Celestial Mechanics Quotes & Sayings

I thought this couldn't happen in astronomy. Isn't celestial mechanics supposed to be an exact science? So we poor backward biologists were always being told. — Arthur C. Clarke

To Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God: Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

Willard Gibbs did for statistical mechanics and for thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure. — Robert Andrews Millikan

It had more layers than an onion. These writers meant business. There was a level for everybody. Your major could be celestial mechanics, and there'd be celestial-mechanics jokes. — Billy West

Celestial mechanics is the origin of dynamical systems, linear algebra, topology, variational calculus and symplectic geometry. — Vladimir Arnold

The recurrence during the eighteenth century Enlightenment of the aspiration to be the 'Newton of the moral sciences' testifies to the prestige not just of celestial mechanics, but of the 'experimental method' more generally. — Stefan Collini

Face it, people, there is more to your malaise than celestial mechanics. If you want to know why you feel so bad, you must look beyond universal gravitation. — James K. Morrow

Librarying is a harder profession than the public realizes, he said. People think it's all rubber stamps, knowing that Dewey 521 is celestial mechanics and saying 'Try looking under fiction' sixty eight times a day. — Jasper Fforde

Ever since celestial mechanics in the skillful hands of Leverrier and Adams led to the world-amazed discovery of Neptune, a belief has existed begotten of that success that still other planets lay beyond, only waiting to be found. — Percival Lowell

After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige. — Franz Cumont

My wish is to construct a system of sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry. — Vilfredo Pareto

Fusing the flying bird with the Sun disk in different civilizations probably represented accepting both of the roles of the parallel and the perpendicular celestial mechanics; the seconds and the minutes marks. But considering the animal and/or the mythical winged creature (Kheper, Bird, Sphinx ..etc) to be the Sun or to play its role, was definitely a heresy. Therefore, the Winged Sun resembled the cross-correlation between the parallel and the perpendicular; but if it had been assigned to anything else other than the mythical creature, then that was another layer of heresy. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like), hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) and celestial mechanics (financed by military and other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA). — Vladimir Arnold

I work in celestial mechanics, but I am not interested in getting to the moon. — Marston Morse

[W]hen Galileo discovered he could use the tools of mathematics and mechanics to understand the motion of celestial bodies, he felt, in the words of one imminent researcher, that he had learned the language in which God recreated the universe. Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God's most devine and sacred gift. — William J. Clinton