Quote of the day, mostly related to astronomy.

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"The great object of all knowledge is to enlarge and purify the soul, to fill the mind with noble contemplations, to furnish a refined pleasure, and to lead our feeble reason from the works of nature up to its great Author and Sustainer. Considering this as the ultimate end of science, no branch of it can surely claim precedence of Astronomy. No other science furnishes such a palpable embodiment of the abstractions which lie at the foundation of our intellectual system; the great ideas of time, and space, and extension, and magnitude, and number, and motion, and power. How grand the conception of the ages on ages required for several of the secular equations of the solar system; of distances from which the light of a fixed star would not reach us in twenty millions of years, of magnitudes compared with which the earth is but a foot-ball; of starry hosts—suns like our own—numberless as the sands on the shore; of worlds and systems shooting through the infinite spaces."
— Edward Everett
Oration at Inauguration of the Dudley Astronomical Observatory, Albany (28 Jul 1856). Text published as The Uses of Astronomy (1856), 36.

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"The knowledge whose content makes up astronomy is the gain from more than 2,000 years’ work on one of the most abundant objects of human knowledge, in which the foremost minds of all times have summoned up all the resources of genius and diligence."
— Carl Friedrich Gauss
From 'Inaugural Lecture on Astronomy', collected in G. Waldo Dunnington (ed.), Carl Friedrich Gauss: Inaugural Lecture on Astronomy and Papers on the Foundations of Mathematics (1937), 49.

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"The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870), 552.

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"The phenomena of nature, especially those that fall under the inspection of the astronomer, are to be viewed, not only with the usual attention to facts as they occur, but with the eye of reason and experience."
— Sir William Herschel
'An Account of Three Volcanoes on the Moon', read before the Royal Society, Philosophical Transactions (1787). Reprinted in Edward Polehampton, The Gallery of Nature and Art; or, a Tour Through Creation and Science (1815), 183.

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"The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strewn with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Essay, 'The Poet', in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Riggs Ferguson (ed.) and Jean Ferguson Carr (ed.), The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume III, Essays: Second Series (1984), 104.

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I love this one!



"The present state of the system of nature is evidently a consequence of what it was in the preceding moment, and if we conceive of an intelligence that at a given instant comprehends all the relations of the entities of this universe, it could state the respective position, motions, and general affects of all these entities at any time in the past or future. Physical astronomy, the branch of knowledge that does the greatest honor to the human mind, gives us an idea, albeit imperfect, of what such an intelligence would be. The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. Man owes that advantage to the power of the instrument he employs, and to the small number of relations that it embraces in its calculations. But ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevents our reaching the same certainty about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining their different degrees of likelihood. So it was that we owe to the weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, the science of chance or probability."
— Pierre-Simon Laplace
'Recherches, 1º, sur l'Intégration des Équations Différentielles aux Différences Finies, et sur leur Usage dans la Théorie des Hasards' (1773, published 1776). In Oeuvres complètes de Laplace, 14 Vols. (1843-1912), Vol. 8, 144-5, trans. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827: A Life in Exact Science (1997), 26.

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"The pursuit of the good and evil are now linked in astronomy as in almost all science. … The fate of human civilization will depend on whether the rockets of the future carry the astronomer’s telescope or a hydrogen bomb."
— Sir Bernard Lovell
In BBC Reith Lecture (30 Nov 1958), 'Astronomy and the State', published as The Individual and the Universe (1959, 1961), 72.

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"The pursuits of the greatest trifles may sometimes have a very good effect. The search after the philosopher’s stone has preserved chemistry; and the following astrology so much in former ages has been the cause of astronomy’s being so much advanced in ours. Sir Isaac Newton himself has owned that he began with studying judicial astrology, and that it was his pursuits of that idle and vain study which led him into the beauties and love of astronomy."
— Antonio Cocchi
As recalled and recorded in Joseph Spence and Edmund Malone (ed.) Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men (1858), 159-160.

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"The sciences are taught in following order: morality, arithmetic, accounts, agriculture, geometry, longimetry, astronomy, geomancy, economics, the art of government, physic, logic, natural philosophy, abstract mathematics, divinity, and history."
— AbulFazl ibn Mubarak
From Ain-i-Akbery (c.1590). As translated from the original Persian, by Francis Gladwin in 'Akbar’s Conduct and Administrative Rules', 'Regulations For Teaching in the Public Schools', Ayeen Akbery: Or, The Institutes of the Emperor Akber (1783), Vol. 1, 290. Note: Akbar (Akber) was a great ruler; he was an enlightened statesman. He instituted a great system for general education

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"There is a strange disparity between the sciences of inert matter and those of life. Astronomy, mechanics, and physics are based on concepts which can be expressed, tersely and elegantly, in mathematical language. They have built up a universe as harmonious as the monuments of ancient Greece. They weave about it a magnificent texture of calculations and hypotheses. They search for reality beyond the realm of common thought up to unutterable abstractions consisting only of equations of symbols. Such is not the position of biological sciences. Those who investigate the phenomena of life are as if lost in an inextricable jungle, in the midst of a magic forest, whose countless trees unceasingly change their place and their shape. They are crushed under a mass of facts, which they can describe but are incapable of defining in algebraic equations."
— Alexis Carrel
Man the Unknown (1935), 1.

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"These neutrino observations are so exciting and significant that I think we're about to see the birth of an entirely new branch of astronomy: neutrino astronomy. Supernova explosions that are invisible to us because of dust clouds may occur in our galaxy as often as once every 10 years, and neutrino bursts could give us a way to study them."
— John N. Bahcall
New York Times (3 Apr 1987)

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"They had neither compass, nor astronomical instruments, nor any of the appliances of our time for finding their position at sea; they could only sail by the sun, moon, and stars, and it seems incomprehensible how for days and weeks, when these were invisible, they were able to find their course through fog and bad weather; but they found it, and in the open craft of the Norwegian Vikings, with their square sails, fared north and west over the whole ocean, from Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen to Greenland, Baffin Bay, Newfoundland, and North America."
— Fridtjof Nansen
In northern mists: Arctic exploration in early times - Volume 1 - Page 248 https://books.google...id=I1ugAAAAMAAJ Fridtjof Nansen - 1911

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"To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts."
— George Santayana
In The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (1896), 100-101.

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"To set foot on the soil of the asteroids, to lift by hand a rock from the Moon, to observe Mars from a distance of several tens of kilometers, to land on its satellite or even on its surface, what can be more fantastic? From the moment of using rocket devices a new great era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament."
— Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
(1896). As quoted in Firmin Joseph Krieger, Behind the Sputniks: A Survey of Soviet Space Science (1958), 23.

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"To what purpose should People become fond of the Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy? … People very readily call Useless what they do not understand. It is a sort of Revenge… One would think at first that if the Mathematicks were to be confin’d to what is useful in them, they ought only to be improv'd in those things which have an immediate and sensible Affinity with Arts, and the rest ought to be neglected as a Vain Theory. But this would be a very wrong Notion. As for Instance, the Art of Navigation hath a necessary Connection with Astronomy, and Astronomy can never be too much improv'd for the Benefit of Navigation. Astronomy cannot be without Optics by reason of Perspective Glasses: and both, as all parts of the Mathematicks are grounded upon Geometry … ."
— Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Of the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning (1699)

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"Undeterred by poverty, failure, domestic tragedy, and persecution, but sustained by his mystical belief in an attainable mathematical harmony and perfection of nature, Kepler persisted for fifteen years before finding the simple regularity [of planetary orbits] he sought… . What stimulated Kepler to keep slaving all those fifteen years? An utter absurdity. In addition to his faith in the mathematical perfectibility of astronomy, Kepler also believed wholeheartedly in astrology. This was nothing against him. For a scientist of Kepler’s generation astrology was as respectable scientifically and mathematically as the quantum theory or relativity is to theoretical physicists today. Nonsense now, astrology was not nonsense in the sixteenth century."
— Eric Temple Bell
In The Handmaiden of the Sciences (1937), 30.

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"We ever long for visions of beauty,
We ever dream of unknown worlds."
— Maxim Gorky
Quoted in Carl Sagan, Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (1979, 1986), 269

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"We should do astronomy because it is beautiful and because it is fun. We should do it because people want to know. We want to know our place in the universe and how things happen."
— John N. Bahcall
From interview in 'A New Decade Dawns for Astronomy', Sky and Telescope (Jan 1990), 79, No. 1, 19. The quote is cited in Current Biography Yearbook (2000), 30.

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"What has been done is little—scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us. Yet it is not to be despised, since by it we reach up groping to touch the hem of the garment of the Most High."
— Agnes Mary Clerke
In A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century (1893), 528. Also quoted in Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (1986), 240.

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"Whatever else astronomy may or may not be who can doubt it to be the most beautiful of the sciences?"
— Isaac Asimov
Epigraph in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 26.