Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

"There seems to be a mysterious force in the universe, one that overwhelms gravity on the grandest scale to push the cosmos apart. . . . We call it "dark energy," but that name, like "dark matter," is merely a code word for our ignorance. It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there."

"The difference between seeing nothing but a pebble and reading the history of the cosmos inscribed inside it is science. (Discussing a slow-growing manganese nodule from the ocean floor which shows that a star near the Earth went supernova within the last two million years or so.)"

"There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the Pale Blue Dot, the only home we've ever known. (Recording of Carl Sagan's voice over a re-imagining of the "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth taken by Voyager 1.)"

"How did we escape from the prison [of ignorance]? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart. (1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me. Think for yourself. Question yourself. (2) Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so. (3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong! Get over it. (4) Follow the evidence, wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment. And perhaps the most important rule of all: (5) Remember, you could be wrong."

"Open your eyes, and open your imagination. The next great discovery could be yours. - U.S. President Barack Obama, introducing the series premiere."

"What Cosmos has, at its heart, is hope. It's about the future we could have if we get our act together. - Ann Druyan, writer for both the 1980 Cosmos and the 2014 Cosmos, as well as an executive producer and director for the 2014 Cosmos."

"Civilization {should know} how to preserve itself. That's a good measure of intelligence, isn't it? Seeing what you're doing that's bad, and fixing that problem. - Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, series presenter / host."

"The important thing is not to suppress ideas. Freedom of thought is the life blood of science. That’s why {Giordano} Bruno’s story is important. - Astrophysicist Steven Soter, writer for both the 1980 Cosmos and the 2014 Cosmos."

"We've reached a point in time where we've gotten a little lax with our enthusiasm about science and our thirst for knowledge. . . . I hope that this Cosmos can instigate a reawakening of the same enthusiasm for science that the original Cosmos brought. - Seth MacFarlane, series executive producer."

"My greatest hope for this new Cosmos is that it has the same impact on someone, somewhere that the original had on me. Because it inspired in me a great interest in science, and in my case, science fiction. - Brannon Braga, series executive producer."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"In the observed universe, everyone gets to feel special . . . at the center of the cosmic horizon. . . . It's what you get when you have a finite speed of light in a universe that had a beginning in time."

"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."

"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."

"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)."

"[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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"[[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."

"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."

"Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature will not be fooled."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."