Fritz Zwicky Quotes & Sayings

Major actions by courageous and wise men will be necessary to avoid our continuing to blunder into the space age like unenlightened and selfish idiots. — Fritz Zwicky

Jupiter is so big and its gravitational pull so strong that man would find it difficult to move about on the surface. The answer is to whittle it down to proper size with terrajets and nuclear power, using the debris to increase the size of Jupiter's moons so they, too, can be colonized. — Fritz Zwicky

Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards. — Fritz Zwicky

To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle (God) is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker.
[Diary entry, 1971] — Fritz Zwicky

The universe is so unique and perfect that it could not have originated by chance but was divined by flawless, creative design.
Fritz Zwicky to youngest daughter, Barbarina Zwicky — Fritz Zwicky

I have a good idea every two years. Give me a topic, I will give you the idea! — Fritz Zwicky

Every evening, I come home tired and have just enough energy to fill out the endless tax forms, to pay bills, not to let my house neglected and to hear the radio concert for an hour. — Fritz Zwicky

Mountains were once my big adventure but is is over since a long time; I still dream from the wonderful days sometimes, read also a few pages from a mountain book. But the thought of doing again active mountain climbing has faded. — Fritz Zwicky

With all reserve we advance the view that a supernova represents the transition of an ordinary star into a neutron star consisting mainly of neutrons. Such a star may possess a very small radius and an extremely high density. As neutrons can be packed much more closely than ordinary nuclei and electrons, the gravitational packing energy in a cold neutron star may become very large, and under certain conditions may far exceed the ordinary nuclear packing fractions ... — Fritz Zwicky

If many things in the past have gone wrong in the lives of men and in the lives of their communities, it is because both small- and large-scale activities were blundered into without any thought or vision of universal planning. — Fritz Zwicky

To eliminate the discrepancy between men's plans and the results achieved, a new approach is necessary. Morphological thinking suggests that this new approach cannot be realized through increased teaching of specialized knowledge. This morphological analysis suggests that the essential fact has been overlooked that every human is potentially a genius. Education and dissemination of knowledge must assume a form which allows each student to absorb whatever develops his own genius, lest he become frustrated. The same outlook applies to the genius of the peoples as a whole. — Fritz Zwicky

Astronautics, strictly speaking, will be concerned with voyages to other stars. Remarkably enough, to achieve such feats, we might not even have to leave the earth. It would suffice to accelerate the sun itself to a very high speed and let it drag all its planets with it. — Fritz Zwicky

I soon became convinced ... that all the theorizing would be empty brain exercise and therefore a waste of time unless one first ascertained what the population of the universe really consists of. — Fritz Zwicky