die Sternwarte

Bits of science, philosophy and physics brought to you by @LaurentBaum

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SAAB magazine ad, circa 1984

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SAAB magazine ad, circa 1984

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Das gesellschaftliche Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein. Die objektive Realität existiert außerhalb und unabhängig vom menschlichen Bewusstsein.

Karl Marx

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The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Douglas Adams

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S.B. Semenov, a witness of the Tunguska event of 1908. "The sky split in two and fire appeared high and wide over the forest. The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn't bear it, as if my shirt was on fire; from the northern side, where the fire was, came strong heat. I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thumb sounded, and I was thrown a few metres. After that such noise came, as if rocks were falling or cannons were firing, the earth shook, and I was on the ground, I pressed my head down, fearing rocks would smash it. When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops."

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It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.

Carl Sagan

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All of the great monotheisms propose that their God works through history. At least sociologically, they are quite right: that a great deal of history - triumphs as well as disasters - has been made on behalf of One True God. What could be more obvious?

Rodney Stark

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We are seven billion, yet we mourn the death of one.

Laurent Baum

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String theorists can be likened to a primitive tribe excavating a buried spacecraft onto which they’ve stumbled. By tinkering and fiddling, the tribe would slowly establish aspects of the spacecraft’s operation, and this would nurture a sense that all the buttons and toggles work together in a coordinated and unified manner. A similar feeling prevails among string theorists.

Brian Greene

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Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

George Bernard Shaw

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We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

Car Sagan

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If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Carl Sagan

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What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our wonder and admiration be encreased when we consider the prodigious distance and multitude of the Stars?

Christiaan Huygens

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Quelle chimère est-ce donc que l'homme! Quelle nouveauté, quel monstre, quel chaos, quel sujet de contradiction, quel prodige! Juge de toutes choses, imbécile ver de terre ; dépositaire du vrai, cloaque d'incertitude et d'erreur ; gloire et rebut de l'univers.

Blaise Pascal

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Eleganz sei die Sache der Schuster und Schneider

Ludwig Boltzmann

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Nun ist er mir auch mit dem Abschied von dieser sonderbaren Welt ein wenig vorausgegangen. Das bedeutet nichts. Für uns gläubige Physiker hat die Scheidung zwischen Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft nur die Bedeutung einer, wenn auch hartnäckigen, Illusion.

Albert Einstein - Briefwechsel Einstein-Besso, Brief an die Angehörigen des verstorbenen Michele Besso