Category: Cosmos
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“The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.”
– Carl Sagan’s Fine Art of Baloney Detection, extracted from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Rules for critical thinking (1 of 10): Carl Sagan developed a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods. But the kit, Sagan argues,…
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“At night the stars put on a show for free … And darling, you can share it all with me”
– Gerry Goffin, Carole King The great song writing duo Goffin and King with Up on the Roof, first recorded by Little Eva, the Drifters and many others. Do the lyrics “evinces a quiet sense of sadness, an urban dissatisfaction that moves beyond anything conceived by the rose-spectacled Tin Pan Alley writers of the early…
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“The wondrous thing about science is that nobody knows the right answer.”
Dr. Becky Smethurst, Astrophysicist. Science Communicator. Author. The full quote from the preface of her book (Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time) is: “The wondrous thing about science is that nobody knows the right answer. This is not how we are taught science as…
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“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_Kennedy_-We_Choose_to_Go_to_the_Moon(29533458786).jpg Speaking of perserverance as I was (see here) the US effort on behalf of mankind in the 60s and 70s shows exactly what humanity is capable of. The video of President Kennedy’s still excites and sets the hair on the back of the neck: Credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th5A6ZQ28pE PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message…
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“Man must rise above the Earth—to the top of the atmosphere and beyond—for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.”
– Socrates (469-399 BC) This quote appears in the Plato’s Dialogue, Phaedo, around 109e. The Greek text is: τὸ δὲ εἶναι ταὐτόν, ὑπ᾽ ἀσθενείας καὶ βραδυτῆτος οὐχ οἵους τε εἶναι ἡμᾶς διεξελθεῖν ἐπ᾽ ἔσχατον τὸν ἀέρα: ἐπεί, εἴ τις αὐτοῦ ἐπ᾽ ἄκρα ἔλθοι ἢ πτηνὸς γενόμενος ἀνάπτοιτο, κατιδεῖν ἂν ἀνακύψαντα, ὥσπερ ἐνθάδε οἱ ἐκ τῆς…
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“… we watched the stars …”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space “Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment, we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but…
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“The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.”
– Lawrence Krauss: “A Universe from Nothing” “… It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution – weren’t created at the beginning of time.”…
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“I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.”
– Stephen Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018) An extract from an interview by Roger Highfield in Daily Telegraph (16 October 2001) where Hawking says, “Colonies in space may be our only hope.” There are certainly a lot of accidents that could befall humanity – and not just the ones we think we…
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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images
For a change of pace, here are several of, the now famous images, taken by the JWST, since its launch on 25 December 2021 at 12:20 pm GMT. JWST took off from the Guiana Space Centre, also called Europe’s Spaceport, a European spaceport to the northwest of Kourou in French Guiana, a region of France in…
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“The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.”
– Richard P. Feynman (11 May 1918 – 15 Feb 1988) What is there to say about Richard Feynman, American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field. His lifelong interest was in subatomic physics. In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in…
Stargazing Guy 