Carolyn Porco Quotes

I read about eastern philosophy and religion and existentialism. All that introspective thinking got me thinking about the great beyond. That turned my sights from inwards to outwards, and I started becoming interested in the makeup of the universe, and I started reading about astronomy, planets, and galaxies.

I got into astronomy through an interest in religion.

The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study. God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.

Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it.

It's an audacious thing to build a model of the cosmos. It's exciting how little we know.

While I'm a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it's the real universe that calls to me.

I'm a person who's very interested in science and the universe and quantum physics and astrophysics.

The natural phenomenon of the universe is so mind-blowing, but you have to know about it. You have to be curious. You've got to find it on your own. If you're lucky, you do.

I'm a cosmologist. All I do is cosmology.

I don't sit around wondering, 'Why am I here? Who made the stars?' I prefer to look at the stars and benefit from them rather than concern myself with how they got there.

It bears mentioning that the Milky Way is only one of 150 billion galaxies visible to our telescopes - and each of these will have its own complement of planets.

Space is certainly something more complicated than the average person would probably realize. Space is not just an empty background in which things happen.

Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite.

I've known from long ago that the universe was calling me. If you were one of those annoying adults that said, 'Oh, what are you gonna be when you grow up?' I would say, 'Astrophysicist.' And then they'd walk away real quickly.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of 50 or 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. And with every step, every window that modern astrophysics has opened to our mind, the person who wants to feel like they're the center of everything ends up shrinking.

I am very interested in the Universe - I am specialising in the Universe and all that surrounds it.

Pure science - this vision of the universe as 15 billion light years across - I am bedazzled and awed by it.

I study the universe. It's the second oldest profession. People have been looking up for a long time.

The universe is a great mystery.

There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy.

I would like to mention astrophysics; in this field, the strange properties of the pulsars and quasars, and perhaps also the gravitational waves, can be considered as a challenge.

It's probably an intellectual weakness, but I look at the stars, and I say, 'There's something bigger than us out there.'

I dreamt of being an astronomer; I had a series of 'How and Why' books on the planets and the stars. At that stage, there were only 14 galaxies; now there are multiverses, dark matter, the nano-microscopic world of the interior of atomic structure.

Space is a laboratory, an experiment in all forms of all things, an infinity of possibilities, properties, and places that cry out for investigation and exploration.

I'm still amazed at how the universe works.