Kip Thorne Quotes

But my most favourite pursuit, after my daily exertions at the Foundry, was Astronomy. There were frequently clear nights when the glorious objects in the Heavens were seen in most attractive beauty and brilliancy.

It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.

Of all things visible, the highest is the heaven of the fixed stars.

First of all, we must note that the universe is spherical.

I do not remember exactly when I became interested in astronomy, but I know it was at a very young age. I did organize an astronomy club for my friends at the age of 11. We would meet once a week to learn about the constellations.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

I had the usual friends who pointed out constellations of stars. But it really was watching the stars. It was getting some sense of the motion of the earth. I found it a remarkable thing.

As a navigator, I started studying astronomy because sometimes you're not able to use the equipment, so you'd have to do it the old-fashioned way, figuring out what you were seeing in the sky.

I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.

Therefore I would not have it unknown to Your Holiness, the the only thing which induced me to look for another way of reckoning the movements of the heavenly bodies was that I knew that mathematicians by no means agree in their investigation thereof.

I have always loved astronomy, and being an astronomer once lurked in the back of my mind. But I was never good at algebra. In fact, I flunked it twice in high school.

I saw, in looking over Cooper, elements of a comet of 1825 which resemble what I get out for this, from my own observations, but I cannot rely upon my own.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

Until very recently, the heavenly bodies have been investigated only with reference to their position and their laws of motion, and a quarter of a century ago astronomy was little more than celestial topography.

You can enjoy stargazing just by going out and learning a couple constellations with your kids.

I have just gone over my comet computations again, and it is humiliating to perceive how very little more I know than I did seven years ago when I first did this kind of work.

The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

I had studied at Harvard and MIT astronomy and a lot about the heavens and the star system and so forth.

I am an astronomer, and my job is to look to the heavens to better understand the universe and our place in it.

People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens of the firmament, the sun and the moon. This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth

… it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study.

I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.

My dad's a physicist and had a key to the St Andrew's observatory, and we used to pop down to see Halley's Comet and Saturn and meteor showers.