The German physicist Max Planck, after whom these unimaginably small quantities are named, introduced the idea of quantized energy in 1900 and is generally credited as the father of quantum mechanics.
Dark matter particles should be passing through your body right now.
If you must know, the brightest star in the nighttime sky is Sirius, the Dog Star.
When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them.
Yet every now and then, even a scientist can’t help thinking of the Periodic Table as a zoo of one-of-a-kind animals conceived by Dr. Seuss.
We begin with the stars, then ascend up and away out to the galaxy, the universe, and beyond. What did Buzz Lightyear say in Toy Story? “To Infinity and Beyond!” It’s a big universe. I.
First of all, as you know, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide everyone into two kinds of people and those who don’t. But actually, there are three kinds of people in the world: those who are good at math and those who aren’t.
People who navigate by the stars know that the altitude of Polaris you observe is equal to your latitude on Earth.
The first trillionaire will be the person who exploits space resources on asteroids, on comets...
You can picture the universe as an enormous loaf of raisin bread rising in the oven.
As a scientist, you must embrace the inconstancy of knowledge.
In our own solar system, for example, everything that is not the Sun adds up to less than one fifth of one percent of the Sun’s mass.
The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual – even redemptive – but not religious. The cosmic perspective enables us to grasp, in the same thought, the large and the small. The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told.
In a trillion or so years, anyone alive in our own galaxy may know nothing of other galaxies. Our observable universe will merely comprise a system of nearby, long-lived stars within the Milky Way. And beyond this starry night will lie an endless void – darkness in the face of the deep.
Merlin prefers to think of space as the regions between all the particles of all the atoms of the universe.
Can space exist in the absence of matter, if matter defines the edge of space?” Merlin.
America will aim no higher than the creation and aggressive marketing of minor consumer products that replace similar, and perfectly satisfactory, consumer products. “America may be losing a competitive edge in many enterprises, from cars to space,” riffed National Public Radio host Scott Simon in the summer of 2010, “but as long as we can devise a five-bladed, mineral-oil-saturated razor, we face the future well-shaved.
At the altitude of about 23,000 miles the satellite takes 23 hours and 56 minutes to orbit Earth. Earth takes 23 hours and 56 minutes to rotate.
If aliens ever give us a call, the Chinese will be the first to know.
If a particle can fall into a black hole, it can come out of a white hole.