Quote collection
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"I think we are all the sum of that which has happened in our lives. And if you're successful, it would be wrong to think that you'd be more successful had something been easier. That's not a given."
"You don't take a dead cat to the vet. I mean you might, but why?"
"When your reasons for believing something are justified ad hoc, you are left susceptible to further discoveries undermining the rationale for that belief."
"Space in general gave us GPS - that's not specifically NASA, but it's investments in space."
"We went to the moon using just Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Newtonian dynamics we call it. So then we find out, "Well, this works because there's certain regimes we've never tested it in." Had we done so, we would show that it didn't work: For example, at very high speeds, very high gravity, Newton's laws fail. They just fail. You need Einstein's laws of motion and gravity. Those would be his special theory of relativity and general theory of relativity. Now you invoke those and it works."
"The whole society has to recognize the importance of the value in embracing what science is going into the 21st Century. Otherwise, we might as well start packing and moving back into the cave right now, because that's where we'll end up."
"But you will hardly ever read about them. Why? Because once again, the media has predetermined what is not worthy of coverage, even when the news item is something as uninteresting as the cosmic origin of every element in your body."
"Like a snowplow in overdrive, a supernova shockwave might sweep away any gas clouds in its path."
"I am not the most annoying person to bring to a movie 'cause I basically hold it in and write about it later or tweet about it. The most annoying people to bring to movies, I think we all agree, are those who read the book first."
"And extracting one molecule's signature in spectral analysis from the rest of the signatures is hard work, sort of like picking out the sound of your toddler's voice in a roomful of screaming children during playtime. It's hard, but you can do it."
"If something comes up that is completely freaky, it's spiritual-looking to the scientist, the first explanation is not going to be that it's God, because the history of that has failed. It would have to be, like, the hundredth explanation."
"Astrophysicists perfected navigation. We perfected all these things that matter to the power of nations manifest on the world stage. So we want to go into space. That's the new high ground, right? We care about multispectral imaging of things. Well, that's what reconnaissance wants to do. So our expertise has been in bed with national security needs forever. So maybe, secretly, that's why they keep us employed."
"I love the future we might invent for ourselves that I have not yet dreamt of."
"I can tell you that in my modern life I enjoy language. I enjoy words, their meaning, what they sound like to the ear, what they sound like to the listener. I strive to write the perfect sentence in all that I do, and when I write [the] perfect sentence I know it. If I had a second life I'd be a librettist for Broadway musicals."
"When you innovate no one else can figure out how to do what you're doing because you're too far ahead of them. And the day they do figure out, you're on to the next object, the next widget, the next concept in innovation. And so America has benefited economically from the space race even though it was driven by military."
"The urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents had radios that was furniture in the living room. Nobody at the time was saying, 'Gee, I want to carry that in my pocket.' Which is a non-thought."
"For me, the most fascinating interface is Twitter. I have odd cosmic thoughts every day and I realized I could hold them to myself or share them with people who might be interested."
"Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct."
"I'm fascinated by the deaths of stars and the havoc they wreak on their environments."
"The remarkable feature of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion."