Great Throughts Treasury

"I know a place where the Sun never sets. It’s a mountain, and it’s on the Moon. It sticks up so high that even as the Moon spins, it’s in perpetual daylight. Radiation from the Sun pours down on there day and night, 24 hours a day — well, the Moon’s day is actually about 4 weeks long, so the sunlight pours down there 708 hours a day. I know a place where the Sun never shines. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. A crack in the crust there exudes nasty chemicals and heats the water to the boiling point. This would kill a human instantly, but there are creatures there, bacteria, that thrive. They eat the sulfur from the vent, and excrete sulfuric acid. I know a place where the temperature is 15 million degrees, and the pressure would crush you to a microscopic dot. That place is the core of the Sun. I know a place where the magnetic fields would rip you apart, atom by atom: the surface of a neutron star, a magnetar. I know a place where life began billions of years ago. That place is here, the Earth. I know these places because I’m a scientist. Science is a way of finding things out. It’s a way of testing what’s real. It’s what Richard Feynman called "A way of not fooling ourselves." No astrologer ever predicted the existence of Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. No modern astrologer had a clue about Sedna, a ball of ice half the size of Pluto that orbits even farther out. No astrologer predicted the more than 150 planets now known to orbit other suns. But scientists did. No psychic, despite their claims, has ever helped the police solve a crime. But forensic scientists have, all the time. It wasn’t someone who practices homeopathy who found a cure for smallpox, or polio. Scientists did, medical scientists. No creationist ever cracked the genetic code. Chemists did. Molecular biologists did. They used physics. They used math. They used chemistry, biology, astronomy, engineering. They used science. These are all the things you discovered doing your projects. All the things that brought you here today. Computers? Cell phones? Rockets to Saturn, probes to the ocean floor, PSP, gamecubes, gameboys, X-boxes? All by scientists. Those places I talked about before? You can get to know them too. You can experience the wonder of seeing them for the first time, the thrill of discovery, the incredible, visceral feeling of doing something no one has ever done before, seen things no one has seen before, know something no one else has ever known. No crystal balls, no tarot cards, no horoscopes. Just you, your brain, and your ability to think. Welcome to science. You’re gonna like it here."

"I think the idea behind the campaign is a good one. The problem right now isn?t any scientific debate or controversy, for there isn?t one. Virtually all the doubt and arguing are being instigated by politically motivated groups and do not exist among actual climate scientists. Getting this across to the public is a crucial step in ousting head-in-the-sand politicians and marginalizing the denial groups that are massively overrepresented in the media."

"Expose an irrational belief, keep a man rational for a day. Expose irrational thinking, and keep man rational for a lifetime"

"I am using the word theory as a scientist means it: a set of ideas so well established by observations and physical models that it is essentially indistinguishable from fact. That is different from the colloquial use that means guess. To a scientist, you can bet your life on a theory. Remember, gravity is just a theory too."

"Finally, am I really a bad astronomer? I don't think so! I would say I am an average one. But on these web pages, I'm discussing astronomy that is bad. Hence the name."

"However, science isn't just about showing when you're right; it's also about showing when you're wrong."

"If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War, lumped them together and blew them up at the same time, that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment."

"I?m tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact."

"I'm tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact."

"If you wish to view this as a cautionary tale, be my guest."

"If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae."

"It?s dead obvious that creationism isn?t science, or even bad science. It?s nonsense. But I?ve long stated it?s also bad religion, because it doesn?t just take faith, it also takes a phenomenal disregard of reality."

"It?s amazing to me that not only can we put a probe around Saturn and get images of its moons, but our math and physics are so freaking accurate we can say, "Hey, you know what? On this date at this time if we turn Cassini that way we?ll see a moon over 2 million kilometers away pass in front of another one nearly 3 million kilometers away." Every morning, I have a 50/50 chance of finding my keys. That kinda puts things in perspective."

"Just like people, stars can be important without being terribly bright."

"Other job markets may lay claim to the title, but astronomy is actually the world's oldest profession."

"Standing eggs on end has nothing to do with the time of year, and everything to do with a steady hand, a bumpy egg, and lots of patience."

"Science asymptotically approaches reality"

"Sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs had a bad day."

"Since a lot of people assume I work or worked for NASA, I will add I am not, nor ever have been, a NASA employee, and anything I say, pretty much ever, is not the official word from NASA! I always speak for no one but myself."

"The next thing to do is to put together videos and Web pages that have more humanity to them, more emotion. If you want to sway people, then you can?t just throw facts at them; those will reflect off them and fall away. We know this (for a fact, oddly enough). If the AAAS wants to change the public?s mind on this issue, it will have to connect with their hearts."

"Sure, black holes can kill us, and in a variety of interesting and gruesome ways. But, all in all, we may owe our very existence to them."

"The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote."

"That?s why the American Association for the Advancement of Science?the world?s largest general science society?has put together a public information campaign called ?What We Know.? The motivation behind it is not so much to be a compendium of facts, but instead to ?present key messages for every American about climate change? as a way to hopefully show people the reality of what we?re doing to the Earth."

"The Universe is cool enough without having to make up crap about it."

"They say that even the brightest star won't shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that."

"We are a reflection of the Universe, in that we?re part of it. But the Universe is also a reflection of us, in that we read our own experiences into it? If the Universe indeed mirrors us, than it must be, on some level, just a little bit silly."

"What I have discovered in 20 years of studying the universe, from here to there to everywhere, is that the universe is complicated, and when things happen, it is almost never like ?A happened and therefore B?. No, A happened and therefore B, C, D and E, but then there is this thing F, and that had a 10% effect, and that prompted G to go back and tip over A, and it is always like this ? everything is interconnected. And so a lot of these far-right fundamentalist religion people, and a lot of these people who are anti-global warming, anti-evolution, anti-science, what they do is they take advantage of the fact that things are complicated, and their lives are based on things being simple ? if we do this, then this will happen ? if we invade Iraq, we will be treated as liberators, if we pray, then good things will happen, and this stuff is wrong. But we have a culture where people are brought up to believe in simplicity, and if A then B. And so when you point out that scientists say the earth is warming, but we had a really devastating winter this year, then these people will say ?oh, obviously global warming is wrong?. No, global warming can cause worse winters locally. It?s complicated. But people don?t want to hear ?it?s complicated?, and boy, the conspiracy theorists and anti-scientists take full advantage of that."

"Yet the public still seems to be confused over it, mostly due to the confusion sown by professional confusers. Polls asking the public what degree of consensus climate scientists have about global warming consistently underrate it; the truth is that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that the planet is heating up and that human activity is the cause."