Quotes & Sayings About Telescopes

The lenses of telescopes and cameras can no more cover the breadth and scale of the visual array than language can cover the breadth and simultaneity of internal experience. — Annie Dillard

I'll go to church with anyone who's willing to smoke pot and look through a telescope with me. — Joe Rogan

I had a hunch. Officially, scientists don't work on hunches. We work on hypotheses and observations and plenty of evidence. Hunches don't get you research funding, tenure at your university, or access to the world's largest telescopes. But a hunch was all I had. — Mike Brown

Equipped with our five senses - along with telescopes and microscopes and mass spectrometers and seismographs and magnetometers and particle accelerators and detectors sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum - we explore the universe around us and call the adventure science. — Edwin Powell Hubble

'As a fraction of your tax dollar today, what is the total cost of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?' Answer: one-half of one percent of each tax dollar. Half a penny. I'd prefer it were more: perhaps two cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to little more than four cents on the tax dollar. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

On certain occasions, the eyes of the mind can supply the want of the most powerful telescopes, and lead to astronomical discoveries of the highest importance. — Francois Arago

The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines. — Carl Sagan

There is no use complaining about the hidden brain, or wishing it away. The telescope effect in our moral judgment is part of our nature. There is nothing we can do about it. But there is something we can do about our actions. We can choose to allow our actions to be guided by reason rather than instinct, choose to set up national and international institutions that respond instantly to humanitarian crises, rather than wait for our heartstrings to be pulled by stories of individual tragedy. If we rely on our moral telescopes, there will be people in a hundred years who ask how the world could have sat on its hands through so many genocides in the twenty-first century. Making — Shankar Vedantam

If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first
century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides
telescopes are unnatural. — Timothy Leary

I've decided to aim a telescope at my neighbour's window. It's the closest I'll ever come to living with someone comfortably. — Dov Davidoff

Do not forget that when the heart petrifies there is no progress. All science must be like a fruit, so ordered that it may hang from a tree of the flesh & ripen in the sunlight of passion. Histology, photography, electric bells, telescopes, birds, amperes, smoothing irons, etc. -this is only good for bouncing off the arse of humanity. — Blaise Cendrars

After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foilage.
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence. — Italo Calvino

Telescopes and microscopes bring to our view the otherwise unseen and unknown. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes. — Edsger Dijkstra

When you look out in space, you're looking back into time. The farther across space you look, the further back in time you see. This means the telescopes and instruments we use to study the cosmos are really time machines. — Carolyn Collins Petersen

The eyes of a man are of no use without the observing power. Telescopes and microscopes are cunning contrivances, but they cannot see of themselves. — Edwin Paxton Hood

It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported. — Joseph Campbell

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. — Alan Watts

Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope. — Kamasi Washington

Those who pretend to investigate the transcendental truths of the Being based on pure reasoning fall in the same mistake as someone who, ignoring how to use the science's modern instruments, tries to study the life of what is infinitely small with telescopes and the life of what is infinitely large with microscopes. — Samael Aun Weor

Jeremy Mars knows a lot about the planet Mars, although he's never been there. He knows some girls, and yet he doesn't know much about them. He wishes there were books about girls, the way there are books about Mars, that you could observe the orbits and brightness of girls through telescopes without appearing to be perverted. — Kelly Link

If you're looking for faults use a mirror, not a telescope — Boonaa Mohammed

The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever-growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without. — Loren Eiseley

In our Mechanics' Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenter's planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments,
rain-gauges, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as gauges and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves. — Julian Barnes

If there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself. Men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants, or to confine their thoughts to the daily affairs of life; they also build telescopes and satellites and accelerators and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather. — Steven Weinberg

I have a fine lot of telescopes. I have one with which I can see the Mountains in the Moon. — Ezra Cornell

For a long time, we've worked on detecting planets with whatever was at hand, making use of existing small telescopes or even amateur telescopes. It's time to move on to the next stage. — Andrew Gould

The Yognul people of Australia thought the constellation represented a canoe. But as we move into the southern hemisphere, a marked change in the nature of the constellations becomes apparent. The southern constellations were named by explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Instead of great heroes and gods, we have the keels of ships, sextants, telescopes and the like, things that mattered most to the people of this era. What constellations would we put in the night sky today? Indeed, when human beings go out and colonise the stars, what constellations will they put up in their night skies? — Paul Abel

The hardware and the software used in the Breakthrough project will be compatible with other telescopes around the world, so they too can search for intelligent life. — Yuri Milner

It had not been science that Lydia had loved. And then, as if the tears are telescopes, she begins to see more clearly: the shredded posters and pictures, the rubble of books, the shelf prostrate at her feet. Everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway. A dull chill creeps over her. Perhaps - and this thought chokes her - that had dragged Lydia underwater at last. — Celeste Ng

The discovery in 1846 of the planet Neptune was a dramatic and spectacular achievement of mathematical astronomy. The very existence of this new member of the solar system, and its exact location, were demonstrated with pencil and paper; there was left to observers only the routine task of pointing their telescopes at the spot the mathematicians had marked. — James R Newman

She went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: — Lewis Carroll

Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end, of the telescope,
the star that is looking, not looked after nor looked at. — Theodore Parker

I was struck by - Einstein's a fascinating figure who didn't have any instruments that he used, he didn't use telescopes, he used his mind to try to understand the universe. — Jonathan Nolan

No sign of purpose can be detected in any part of the vast universe disclosed by our most powerful telescopes. — Hugh Elliot

Astronomers have built telescopes which can show myriads of stars unseen before; but when a man looks through a tear in his own eye, that is a lens which opens reaches into the unknown, and reveals orbs which no telescope, however skilfully constructed, could do. — Henry Ward Beecher

When Galileo made his astonishing discovery of mountains on the moon, his telescope didn't actually have enough magnifying power to support that finding. Instead, he recognized the zigzag pattern separating the light and dark areas of the moon. Other astronomers were looking through similar telescopes, but only Galileo "was able to appreciate the implications of the dark and light regions," Simonton notes. He had the necessary depth of experience in physics and astronomy, but also breadth of experience in painting and drawing. Thanks to artistic training in a technique called chiaroscuro, which focuses on representations of light and shade, Galileo was able to detect mountains where others did not. — Adam M. Grant

The best thing we're put here for's to see; The strongest thing that's given us to see with's a telescope. Someone in every town, seems to me, owes it to the town to keep one. — Robert Frost

And I say,
I crash in to things in the dark
Even when the lights are on
And I am wrong more often than I am writing
And even then, I am often wrong
But when my friends are in the bathroom at the bar
Rolling dollar bills in to telescopes,
Claiming they can see God,
I will come to you — Andrea Gibson

The great radio telescopes of the world are constructed in remote locations for the same reason Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti: For them to work well they must be far from civilization. — Carl Sagan

If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen. — Alan W. Watts

We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they're watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they're not seeing you and me. They're watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs
people who don't know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that's quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin "Dear Sire," and congratulate us on the handsomness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us. — Bill Bryson

I missed the moonlight, the stars. There were times I forgot that there was an entire universe above the clouds. It was as if a shroud had been pulled around the Earth. Over time, we would forget everything that we had once struggled so hard to observe and learn and prove. We would forget about Jupiter and its churning storms. We would forget about the Big Dipper, about Halley's comet. We would stumble across telescopes in old department stores and never give them a second look, never wonder about the things they once made large. — Jason Gurley

LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you. — Alan Watts

Nature was one of the key forces that brought me back to God, for I wanted to know the Artist responsible for beauty such as I saw on grand scale in photos from space telescopes or on minute scale such as in the intricate designs on a butterfly wing. — Philip Yancey

You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens. — C.S. Lewis

Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here. — Randall Munroe

I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery. — Clyde Tombaugh

I never really understood that massive collaboration involving hundreds of people is what makes movies possible, and it's also why I would agree that curiosity is not the most important human trait; the urge to collaborate is. Heck ... only we have the ability to cooperate to make like online communities and space telescopes and imaginariums and movies. So the great thrill of this whole experience [my novel being made into a movie] for me was ..seeing humanity do what it's best at, which ultimately is not competing but cooperating. — John Green

The white man had invented glasses which made objects too near or too far, cameras, telescopes, spyglasses, objects which put glass between living and vision. It was the image he sought to possess, not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness. — Anais Nin

His eyes are like a telescope. I look into them and I'm transported across the universe to a world I've never been. — Julie Anne Peters

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. — John Updike

Yesterday, we sought telescopes good enough to see all the planets. Today, we seek vehicles good enough to reach them. — Robert Kennedy

Telescopes and binoculars endanger the ever-distant sublime. — Mason Cooley

The Bible teaches that we are to be patient in suffering. Tears become telescopes to heaven, bringing eternity a little closer. — Billy Graham

A battle goes on in the stock market and the tape is your telescope. You can depend upon it seven out of ten cases. — Edwin Lefevre

He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man's dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him? — Primo Levi

There's something not quite Christian about it," Tony said. He sat back in his chair and looked up to where his Bible sat on the shelf. "I can't put my finger on why exactly, but it doesn't seem right for a couple of young ladies to be out there in the middle of the night, obsessing over their telescopes. — Joey Comeau

The telescope ... is a conduit to the cosmos. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes ... They are the supreme realists of the race. — H.L. Mencken

After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain. — Timothy Ferriss

Nowadays, the Abrahamic argument - just look at everything, how could it all be so awesome if there weren't a designer behind it? - has been judged wanting, at least in most scientific circles. But then again, now we have microscopes and telescopes and computers. We are not restricted to gaping at the moon from our cribs. We have data, lots of data, and we have the tools to mess with it. — Jordan Ellenberg

So let men turn their telescopes on the heavens and their microscopes on the molecules. Let them probe and search and tabulate and name and find and discover. I can dare to say to them, "I know the One who made all this. I'm personally acquainted with the One who made it. — A.W. Tozer

Show me proof there is a God, you say. I say use your telescopes to look to the heavens, and tell me how there could not be s God! — Dan Brown

The planet Mars
crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms
has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin. — David Grinspoon

The problem here is that a civilization that is 1,000 light years away doesn't know we exist. They don't know that we have radio telescopes here on Earth because they see Earth as it was 1,000 years ago. Nothing can travel faster than light, so however good their instruments they can't see in affect the future. So there is no particular reason they should be sending us messages at this time. — Paul Davies

In all these products, whether iron bridges, locomotives, automobiles, telescopes, cottages, airport-hangars, funicular railways, skyscrapers, or children's toys, the will towards a new style expresses itself. The similarity of these examples to the new creations in art consists in the same striving for clear, pure form which expresses truth in the objects. — Theo Van Doesburg

When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories. — Italo Calvino

Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Astronomy may be revolutionized more than any other field of science by observations from above the atmosphere. Study of the planets, the Sun, the stars, and the rarified matter in space should all be profoundly influenced by measurements from balloons, rockets, probes and satellites ... In a new adventure of discovery no one can foretell what will be found, and it is probably safe to predict that the most important new discovery that will be made with flying telescopes will be quite unexpected and unforeseen. (1961) — Lyman Spitzer

I know a lot of things, Mathilda. I have gazed through space telescopes into the heart of the galaxy. I have seen a dawn of four hundred billion suns. It all means nothing without life. You and I are special, Mathilda. We are alive. — Daniel H. Wilson

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. We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary, average-sized, yellow star, near the outer edge of one of the spiral arms. — Stephen Hawking

Sometimes I really regret that I did not live in those times when there was still so much that was new; to be sure enough much is yet unknown, but I do not think that it will be possible to discover anything easily nowadays that would lead us to revise our entire outlook as radically as was possible in the days when telescopes and microscopes were still new. — Heinrich Hertz

We may take it that the world is undoubtedly itself [i.e., is indistinct from itself], but, in any attempt to see itself, as an object, it must, equally, undoubtedly act so as to make itself distinct from and therefore false to itself.

In this sense, in respect to its own information, the universe must expand to escape the telescopes through which we, who are it, are trying to capture it, which is us. — G. Spencer Brown

You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht. — Chad Harbach

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky. — Clyde Tombaugh

I don't have any hobbies because my working job is my hobby. What I do is I spend my whole time looking through telescopes and having brain scans and buying books about various different ideas and I just sit around, that's my life. — Robin Ince

Astronomers are obsessed with building larger and larger telescopes. There are two promises that we make with bigger telescopes: that they can see fainter things and that they see more detail. But it's been really hard to follow through on that second promise because of atmospheric distortion. — Andrea M. Ghez

I knew my interest in the universe and I owned a telescope that I bought with money I earned by walking dogs. 50 cents per walk, per dog, and that accumulated quickly. I bought a camera, a telescope. I taught myself astrophotography. I did all this. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The telescope sweeps the sky without finding God. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

The beauty of Mars exists in the human mind," he said in that dry factual tone, and everyone stared at him amazed. "Without the human presence it is just a collection of atoms, no different than any other random speck of matter in the universe. It's we who understand it, and we who give it meaning. All our centuries of looking up at the night sky and watching it wander through the stars. All those nights of watching it through the telescopes, looking at a tiny disk trying to see canals in the albedo changes. All those dumb sci-fi novels with their monsters and maidens and dying civilizations. And all the scientists who studied the data, or got us here. That's what makes Mars beautiful. Not the basalt and the oxides — Kim Stanley Robinson

This Excellent Mathematician having given us, in the Transactions of February last, an account of the cause, which induced him to think upon Reflecting Telescopes, instead of Refracting ones, hath thereupon presented the curious world with an Essay of what may be performed by such Telescopes; by which it is found, that Telescopical Tubes may be considerably shortened without prejudice to their magnifiying effect. On his invention of the catadioptrical telescope, as he communicated to the Royal Society. — Isaac Newton

The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground. — Carl Sagan

His eyes are blue, and blue eyes up close are a celestial phenomenon: nebulae as seen through telescopes, the light of unnamed stars diffused through dusts and elements and endlessness. Layers of light. Blue eyes are starlight. — Laini Taylor

It used to be that, in astronomy, a small team of people could look at photos of a few thousand galaxies and classify and catalog them relatively easily. But now, with a new generation of robotic telescopes scanning the skies constantly and producing millions of images, that's become next to impossible. — Peter Diamandis

Spyglasses, as Lipperhey called telescopes, whether they're in the form of spotting scopes, spyplanes, or reconnaissance satellites, are more than simple instruments or tools. They beget infrastructures and geographies. — Trevor Paglen

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

I have tried to improve telescopes and practiced continually to see with them. These instruments have play'd me so many tricks that I have at last found them out in many of their humours. — William Herschel

To-night, as ages hence, people would say this, or shut their doors on them, turn in bereaved agony from them, or toward them with love saying: "That is our star up there, yours and mine"; steer by them above the clouds or lost at sea, or standing in the spray on the forecastle head, watch them, suddenly, careen; put their faith or lack of it in them; train, in a thousand observatories, feeble telescopes upon them, across whose lenses swam mysterious swarms of stars and clouds of dead dark stars, catastrophes of exploding suns, or giant Antares raging to its end - a smouldering ember yet five hundred times greater than the earth's sun. — Malcolm Lowry

There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes - that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemn space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it. The Geometers came from other Narratives - until they came here, and joined ours. — Neal Stephenson

Science is not, as so many seem to think, something apart, which has to do with telescopes, retorts, and test-tubes, and especially with nasty smells, but it is a way of searching out by observation, trial and classification; whether the phenomena investigated be the outcome of human activities, or of the more direct workings of nature's laws. Its methods admit of nothing untidy or slip-shod; its keynote is accuracy and its goal is truth. — Archibald E. Garrod

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

What are they doing, examining last month's costs with a microscope when they should be surveying the horizon with a telescope? — Francis Arthur Freeth

I see all this and I feel no amazement because making the shell implied also making the honey in the wax comb and the coal and the telescopes and the reign of Cleopatra and the films about Cleopatra and the Pyramids and the design of the zodiac of the Chaldean astrologers and the wars and empires Herodotus speaks of and the words written by Herodotus and the works written in all languages, including those of Spinoza in Dutch, and the fourteen-line summary of Spinoza's life and works in the instalment of the encyclopedia in the truck passed by the ice-cream van, and so I feel as if, in making the shell, I had also made the rest. — Anonymous

Here's the problem, when you're stargazing on a mountain top you are partially oxygen-deprived and you're in command of million dollars worth of hardware. So as much as I would like to sip wine under the stars, it's contraindicated in the instructions on operating telescopes. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque — Carl Sagan

As you make more and more powerful microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape the investigation. Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all these investigations is this: Through us and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself. And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? It runs away. You can't get at it. This is the principle. Shankara explains it beautifully in his commentary on the Kenopanishad where he says 'That which is the Knower, the ground of all knowledge, is never itself an object of knowledge.'
[In this quote from 1973 Watts, remarkably, essentially anticipates the discovery (in the late 1990's) of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.] — Alan W. Watts

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. — Bertrand Russell

Microscopes and telescopes really confuse our minds. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe