Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do.
I've decided to aim a telescope at my neighbour's window. It's the closest I'll ever come to living with someone comfortably.
When we look at the universe, what we see by eye or with our telescopes is only five percent of the universe. The rest, 95 percent is dark. Dark meaning, first of all, not visible to our instrument. Second, dark also indicates our ignorance. We don't know what's the composition of this part of the universe.
I'm such a long-term investor, I've never really let go and celebrated what I did with the Hubble telescope.
There we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.
The discovery in 1846 of the planet Neptune was a dramatic and spectacular achievement of mathematical astronomy. The very existence of this new member of the solar system, and its exact location, were demonstrated with pencil and paper; there was left to observers only the routine task of pointing their telescopes at the spot the mathematicians had marked.
Looking at scientific inquiry, next paradigm will be based on very large datasets. Scientists are in the lead in handling very large datasets - Hubble telescope or Large Hadron Collider are massive datasets.
You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.
The one way to discover about aliens is to tune your radio telescope and listen to the signals.
He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man's dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?
LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you.
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
The eyes of a man are of no use without the observing power. Telescopes and microscopes are cunning contrivances, but they cannot see of themselves.
Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.
My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
The telescope sweeps the sky without finding God.
I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn't have a telescope, so I was just an idiot.
It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported.
Computer science has as much to do with computers as astronomy has to do with telescopes.
Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end, of the telescope,--the star that is looking, not looked after nor looked at.
