Stars quotes
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"So you used to know everything?" She wrinkled her nose. "Everybody did. I told you. It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play." "To play what?" "This," she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and the shawls and clusters of bright stars."
"That doesn't happen," she explained. "Stars fall. They don't go back up again." "You could be the first," he told her."
"He stared up at the stars, and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does."
"He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity."
"I'm not criticizing the science in Star Wars. That's a waste of everybody's time."
"Trillions of years into the future, when all stars are gone...all parts of the cosmos will cool to the same temperature as the ever-cooling background. At that time, space travel will no longer provide refuge because even Hell will have frozen over. We may then declare that the universe has died-not with a bang, but with a whimper."
"We can trace the elements. They were forged in the centers of high-mass stars that went unstable at the ends of their lives, they exploded, scattered their enriched contents across the galaxy, sprinkled into gas clouds that then collapsed and formed stars and planets and life."
"We only recently figured out the origin of our own moon. And we have some idea of how the Sun and Earth formed, but that's only because modern telescopes empower us to see other stars and planets freshly hatched within gas clouds across the galaxy. As for the origin of life itself, the transition from inanimate molecules to what any of us would call life remains one of the great frontiers of biology."
"There are as many atoms in each molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. This is true for dogs, and bears, and every living thing. We are, each of us, a little universe."
"Once you've got the makings of a star, gravity draws leftover gas and dust into a giant swirling disk. The dust continues to stick together, clumping into rocky asteroids, which eventually become orbiting rocky planets. And voila: a solar system!"
"I didn't even know there were stars to look at to not see. If you don't know that they're there, you don't know that you're missing them."
"I never got into 'Star Wars.' Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all."
"As the plow pushes through a parking lot of light fluffy snow, the snow clumps together in bigger and bigger chunks. Out in space, pressure hitting a gas cloud has a similar effect, except, instead of snowballs, you get stars!"
"In the movie, the stars above the ship bear no correspondence to any constellations in a real sky. Worse yet, while the heroine bobs... we are treated to her view of this Hollywood sky-one where the stars on the right half of the scene trace the mirror image of the stars in the left half. How lazy can you get?"
"The iron from that meteorite and the iron from your blood have common origin in the core of a star."
"For your own safety, do not ever tell an astrophysicist, I hope all your stars are twinkling."
"The universe for me was other planets and other star systems and other galaxies. I enjoyed tracking it, but it had no specific influence on my ambitions for that reason. It wasn't really far enough away from Earth to matter to me."
"If there's some kind of rock star status, would I be irresponsible if I didn't somehow use it for a continued greater good? I'm always involved in some way with reaching the public."
"That the north star is the brightest in the night sky. I'd guess about 9 out of 10 people think this. But it does not require a grant from the National Science Foundation to learn the answer. The North Star is not even in the top 40 in the night sky. It's the 49th brightest star. Rather dull and boring by most measures."
"You were born to rock, you'll never be an opera star."
