We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?
If I have questions about the universe on my mind when I go to bed, I can’t turn off. I dream equations all night.
As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control. It was a natural next step to want to know how the universe works.
The lesson of the book is that the universe is governed by the laws of science.
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
The Moon is the first milestone on the road to the stars.
I think of space not as the final frontier but as the next frontier. Not as something to be conquered but to be explored.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.
Science is the poetry of reality.
The world and the universe are extremely beautiful places, and the more we understand about them the more beautiful they appear.
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
Scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.
Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.
Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!
I am among those who think that science has great beauty.
I never guess. It is a shocking habit destructive to the logical faculty.