There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history. John D Barrow, The Book of Universes
With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress. Kurt Vonnegut
What grander idea can the mind of man form to itself than a prodigious, glorious and fiery globe hanging in the midst of an infinite and boundless space surrounded with bodies of whom our earth is scarcely any thing in comparison, moving their rounds about its body and held tight to their respective orbits by the attractive force inherent to it while they are suspended in the same space by the Creator’s almighty arm! And then let us cast our eyes up to the spangled canopy of heaven, where innumerable luminaries at such an immense distance from us cover the face of the skies. All suns as great as that which illumines us, surrounded with earths perhaps no way inferior to the ball which we inhabit and no part of the amazing whole unfilled! System running into system, and worlds bordering on worlds! Sun, earth, moon, stars be ye made, and they were made! Edmund Burke, age 15 praising ‘noble science’ of astronomy
We live in a changing universe, and few things are changing faster than our conception of it. Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang
Telescopes are in some ways like time machines. They reveal galaxies so far away that their light has taken billions of years to reach us. We in astronomy have an advantage in studying the universe, in that we can actually see the past.
We owe our existence to stars, because they make the atoms of which we are formed. So if you are romantic you can say we are literally star-stuff. If you’re less romantic you can say we’re the nuclear waste from the fuel that makes stars shine.
We’ve made so many advances in our understanding. A few centuries ago, the pioneer navigators learnt the size and shape of our Earth, and the layout of the continents. We are now just learning the dimensions and ingredients of our entire cosmos, and can at last make some sense of our cosmic habitat. Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal
It’s amazing to me that we humans have the intellectual capacity to ask deep questions and to devise methods for learning how the universe works and how its contents evolve with time. Alex Filippenko
How glorious, then, appears the mind of man,
When in it all the stars, and planets, roll.
And what it seems, it is: great objects make
Great minds. Edward Young, Night Thoughts, 1742-5
American astronomers say they have made the discovery of the century. They’ve found evidence to confirm how the universe developed. Data from a NASA satellite has revealed immense faint ripples in the level background radiation on the edge of space. BBC News 23rd April 1992
April 12th 1633 ... In Rome 70-year-old Galileo Galilei is on trial for heresy. Days That Shook the World s2e6: Reach For the Stars, BBC 2004
There can be no ultimate proof of God’s design. ibid. Pope to Galileo
The Dialogue is being printed, not in Rome but in Florence. ibid.
The Inquisition makes its intentions unmistakably clear. ibid.
The Dialogue is banned by the Catholic Church, and will remain so for the next two hundred years. ibid.
April 12th 1961 ... In the USSR a human being prepares to leave the planet. ibid.
Just six months ago 190 engineers perished when a rocket misfired. Rocket design is still in its infancy. ibid.
The flight is designed to be fully automatic. ibid.
At twenty times the speed of sound Gagarin slips silently into darkness. ibid.
The Space Race has begun. ibid.
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe. Jimmy Carter
The universe was an expanding structure – galaxies flying away from each other, flying away from each other ever more rapidly the further away they were. The implication of course of all this if you simply send time backwards everything is closer together in the past. So there’s the idea of something blowing up or flying apart. Bob Dicke, interview BBC