Astronomers From The United States

"We talk about how diversity will open up new possibilities, and she’s a prime example of that. She thinks of stuff that no one has done and does it—pulls it off."

"The link between art and science for me is my love of color and my love of light."

"Imagination is a huge part of what it means to do science, and I often imagine what it would be like to be up close to these environments."

"It’s frustrating for me, when people just talk about things at a superficial level and then try to solve the problem through diversity programs."

"... part of the challenge with astronomy is that images are inherently flat... 3-D models uniquely tap into the human brain’s ability to detect patterns. And so that was the idea behind the 3D printing was to have a new way of visualizing stellar nurseries — visual."

"I grew up in an environment where love for my people and for our culture was expressed all around me. I was raised to identify with Black people around the globe."

"I paint mostly black people because I am black...I think it’s a cultural crisis in America, how people see themselves, and I think that should be an ambition in any art form to uplift people in some way."

"Love is the ultimate thing, I want that to be the connection between everything I do: science, art, or otherwise."

"It’s the strangeness of the universe that has always been my favorite part of physics."

"Astronomers are experts on understanding what light is. We can’t touch or sense most of the objects that we study, other than from the light that we receive from them."

"We can never make assumptions about the entire universe based on what’s happening in our own backyard...we don’t want to have a theory of star formation just for the Milky Way — we want a universal theory."

"One strong motivation [for painting portraits] has been wanting to portray Black people in all the beauty that I see in them...I take a lot of joy in that."

"Now, most astronomers hate dust; dust can dim the light from background stars and galaxies that we're trying to observe. But I love dust. Stellar nurseries are dusty. And we can use our knowledge of dust to understand the structure of molecular clouds. Stellar nurseries are threaded by these long, dense noodlelike structures called filaments. Embedded within filaments are these compact knots of gas called cores — the final stage before star formation."

"[T]here's a 3rd impossibility. In order to get this stuff out of a black hole, it's going to come out half matter and half antimatter, because the... fireball has to be all , and when radiation cools off to material particles... 50/50 matter and antimatter. ...So now it's impossibility cubed. Do I need to any further?"

"[E]ven if you did get nothing to make everything out of nothing, you still have the difficulty that it's in a black hole. Getting it out of a black hole is the second impossibility. We now have impossibility squared."

"[W]e used to consider that no matter how many evidences in favor of your model, [if] you have... one evidence against you, and you're dead."

"The Big Bang people wanted to get everything out of nothing. They want us to believe that nothing made everything out of nothing."

"I like to make fun of the Big Bang. I'm allergic to the Big Bang."

"You can't persuade a kid that nothing made everything out of nothing. ...It's impossible to get everything out of nothing."

"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."

"[R]adiation... through a field of low-mass particles would be so often picked up and reradiated that it would be thermalized to 3° Kelvin and... appear as the background radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1965."

"Radiation] of matter near the border... would be red-shifted (lowered in frequency)... But if the energy of the radiation of... particles is lowered, so too is the energy of the particles... and therefore also their . (...Einstein's 1905 equations ...)"

"[I]f the mass of the particles approaches zero, their must... approach zero... [B]y Heisenberg's uncertainty principle... if we... know the momentum... we cannot know that it's at the border... its position."

"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."

"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."

"The observable Universe has a border... fifteen billion light years distant in all directions, imposed... by... "the expansion." ...At [the border distant objects] ...are estimated ...receding at the speed of light. ...[T]his apparent "expansion" ...imposes a border ...because things receding faster than ...light are not observable. ...[I]f the rate of expansion ...increased, the border would ...be closer."

"[I]f the particles... recycle by "tunneling" back into the observable Universe as (with its ... restored)... the entropy of the... Universe might not increase."

"So if we confine ourselves to the observational evidence... all those distant galaxies appear to be running away from us, and the farther away we look, the faster they appear to be running away... [A]lthough the simplest explanation is long ago there was this explosion... all we know is... the ... something that happens in radiation."

"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.""

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"A is just a pile of stuff."

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

"He is portrayed as a galactic Pied Piper, luring followers with enthusiasm and charm, coaxing them on a journey to the heavens."

"A specific type of Alt-Az mount is called a Dobsonian mount, named after John Dobson... a cofounder of the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers in 1967 and an avid promoter of bringing the wonders of astronomy to the people. ...The Dobsonian mount is simple (two basic pieces - tube and base), stable, and low cost."

"[Y]ou need to make telescopes so you can see what's going on out there. You can't see it any other way. Watching TV doesn't do it. They get all mixed up when they run the TV, and they get you all mixed up if you're not careful."

"[A] side to Dobson’s work that makes... scientists, uncomfortable."

"Galaxies are formed when clouds of fall together... The clouds, unlike the stars, are large with respect to the spaces between them... So the [cloud] particles of each collide... and... scramble their motions to . ...energy of falling is transformed to heat. ...[T]he entropy has gone up."

"If the amateurs don't get their telescopes out for the public, nobody will! The professionals make telescopes for the professionals. We sidewalk astronomers make telescopes for the rest of you."

"Dobson believes scientists are making a mistake by limiting themselves to conventional measurements of space and time. Such... he insists, have hit a roadblock. Researchers should, he says, add philosophy and metaphysics into their equations."

"Dobson tried this argument out on the physics department at , referring to his model of the universe... "I’ll admit... this is way out in left field." ...[P]rofessors and students fidgeted through the lecture. Several walked out... Afterward came... "What you’re talking about isn’t physics." "Nobody is going to listen... until you can come up with... numbers.""

"Dobson’s original design is fundamentally excellent. What I have done is taken Dobson’s concepts and tried to realize their full potential."

"Dobson is a visionary. With his home-built telescopes, he smashed traditional "small" expectations for amateur instruments. ...John Dobson pointed the way to today’s dream telescopes."

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

"But if you don't know about that... when a fire engine is coming toward you the bell has a high pitch, and when goes past you it goes away with a low pitch. Ding, ding, ding... The reason that it slurs like that, is because the fire engine missed you."

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

"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?"

"I was in ... and they've had star parties on the dark of the moon... probably for 100 years... Run off to the wilderness with their telescopes so they can lick their chops and go to bed. And now on the next week, when there is a quarter moon, they have a public star party in the old in Seattle, and they blame that one on me. But they get quite a number of telescopes... and several hundred people looking... A lot of amateurs do this kind of thing now. We sidewalk astronomers used to do it on every clear night, but... I can't do that any more. They run me all over the place in a plane."

"I was asked to give a talk... [by] the lady at the pretzel farm in Sierra... You understand a pretzel farm, where all those folded s are? ...[T]he lady ...asked me to give a talk on frustration. ...I said I was walking down through ... in Los Angeles in the winter... the rainy season, and there's this little stream of water coming along beside me... I was thinking that the poets say it will be happy when it reaches the sea. But the poets are wrong... The sea is trying desperately to get to the center of the earth, and the rocks are in the way, and it gets frustrated. ...So the rocks are trying desperately to get to the center of the earth, and the iron of the earth's core is in the way, and the rocks get frustrated. And the iron at the earth's core is trying desperately to fall into the sun, and its inertia is in the way, and it goes round and round... 18 miles a second, and it gets frustrated. And the sun is trying desperately to get to the center of the galaxy, and its inertia, the way it goes around 150 miles a second, and it gets frustrated. And the galaxy has been trying to merge with all the rest of the matter of the observable universe, but the expansion is in the way, and it gets frustrated. And the expansion has been trying to reduce the density of the universe, but the recycling is in the way, and it gets frustrated."