Author of quotes: Carl Sagan. Page 2

The face of the Cosmos most human Affairs seem insignificant, even trifling.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Cosmos is everything that ever was and ever will be. One contemplation of the Cosmos shakes: tremors running back, catches the throat, and leaves you feeling weak as a vague memory like a fall from a height. We are aware that are touching the greatest of mysteries.

Science is a delight. That's the way of evolution, we get pleasure from the knowledge - knower survive with higher probability.

Could a rare but natural phenomenon - the fall of a large cometary fragment is to lead to the outbreak of nuclear war? Would be a strange scenario: a small comet falls to the Ground, as this has happened before with millions of other comets, and our civilization self-destructs immediately. It would not hurt us to learn more about comets, collisions and catastrophes.

Harold Morowitz calculated what it would cost set the correct molecular components of the human body, if you buy them at market prices. Got about ten million dollars, that allows us to feel a little better. But even in this case, we cannot mix these reagents and to bring man into the vial. It goes far beyond our capabilities, and probably will for a very long time. Fortunately, there are much less expensive and, moreover, a very reliable method of creating human beings.

People are driven by emotions and demonstrate the wonders of self-deception.

When I was a little older, parents gave me my first library card. It seems the library was located on 85th street, in a foreign land. I immediately asked the librarian for something on stars. She brought a photo album of the men and women with names like Clark gable and Jean Harlow. I complained, and she smiled (because I then do not understand), I've found another, proper book.

It was the time of Theodore, a distinguished engineer of his century, whom the Greeks credited with the invention of the key, the ruler, the carpenter's square, level, turning, bronze casting and Central heating. Why is this man not a monument?

Some scientists think that when expansion [of the Universe] is followed by contraction, when the spectra of distant galaxies will become blue-shifted, there will be an inversion of causality and effect will precede cause.

Imagine that we live in an unusual country where everything is totally flat. Following Edwin Abbott, a scholar of Shakespeare who lived in Victorian England, let's call it Flatland (from the English. flat - flat. - TRANS.). Some of us are squares, others triangles, and some has a more complex shape. We scurry past our flat houses, go out, do your flat cases and flat fun. All the flatlanders have a width and length, but don't have the height. We know what is right and left, forward and back, but no one except our flat mathematicians don't have the slightest idea about what is top and bottom. They say, "Look, it's really very simple. Imagine the movement of left and right. Now a back and forth motion. So far, so good? Now imagine another dimension, at right angles to our two". And we answer: "What are you talking about? How is "at right angles to our two"?! There are only two dimensions. Show us the third dimension. Where is it?" And mathematics in the depression are removed. Nobody listens to mathematicians.

Largest libraries of the world contain millions of volumes, which corresponds to 10^14 bits of information conveyed in words, and about 10^15 bits - in illustrations. This is ten thousand times more of the information that is contained in our genes, and about ten times more the amount of information stored in our brain. If I were to read one book per week, over a lifetime, can handle only a few thousand volumes - tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books should meet.