Astronomical Quotations

'One important object of this original spectroscopic investigation of the light of the stars and other celestial bodies, namely to discover whether the same chemical elements as those of our earth are present throughout the universe, was most satisfactorily settled in the affirmative; a common chemistry, it was shown, exists throughout the universe.'
- Sir William Huggins, Equivalently this can be interpreted as;
'The laws of physics are the same everywhere'

... It had almost no hydrogen. It was made largely of helium, and had much too much nitrogen and neon. It is still a mystery in many ways ... But it was the first star ever analyzed that had a different composition, and I started that area of spectroscopy in the late thirties.
- Jesse Greenstein, pioneer in astronomical research on the strange shell stars.

"Philosophically, I liked the steady-state cosmology. So I thought that we should report our results as a simple measurement; the measurement might be true after the cosmology was no longer true !"
- R.W. Wilson (1990), Comments on the measurement of the 3 K cosmic background radiation he made in collaboration with Arno Penzias.

"My optical spectra showed several emission lines in the red part of the spectrum. I discussed them at a conference on extragalactic radio sources held at the Goddard Space Science Institute in New York in 1962. I attempted to explain the spectrum in terms of helium emission from an expanding shell, but did not publish this interpretation."
- Maarten Schmidt comment made in 1990 discussing the time just before he changed his mind and 'invented' quasar redshift.

the (velocity-distance) relation departs from linearity by just about the added correction for recession ... the necessary adjustments and compensations suggest that the model may be a forced interpretation of data , and, ... we may evidently choose between a curious small-scale universe and new principles of physics'
-Edwin P Hubble, 1936a. Kellermann (1972) remarks how Hubble, many decades earlier, noticed the same effect as the first of Kellermann's four paradoxes : The density of radio sources and optical-galaxy counts depends on red shift in just such a way to cancel the geometrical effects and the effect of the red shift.

Scientific Biographies and Quotations.