Richard P. Feynman Quotes

The objects that are of moderate energy, like our sun or most of the stars that we see in the night sky with the naked eye, are objects in which relatively moderate energy processes are taking place.

We are 'nuclear waste' from the fuel that makes stars shine; indeed, each of us contains atoms whose provenance can be traced back to thousands of different stars spread through our Milky Way.

Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole. It's actually not massive enough.

It is sound judgment to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.

Stars that become supernovae start off at least eight times heavier than our sun. They're so short-lived that, even if they have planets, there is unlikely to be time for life to get started. The surface is 40,000C and, as a result, the colouring will be extremely blue.

Most stars just fuse hydrogen into helium, but larger stars can fuse helium into other elements. Still larger stars, in turn, fuse those elements into slightly bigger ones, and so on.

At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars.

The whole of the hydrogen on the earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.

Because Hubble's been up so many years now, it's actually given us a window to things like... how planets' atmospheres actually change, evolve... over time.

Big Bang gave us hydrogen and helium. We couldn't make people out of hydrogen and helium. So we're made out of exploding stars.

There's truth in light. You can tell what elements a star is composed of and the temperature at which it burns by the light it gives off.

We forget how recently astronomers figured out what the stars are made of, what makes them shine, how distant they are, how they are born, and whether they remain immutable or evolve and die.

All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we're the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine.

When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely.

It turns out that the history of astrophysics is where we perfected time keeping.

Iron is the final peal of a star’s natural life.

For your own safety, do not ever tell an astrophysicist, I hope all your stars are twinkling.

From a chemist's point of view, the surface or interior of a star…is boring—there are no molecules there.

The first stars tremble as if shimmering in green water. Hours must pass before their glimmer hardens into the frozen glitter of diamonds. I shall have a long wait before I witness the soundless frolic of the shooting stars. In the profound darkness of certain nights I have seen the sky streaked with so many trailing sparks that it seemed to me a great gale must be blowing through the outer heavens.

We can trace the elements. They were forged in the centers of high-mass stars that went unstable at the ends of their lives, they exploded, scattered their enriched contents across the galaxy, sprinkled into gas clouds that then collapsed and formed stars and planets and life.

The helium which we handle must have been put together at some time and some place. We do not argue with the critic who urges that the stars are not hot enough for this process; we tell him to go and find a hotter place.

The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.

What is possible in the Cavendish Laboratory may not be too difficult in the sun.

This entire process of stellar evolution is by natural process alone. We do not have to invoke Divine intervention at any stage in the history of the life-cycle of the stars that we observe.

When the Sun shrinks to a dull red dwarf, it will not be dying. It will just be starting to live and everything that has gone before will merely be a prelude to its real history.