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"[Faraday's] fellow scientists . . . needed to see his ideas expressed in the language of modern physics - precise equations. [Then] James Clerk Maxwell . . . translated Faraday's experimental observations on electromagnetic fields into equations [and helped transform] human civilization from a patchwork of cities, towns and villages into an intercommunicating organism linking us at light speed to each other and to the cosmos."

"The essential message of life has been copied and recopied for more than 3 billion years. But where did that message come from? Nobody knows. Perhaps it began in a shallow, sunlit pool, just like this. . . . Or life could've started in the searing heat of a volcanic vent on the deep sea floor. Or is it possible that life came to Earth as a hitchhiker?"

"We've encoded our stories in radio waves and beamed them into space . . . for over 70 years. [And [[w:Search for extraterrestrial intelligence | since] 1960, we've been listening for extraterrestrial radio signals]] without hearing so much as a tolling bell. . . . For all we know, we may have just missed an alien signal. [Or perhaps a civilization] even slightly more advanced than ours may have already moved on to some other mode of communication."

"Whether or not we ever make contact with intelligent alien life may depend on a critical question: What is the life expectancy of a civilization? . . . Today, we have a single global civilization. How long will it live? . . . We're pumping greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere at a rate not seen on Earth for a million years. And there's scientific consensus that we're destabilizing our climate."

"Few animals larger than a hundred pounds survived the catastrophes of the late Cretaceous. The dust cloud brought night and cold to the surface for months. The dinosaurs froze and starved to death. But there were small creatures who took shelter in the Earth. And when they emerged they found that the monsters who had hunted and terrorized them were gone. The Earth was becoming the Planet of the Mammals. And the Earth continued its ceaseless changing."

"Two-thirds of the Earth lies beneath more than 1,000 feet of water. It's a vast and largely unexplored frontier. . . . This is the longest submarine mountain range in the world, the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge. It wraps around our globe like the seam on a baseball. The past is another planet, but most of us don't really know this one."

"The way the planets tug at each other, the way the skin of the Earth moves, the way those motions affect climate and the evolution of life and intelligence - they all combined to give us the means to turn the mud of those river deltas into the first civilizations."

"The psychedelic death shrouds of ordinary stars are fleeting, lasting only tens of thousands of years. . . . The stars in a binary star system . . . [like] Sirius [and its companion] white dwarf [will create numerous novae as the system ages]. . . . A star about 15 times as massive as the Sun - one like Rigel - [will ignite] a more powerful nuclear reaction, a supernova [which will result in a pulsar]. . . . [F]or a star more than 30 times as massive as the Sun - a star like Alnilam, in Orion's Belt - [its supernova will create] a black hole. . . . [Finally, when a supermassive star like the largest in the Eta Carinae system] goes, it won't become a mere nova or supernova. It will become something far more catastrophic - a hypernova. And it could happen in our lifetime. . . . Earth will be just fine. . . . But still, Eta Carinae in its death throes will . . . light up the night of the southern hemisphere with the brightness of a second Moon."

"[Currently] our Sun is poised in a stable equilibrium between gravity and nuclear fire. . . . [F]our or five billion years from now . . . it will become bloated [and] will envelop and devour the planets Mercury and Venus and possibly the Earth. [Finally it will shrink] a hundredfold to the size of the Earth [and will be] a white dwarf star."

"[D]uring the Carboniferous Period, the atmosphere had almost twice the oxygen as today. Insects could then grow much bigger and still get enough oxygen in their bodies. That's why the dragonflies here are as big as eagles and the millipedes the size of alligators."

"Congratulations. You're alive. There's an unbroken thread that stretches across more than three billion years that connects us to the first life that ever touched this world. Think of how tough, resourceful and lucky all of our countless ancestors must have been to survive long enough to pass on the message of life to the next and the next and the next generation, hundreds of millions of times before it came to us. . . . Each of us is a runner in the longest and most dangerous relay race there ever was, and at this moment, we hold the baton in our hands."

"For thousands of generations we watched the stars as if our lives depended on it, because they did. . . . [O]ur ancestors noticed that the motions of the stars across the nights of the year foretold changes on Earth that threatened or enhanced our chances for survival."

"Are there any mementos from when the Earth was born, objects that could possibly tell us its true age? I know a place where the unused bricks and mortar left over from the creation of our solar system can be found. It lies between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars."

"[The Harvard Observatory Computers included] Annie Jump Cannon, the leader of the team [who eventually] catalogued a quarter of a million stars, [and] Henrietta Swan Leavitt [who] discovered the law that astronomers still use more than a century later to measure the distances to the stars. . . . [Cannon provided classification data to Cecilia Payne, whose] "Stellar Atmospheres" is widely regarded as the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy."

"What better way to find the true age of the Earth than with the uranium atom? If you knew what fraction of the uranium in a rock had turned into lead, you could calculate how much time had passed since the rock was formed."

"Now at last, Patterson was ready to tackle the iron meteorite, to find the true age of the Earth. [He discovered that the] world is four and a half billion years old. . . . His reward for this discovery? A world of trouble."

"There are many kinds of stars. Some are bright like the Sun. Some are dim. The greatest stars are ten million times larger than the smallest ones. Some stars are old beyond imagining, more than ten billion years of age. Others are being born right now. When atoms fuse in the hearts of stars, they make starlight. Stars are born in litters, formed from the gas and dust of interstellar clouds."

"I could be thousands of miles away, and yet, when you turn on whatever device is bringing my image and voice to you, I'm there. Instantaneously. How is that possible? . . . It all began in the mind of one person. . . . This is the story of how we learned to make electrons do our bidding."

"The chloroplast is a three billion year-old solar energy collector. This sub-microscopic solar battery is what drives all the forests, and the fields, and the plankton of the seas, and the animals, including us."

"You never know where the next genius will come from. How many of them do we leave in the rubble? The prince and his kingdom were immeasurably enriched by that act of kindness to a poor orphan."

"Thales kindled a flame that still burns to this day: the very idea of cosmos out of chaos, a universe governed by the order of natural laws that we can actually figure out. This is the epic adventure that began in the mind of Thales."

"[The scientific method is so] powerful that it has carried our robotic emissaries to the edge of the solar system and beyond. It has doubled our lifespan, made the lost worlds of the past come alive. Science has enabled us to predict events in the distant future and to communicate with each other at the speed of light, as I am with you, right at this moment."

"Show me the spectrum of anything, whether here on Earth or from a distant star, and I'll tell you what it's made of. Fraunhofer's lines are the atomic signatures of the elements writ large across the cosmos. As with every other major revelation in the history of science, it opened the way to newer and deeper mysteries."

"Confining our perception of nature to visible light is like listening to music in only one octave."

"The nucleus is very small compared to the rest of the atom. If an atom were the size of this cathedral, its nucleus would be the size of that mote of dust."

"Black holes may very well be tunnels through the universe. [If you could somehow survive the ride on] this intergalactic subway system, you could travel to the farthest reaches of spacetime, or you might arrive in someplace even more amazing. We might find ourselves in an altogether different universe."

"Nature commands, "Thou shalt not add my speed to the speed of light." . . . For reality to be logically consistent, there must be a cosmic speed limit."

"The age and size of the cosmos are written in light. The nature of beauty and the substance of the stars, the laws of space and time they were there all along, but we never saw them until we devised a more powerful way of seeing."

"In China, more than 2,000 years ago, a philosopher named Mo Tzu is said to have observed that light could be made to paint a picture inside a locked treasure room. This was the description of the first camera: the camera obscura, the prototype of all image-forming cameras (including the one that's bringing you this picture)."

"There are more atoms in your eye than there are stars in all the galaxies in the known universe."

"[The Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detector] is a trap designed to catch neutrinos only. Other particles, such as cosmic rays . . . cannot get through all that rock above us. But matter poses no obstacle to a neutrino. A neutrino could pass through a hundred light years of steel without even slowing down."

"[[w:Tetraethyllead | [T]etraethyl lead]] could be marketed as an anti-knock additive to gasoline [but a] half a cup of it on your skin could kill you. . . . What was needed was a man of science to calm the public's fears and improve lead's image. . . . This was one of the first times that the authority of science was used to cloak a threat to public health and the environment."

"This was the first motor converting electric current into continuous mechanical motion. Looks pretty feeble, right? But that turning spindle is the beginning of a revolution, one that dwarfs all the shots fired and bombs ever detonated in the sheer magnitude of its effect on our civilization."

"Newton's laws made it possible for Edmond Halley to see some 50 years into the future and predict the behavior of a single comet."

"Newton's Principia Mathematica set us free. . . . By finding the natural laws governing the comings and goings of comets, he decoupled the motions of the heavens from their ancient connections to our fears."

"Using nothing more than Newton's laws of gravitation, we astronomers can confidently predict that several billion years from now our home galaxy - the Milky Way - will merge with our neighboring galaxy - Andromeda. . . . Any life on the worlds of that far off future . . . would be treated to an amazing billion-year-long light show; a dance of a half a trillion stars, to music first heard on one little world, by a man who had but one true friend."

"This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules: (1) Test ideas by experiment and observation (2) Build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail (3) Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and (4) Question everything. Accept these terms, and the cosmos is yours."

"Many of us suspect that all of this - all the worlds, stars, galaxies and clusters in our observable universe - is but one tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes; a multiverse. Universe upon universe; worlds without end."

"Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher; a community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars."

"Does the fact that most of us know the names of mass murderers but never heard of Jan Oort say anything about us?"

"When [the light we see today] left the Pleiades, about 400 years ago, Galileo was taking his first look through a telescope."

"This is a story about you . . . and me . . . and your dog."

"Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. We're not afraid to admit what we don't know. There's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers."

"[On] Titan, Saturn's giant moon . . . the seas and the rain are made not of water but of methane and ethane. . . . [W]e can imagine other kinds of life. There might be creatures that inhale hydrogen instead of oxygen. And exhale methane instead of carbon dioxide. They might use acetylene instead of sugar as an energy source."

"No matter where he searched on Earth, no matter how far he traveled back in time, the . . . naturally occurring [lead] levels in the air and water in the past were far lower. . . . [[w:Clair Cameron Patterson#Campaign against lead poisoning | Patterson fought the industry for [more than] 20 years]] before lead was finally banned in US [gasoline and other] consumer products."

"Some stars are so far away, it takes eons for their light to get to Earth. By the time the light from some stars gets here, they are already dead. For those stars, we see only their ghosts."

"Stars . . . get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All of it was cooked in the fiery hearts of long-vanished stars. You, me, everyone: we are made of star stuff."

"Every person you've ever heard of lived somewhere in there [pointing]. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, everything in the history books happened here in the last seconds of the Cosmic Calendar."

"Like Babe Ruth predicting where his next home run would land in the stands, Halley stated flatly that the comet would return at the end of 1758, from a particular part of the sky, following a specific path."

"By age 40, [Michael Faraday] had invented the electric motor, the transformer, the generator; machines that would change everything about the home, the farm, the factory. Now, at 60 . . . plagued by memory loss and melancholy, he fearlessly probed deeper into the mysterious invisible forces. . . . Having discovered the unity of electricity, magnetism and light, Faraday needed to know how this trinity of natural forces work together."