[4097] Physics 316: Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology
Cosmology Quotes

John Updike, in "The Poorhouse Fair"
There is infinitely more nothing in the universe than anything else

Stephen Hawkings, in A Brief History of Time
If you remember every word in this book, [...] This will increase the disorder of the universe by [...] about ten million million million times the increase in order in your brain

Arthur Koestler, in "The Sleepwalkers"
The history of cosmic theories ... may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias.

Alan W. Hirshfeld, in "Parallax - The Race to Measure the Cosmos"
In a sense, Ptomely was the Bill Gates of his day. His Ptolemaic "operating system", despite its known deficiences, grew to dominate - in fact, monopolize - the astronomical market place."

Lev Landau:
Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt

Stephen Hawkings (1988):
We may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature

Cardinal Baronius (1616), often attributed to Galileo Galilei:
The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go

Albert Einstein (1935):
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible

The Times (1919):
Lights all askew in the heavens, men of science more or less agog

Steven Weinberg (1977):
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless

Michael S. Turner (1990):
The "go-go" junk bond days of cosmology are over

Hannes Alfven (1978):
To try to write a grand cosmiical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitite ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science

Hannes Alfven (1978):
[Today cosmology is in the hands of scientists who] have never visited a laboratory or looked through a telescope, and, even if they had, it was below their dignity to get their hands dirty.

Georg Busch, (German painter) on comets
This poisonous stuff falls down again on people's heads, and causes all kinds of mischief such as pestilence, Frenchmen, sudden death, bad weather, &c"