Edwin Hubble

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

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

"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."

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

"...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 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."

"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."

"She deserved the Nobel Prize for her work."

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

"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."