Quotes About Telescopes

Because of Hubble and other telescopes, we've now discovered that there are probably planets around every star, or virtually every star. There are solar systems around most stars. And the fact that we're here on a planet, Earth, means that it's likely there's lots of other Earths out there.

It bears mentioning that the Milky Way is only one of 150 billion galaxies visible to our telescopes - and each of these will have its own complement of planets.

Everything we know about the universe is studied by using telescopes or other instruments that look at visible light, infrared, ultraviolet or X-ray - different wavelengths of electromagnetic interactions. Only 4 percent of what's in the universe gives off electromagnetic radiation, so we don't have any handle on the rest.

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.

I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.

When the revolutionaries of the early modern world peered through their telescopes into the night sky, the first thing they saw was injustice on earth.

I had a hunch. Officially, scientists don't work on hunches. We work on hypotheses and observations and plenty of evidence. Hunches don't get you research funding, tenure at your university, or access to the world's largest telescopes. But a hunch was all I had.