Like no other science, astrophysics cross-pollinates the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists and physicists, all to discover the past, present, and future of the cosmos-and our humble place within it.
There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.
Whether or not you can become great at something, you can always become better.
I think on some level, role models are overrated If you require a role model who looks just like you to be something you wanna be and you can’t find one, is that a reason to not be what you wanna be? No!
In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It’s called the moon illusion.
For centuries, magicians have intuitively taken advantage of the inner workings of our brains.
I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we’re the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.
I never got into ‘Star Wars.’ Maybe because they made no attempt to portray real physics. At all.
After 50 years of television, there’s no other conclusion the aliens could draw, but that most humans are neurotic, death-hungry, dysfunctional idiots.
The persistent failures of controlled, double-blind experiments to support the claims of parapsychology suggest that what’s going on is nonsense rather than sixth sense.
If Mars formed life, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth descended from Martians.
Private enterprise can never lead a space frontier. It’s not possible because a space frontier is expensive, it has unknown risks and it has unquantified risks.
No matter what eyewitness testimony is in the court of law, it is the lowest form of evidence in the court of science.
Emotional truths woven by lawyers in the court of law are apparently more important than the truths of actual events. I have grown to fear for those whose innocence became trapped within the legal system.
To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place. By comparison, human nature-the psychologist’s domain-is infinitely more daunting.
But you will hardly ever read about them. Why? Because once again, the media has predetermined what is not worthy of coverage, even when the news item is something as uninteresting as the cosmic origin of every element in your body.
Perhaps these ancient observatories like Stonehenge perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what’s going on in the sky.
All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.
When you innovate, you create new industries that then boost your economy. And when you create new industries and that becomes part of your culture, your jobs can’t go overseas because no one else has figured out how to do it yet.
We went to the moon and discovered earth.
I think of space not as the final frontier but as the next frontier. Not as something to be conquered but to be explored.