heightened by the fact that I am a citizen of the leading polluter nation, as well as being an individual member of a supposedly sentient species which is causing the greatest mass extinction since that of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Most of us are complacent, distracted or conveniently ignorant, in part because of the overwhelming depth of the situation. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us!”"

"My contemplation led to what might be one of the most radical and yet believable (to me) conspiracy theories of all: if we do our healing work well, someone will either point a gun to our heads (and maybe shoot it) or give us a bribe to keep quiet, to cease doing our work if we want to stay alive. Sometimes they can even order us to help them do their dirty work."

"Dear Mr. [Al] Gore: I am a former astronaut, Cornell professor, physics faculty member at Princeton University and visiting faculty member in technology assessment at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, I was Mo Udall’s energy advisor and speechwriter during his 1975 Presidential campaign, author, AAAS Fellow, World Innovation Foundation Fellow, NASA group achievement award recipient, and founder of the New Energy Movement.You have asked the public to address the important question, “How can we reverse global climate change?” I agree that taking on that task is critical for our collective survival. You have also stated that we must freeze and drastically reduce our carbon emissions. I agree.The most promising answer to your question is surprisingly simple and can be summed up in two words: new energy. My experience finds that serious discussion of new energy is still politically incorrect in mainstream circles, which is appalling. Delays in implementing life-saving innovation will be at our collective risk and peril. The urgency for action in these times is unprecedented in the human journey. Quantum leaps in energy innovation, which some of us in the scientific community are aware of, can provide the needed solution, hopefully in time to avert global disaster."

"[…] my basis for confidence in declaring my reality checks as valid is based primarily on observing repeatable, nonlinear electric outputs in many demonstrations and in replicated experiments which I have witnessed. I could not explain the anomalous results in traditional ways. These direct observations combined with a rudimentary theoretical understanding of the physics give me reasonable confidence that the effects both measured and calculated are real. Add to this fact that I am building relationships with these individuals based on growing mutual respect and trust among colleagues. I would be surprised that all of these people, for the years of work they have put into these experiments, are either deliberately or naïvely fraudulent. On the contrary, these are the explorers of a new reality, often cut off from the mainstream, because the mainstream will more often than not debunk this reality, with a denial based on the most superficial and ad hoc reasoning."

"Nuclear power. Carbon sequestration at coal plants. Ethanol-from-corn. Other kinds of biofuels. Carbon cap-and-trading. Hybrid cars. Conventional electric cars. Air cars. Gas-turbine micropower. Efficient powerplants. Hydrogen economy. Hydro-power. Geothermal energy. Solar. Wind. Tides. Waves. Ocean thermal gradients.Which one(s) of these will solve our climate crisis and give us a large and lasting contribution to energy sustainability? The sobering answer to any truthful inquiry, I am sorry to say, is none of the above."

"We must now rewrite the laws of physics so that the results of such experiments are no longer anomalous. In doing so, we must never forget that the “laws” we write are simply reflections of our own current understanding of reality. They must never be confused with reality itself, which is always greater than the words and concepts we use in our attempts to manage it."

"In 1979 Jahn and I began to develop a new mutual interest, although we did not learn of our commonality until several years later. The subject was psychokenesis, and it was so far outside our left-brained aerospace view of reality that it would take several years before either of us felt comfortable speaking about it in public. We were “closet parapsychologists,” afraid to reveal ourselves to the skeptical frowns of our Princeton colleagues. Nevertheless we began, independently, to explore inner space; it was so intriguing and had such a siren’s call to our thirst for understanding that we simply had to heed it, even knowing that the world would look on in disbelief if it were disclosed."