Quotes About Discovery

How do you study something that cannot possibly get your clothes dirty? How do astrophysicists know anything about either the universe or its contents if all the objects to be studied are light-years away? Fortunately, the light emanating from a star reveals much more to us than its position in the sky or how bright it is.

A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose.

You can not become a scientist if you require that every question has an answer because its the very questions that have no answer that attract you to a laboratory every single day.

Sir William Herschel was the first person to discover a planet beyond those easily visible to the naked eye, and he was ready to name it after the King—always a safe bet when you are his subject. Had Sir William succeeded, the planet list would read: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and George.

We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and

Uranus was almost named George.

We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it. One might even say that the universe has empowered us, here in our small corner of the cosmos, to figure itself out. And we have only just begun.

What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning. The universe continues to evolve. And yes, every one of our body's atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago. We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out—and we have only just begun.

El problema de no advertir la cultura propia es uno de los grandes placeres de viajar al extranjero: descubrir lo que uno no ha visto en el propio país y advertir lo que los demás no conocen acerca de ellos mismos.

We embark on this quest not from a simple desire, but from a mandate of our species to search for our place in the cosmos. The quest is old, not new. And has garnered the attention of thinkers great and small, across time and across culture. What we have discovered, the poets have known all along.

Within the chemically rich liquid oceans, by a mechanism yet to be discovered, organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life.

Aluminum occupies nearly ten percent of Earth's crust yet was unknown to the ancients and unfamiliar to our great-grandparents. The element was not isolated and identified until 1827 and did not enter common household use until the late 1960s, when tin cans and tin foil yielded to aluminum cans and, of course, aluminum foil. (I'd bet most old people you know still call the stuff tin foil.)

The National Air and Space Museum is unlike any other place on this planet. If you're hosting visitors from another country and they want to know what single museum best captures what it is to be American, this is the museum you take them to. Here they can see the 1903 Wright Flyer, the 1927 Spirit of St. Louis, the 1926 Goddard rocket, and the Apollo 11 command module—silent beacons of exploration, of a few people willing to risk their lives for the sake of discovery. Without

ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist.

It is often true that groundbreaking discoveries are made from poor data at the leading edge

Decade by decade: estimates of Pluto's size got smaller and smaller.

People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe. What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning.

In short, were it not for our ability to analyze spectra, we would know next to nothing about what goes on in the universe.

The universe is knowable...

The universe is knowable and what one need not apeal to mystical, magical forces to account for things

Thus, helium became the first and only element in the chemist's Periodic Table to be discovered someplace other than Earth.

I don't know how Albert would have felt about this, but an unknown element was discovered in the debris of the first hydrogen bomb test in the Eniwetok atoll in the South Pacific, on November 1, 1952, and was named einsteinium in his honor. I might have named it armageddium instead.

Sir William Herschel was the first person to discover a planet beyond those easily visible to the naked eye, and he was ready to name it after the King—always a safe bet when you are his subject. Had Sir William succeeded, the planet list would read: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and George. Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed and the classical name Uranus was adopted some years later.

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices. JAMES FERGUSON, 1757†