Hubble Quotes

Wisdom cannot be directly transmitted, and does not readily accumulate through the ages. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

I wondered had I really oversold the Hubble. I have to admit that, since, I have been convinced that I didn't. ~ Nancy Roman

I don't know how anyone can see the Hubble 'Deep Field' image and not feel like something else is going about its business out there. ~ Tracy K. Smith

The Earth - from our altitude at Hubble, we're 350 miles up. We can see the curvature. We can see the roundness of our home, our home planet. And it's the most magnificent thing I've ever seen. It's like looking into Heaven. It's paradise. ~ Michael J. Massimino

Which brings me to the Hubble Space Telescope's newest images. If it's wonder that you're looking for, and mystery, don't just scan the photographs. Stop and think about them. Try to imagine the scale. The Earth is just a speck of dust on one distant whirling tentacle of the Milky Way galaxy, which contains billions of stars. A 'collision' of galaxies seems unimaginably large - and yet it is something scientists long ago imagined ... The imaginings of pseudoscience are feeble by comparison. ~ Mark Bowden

Hubble was lucky in a way. The Hubble Space Telescope could easily have been given another name had certain events turned out differently: if someone had not prematurely died (Keeler), if someone else had not taken a promotion (Curtis), or if another (Shapley) was not mulishly wedded to a flawed vision of the cosmos. The discovery of the modern universe is a story filled with trials, errors, serendipitous breaks, battles of wills, missed opportunities, herculean measurements, and brilliant insights. In other words, it is science writ large. ~ Marcia Bartusiak

Especially," said Mr. Pumblechook, "be grateful, boy, to them which brought you up by hand." Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, "Why is it that the young are never grateful?" This moral mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, "Naterally wicious." Everybody then murmured "True!" and looked at me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner. ~ Charles Dickens

The unspooling of the skein of the genome has effectively abolished racism and creationism, and the amazing findings of Hubble and Hawking have allowed us to guess at the origins of the cosmos. But how much more addictive is the familiar old garbage about tribe and nation and faith. ~ Christopher Hitchens

While Roscoe made cups of coffee for Charlie Hubble and Finlay sat in the rosewood office, ~ Lee Child

But in those first hours after you take it, your brain is tuned in like nothing you can imagine. Eyes like the Hubble telescope, sensing light that's not even on the spectrum. You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that's exactly right every time. ~ David Wong

There's a cluster of five galaxies called Stephan's Quintet, which we see through the Hubble telescope spectacularly colliding with each other. But we see them colliding 280 million years ago. If there are aliens in one of those colliding galaxies with a telescope powerful enough to see us, what they are seeing on Earth, at this very moment, here and now, is the early ancestors of the dinosaurs. ~ Richard Dawkins

The Hubble Law is one of the great discoveries in science; it is one of the main supports of the scientific story of Genesis. ~ Robert Jastrow

With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually, we reach the dim boundary - the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

I feel privileged and honored to have flown. It's been a tremendous ride, looking back on the legacy and accomplishments, like the Hubble telescope and the launching of the International Space Station in 1998. ~ Alan G. Poindexter

Historically, discoveries of pure science are slow to reach the mainstream compared with those of the applied sciences, which noisily announce themselves with new medicines and gadgets. The Hubble has proved an exception, remaking, in a single generation, the popular conception of the universe. It has accomplished this primarily through the aesthetic force of its discoveries, which distill the difficult abstractions of astrophysics into singular expressions of color and light, vindicating Keats's famous couplet: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Though philosophy has hardly registered it, the Hubble has given us nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning with what is. The telescope compels the mind to contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite. ~ Ross Andersen

The great spirals ... apparently lie outside our stellar system. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

The reason we have the stars twinkle at night is because the light is being kind of blurred by the atmosphere around the Earth. That is why the Hubble Space Telescope is so good, because it is above the atmosphere. So it is kind of like looking at the sun from the bottom of a swimming pool, versus looking at the sun above the swimming pool. ~ Michael J. Massimino

In this way, Edwin Hubble worked out the distances to nine different galaxies. We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars. ~ Stephen Hawking

Take solace in that, regardless of the fact that the love you had in your mind was lost, it was fairer than any, and you can take that with you forever. ~ Taylor Nadeau

Grandpa, in his male armchair, deaf aid occasionally whistling and pipe making a hubble-bubble noise as he sucked on it, would shake his head over DAILY EXPRESS, which described to him a world where truth and justice were constantly imperilled by the Communist Threat. In her softer, female armchair - in the red corner - Grandma would tut-tut away over DAILY WORKER, which described to her a world where truth and justice, in their updated versions, were constantly imperilled by Capitalism and Imperialism. ~ Julian Barnes

If spirituality is the sense of awe and humility in the face of the creation, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists. ~ Michael Shermer

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

As we begin the 21st century, the Hubble space telescope is providing us with information about as yet uncharted regions of the universe and the promise that we may learn something about the origin of the cosmos. This same spirit of adventure is also being directed to the most complex structure that exists in the universe - the human brain. ~ Floyd E. Bloom

But in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the landmark observation that wherever you look, distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us. In other words, the universe is expanding. ~ Stephen Hawking

I've been going insane reading my students' papers. Apparently several of them think the Hubble Space Telescope is used to search the universe for hubbles."
~ Ithana Aaronson ~ Jeanne Birdsall

Observation always involves theory. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

Faced with the blazing magnificence of the everyday, the artist is both humbled and provoked. There are photographs now of events on an unimaginable scale [ ... ] When we look at these images, there is, yes, legitimate wonderment at our own lengthening reach and grasp. But it would be vain indeed to praise our puny handiwork
the mastery of the Hubble wielders, the computer enhancers, the colorizers, all the true-life-fantasist counterparts of Hollywood's techno-wizards and imagineers
when the universe is putting on so utterly unanswerable a show. Before the majesty of being, what is there to do but hang our heads? ~ Salman Rushdie

Kit leaned forward. "But if you're up to something, know that I'm ready. The days of Kit the Clueless are over. I'm watching you guys like a ... like a ... like a really good watcher of things." He cocked his head. "An owl, maybe?"
"Up to something?" I flapped a breezy hand. "Pshh. Relax."
"Kit's not so good with similes," I said, wiping down a steel counter. "I would've gone with a hawk, or maybe the Hubble telescope. I guess owl works. ~ Kathy Reichs

After that, he drank all the rest of the sherry, and Mr. Hubble drank the port, and the two talked (which I have since observed to be customary in such cases) as if they were of quite another race from the deceased, and were notoriously immortal. ~ Charles Dickens

They don't understand that religion and science are there to serve different purposes. We need science to understand how everything on this planet and beyond works – us, nature, everything we see around us. That's fact – no one with a working brain can question that. But we also need religion. Not for ridiculous counter-theories about things that science can prove. We need it for something else, to fill a different kind of need. The need for meaning. It's a basic need we have, as humans. And it's a need that's beyond the realm of science. Your scientists don't understand that it's a need they can't fulfill no matter how many Hadron colliders and Hubble telescopes they build- and your preachers don'[t understand that their job is to help you discover a personal, inner sense of meaning and not behave like a bunch of zealots intent on converting the rest of the planet to their rigid, literalist view of how everyone should live their lives. ~ Raymond Khoury

The outstanding feature, however, is the possibility that the velocity-distance relation may represent the de Sitter effect, and hence that numerical data may be introduced into discussions of the general curvature of space. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

Next to her a calico cat puffed away at a hubble-bubble. Puss's watch cost more than his vest, and his vest cost more than his boots, and his boots cost more than a house. If you stripped him naked and sold off his costume, you'd walk away with enough money to retire - though if you left him alive you wouldn't have long to enjoy it. The only thing that could rival Puss's vanity was his sadism. ~ Daniel Polansky

The great spirals, with their enormous radial velocities and insensible proper motions, apparently lie outside our Solar system. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

That's what Hubble can do for us. It can tell us whether the universe is expanding forever or if one day it's going to come back together. ~ Duane G. Carey

She couldn't see him, but his voice was like light through a stained-glass window in a cathedral. ~ Graham Joyce

Hubble is very close to my heart, and going back to Hubble, because I was there once already in 1993, is really a great privilege for me. ~ Claude Nicollier

It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope. ~ Tom Hanks

We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of a world it is - at least in its physical aspects. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

When my father died, those years when he was working on the Hubble came back to me, and it seemed fitting to imagine him as having somehow merged with the large mystery that the universe represents. ~ Tracy K. Smith

Ironically, it is only when disaster strikes that the shuttle makes the headlines. Its routine flights attracted less media interest than unmanned probes to the planets or the images from the Hubble Telescope. The fate of Columbia (like that of Challenger in 1986) reminded us that space is still a hazardous environment. ~ Martin Rees

I will fight in the United States Senate this year to fund a servicing mission to Hubble by 2008, a mission that would potentially increase Hubble's power and efficiency by a factor of 10 and allow us to look back almost to the beginning of the universe. ~ Barbara Mikulski

We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known universe. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

Edwin Hubble, who continues to give me great faith in humanity, because he started out as a lawyer and then became an astronomer. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

The Next Generation Space Telescope, which will be located much further away from the Earth than the Hubble Space Telescope presently is, will also explore the infrared part of the spectrum. ~ Claude Nicollier

With the Hubble telescope and all the other things that are out there, I believe something would have come through. Today, I really believe we are unique. ~ Mark Goddard

If you'd cured Henry the Seventh's TB with a course of ethambutol, or given Isaac Newton an hour's access to the Hubble telescope, or shown an off-the-shelf 3-D printer to the regulars at the Captain Marlow in the 1980s, you would have had the M-word thrown your way, too. Some magic is merely normality that you're not yet used to. ~ David Mitchell

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted aurora near the poles of both Saturn and Jupiter. And on Earth, the aurora borealis and australis (the northern and southern lights) serve as intermittent reminders of how nice it is to have a protective atmosphere. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A scientist naturally and inevitably ... mulls over the data and guesses at a solution. He proceeds to testing of the guess by new data-predicting the consequences of the guess and then dispassionately inquiring whether or not the predictions are verified. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble

Dashed if I don't think he's begun to get queer in his attic! Well, what I mean is, hubble-bubble! I don't set up as one of these clever coves, but I've got more sense in my knowledge-box than to say such an addle-brained thing as that! Seems to me it don't make a ha'porth of difference whether you keep the dashed mill, or whether you don't, because that's where all your gingerbread came from, whichever way you look at it. And don't you tell me it's repugnant to him to have you coming down with the derbies, because all I've got to say to that is, Gammon! ~ Georgette Heyer

Observations always involve theory. ~ Edwin Powell Hubble