Quotes About Discovery

Across the sea of space. The stars are other suns. We have traveled this way before. And there is much to be learned.

The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question—the search for who we are.

Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed—if they're here, I want to know about them.

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire.

Something very strange is going on in the depths of space.

There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both

That's what this book is about: other worlds, what awaits us on them, what they tell us about ourselves, and - given the urgent problems our species now faces - whether it makes sense to go. Should we solve those problems first? Or are they a reason to go?

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas Ã¢â'¬Â¦Ã¢â'¬Â To the ancient Greeks and Romans, the known world comprised

We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein.

But before the grandeur and intricacy of Nature, he was, like Ptolemy and Kepler, exhilarated as well as disarmingly modest. Just before his death he wrote: "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips out onto the microscope stage. You look at the projected image. The drop is full of life - strange beings swimming, crawling, tumbling; high dramas of pursuit and escape, triumph and tragedy. This is a world populated by beings far more exotic than in any science fiction movie...

Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both for the scientists and for the millions of people in every nation who, while not professional scientists, are deeply interested in the methods and findings of science.

if we have several hundred or several thousand cultures, each with its own cosmology, we should not be astounded if, every now and then, purely by chance, one of them proposes an idea that is not only correct but also impossible for them to have deduced.

Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.

But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.

Tsiolkovsky wrote: "The Earth is the cradle of mankind. But one does not live in the cradle forever.

The universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.

Let's see if I got this right, she would say to herself. I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.

The idea of science as a method rather than as a body of knowledge is not widely appreciated outside of science, or indeed in some corridors inside of science.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter.

Nearly every scientist has experienced, in a moment of discovery or sudden understanding, a reverential astonishment. Science - pure science, science not for any practical application but for its own sake - is a deeply emotional matter for those who practise it, as well as for those nonscientists who every now and then dip in to see what's been discovered lately.