Quote collection
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"We're quite happy with our Big Bang description of cosmic origins. But actually, the Big Bang accounts for what happened only after the beginning. The beginning itself, and especially what happened before, remains the biggest mystery of all."
"People think about life from day-to-day rather than thinking about life as something that invents a new kind of tomorrow."
"Deep down within anyone there's a flame that maybe had gone dormant that can be fanned or ignited in case it had blown out. This is the flame of curiosity, the flame of wonder, of awe, of all the things that make you want to learn something more tomorrow than you knew today."
"The number of people in the world engaged in this search for catastrophic impactors totals one or two dozen. How long into the future are you willing to protect Homo sapiens on Earth? Before you answer that question, take a detour to Arizona's Meteor Crater during your next vacation."
"The telescope... is a conduit to the cosmos."
"With automatic spell checkers running unleashed over what we compose, our era is that of correctly spelled typos."
"Wanna lose 1200 Calories a month? Drink a liter of ice water a day. You burn the energy just raising the water to body temp."
"I suppose I can live with missing decimals, missing floors to tall buildings, and floors that are named instead of numbered. A more serious problem is the limited capacity of the human mind to grasp the relative magnitudes of large numbers. Counting at the rate of one number per second...to count to a trillion takes 32,000 years, which is as much time as has elapsed since people first drew on cave walls."
"If NASA were advancing a space frontier there would be challenges you've never seen before. You have to be creative and you have to patent some new idea. You get to Mars...well, how do we get the water from the soil? I gotta invent a new device that will do that. And the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, how can we use that? Can we breathe the oxygen from the carbon dioxide?"
"When NASA dreams big America dreams big. People...kids say, 'I want to do that when I grow up'. Because you want to do what's visible to you."
"You can't have people making decisions about the future of the world who are scientifically illiterate. That's a recipe for disaster. And I don't mean just whether a politician is scientifically literate, but people who vote politicians into office."
"My goal is not to shove information into your head. It's to find ways to reignite the curiosity that we all had as children for the natural world. You don't have to tell a child to explore the backyard."
"How many times have you heard a person in a workplace say, "I wasn't trained for this!" That's an impossible reaction from a physicist, who would say, instead, "Cool. A problem I've never seen before. Let's see how I can figure out how to solve it!""
"... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance."
"Our nation is turning into an idiocracy."
"You say you're worried about kids? I'm not worried about kids, I'm worried about grown ups... Children are not the problem here... We spend the first year of their lives teaching them how to walk and talk, and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down."
"What would aliens say when told earthlings shift clocks twice a year to fool themselves into thinking there's more sunlight?"
"What I’m saying is, when different experiments give you the same result, it is no longer subject to your opinion. That’s the good thing about science: It’s true whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works."
"Right now people think God is dark energy and dark matter, the spirit. Go ahead and think that, but the day we can tell you exactly what it is - that it's gremlins in the vacuum of space or whatever - then what's your recourse at that point?"
"The universe is almost 14 billion years old, and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I think it would be inexcusably egocentric of us to suggest that we're alone in the universe."