Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey Season 1 quotes

This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules: (1) Test ideas by experiment and observation (2) Build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail (3) Follow the evidence wherever it leads, and (4) Question everything. Accept these terms, and the cosmos is yours.

Many of us suspect that all of this - all the worlds, stars, galaxies and clusters in our observable universe - is but one tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes; a multiverse. Universe upon universe; worlds without end.

Stars . . . get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. All of it was cooked in the fiery hearts of long-vanished stars. You, me, everyone: we are made of star stuff.

Every person you've ever heard of lived somewhere in there [pointing]. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, everything in the history books happened here in the last seconds of the Cosmic Calendar.

Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher; a community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

This is a story about you . . . and me . . . and your dog.

If life has a sanctuary, it's here in the nucleus, which contains our DNA - the ancient scripture of our genetic code. And it's written in a language that all life can read.

The Theory of Evolution, like the Theory of Gravity, is a scientific fact. Evolution really happened. Accepting our kinship with all life on Earth is not only solid science, in my view, it's also a soaring spiritual experience.

That nameless corridor? That's for another day. (While standing near the as-yet-unnamed, sixth corridor in the "Halls of Extinction.")

Science works on the frontier between knowledge and ignorance. We're not afraid to admit what we don't know. There's no shame in that. The only shame is to pretend that we have all the answers.

Does the fact that most of us know the names of mass murderers but never heard of Jan Oort say anything about us?

Newton's Principia Mathematica set us free. . . . By finding the natural laws governing the comings and goings of comets, he decoupled the motions of the heavens from their ancient connections to our fears.

Like Babe Ruth predicting where his next home run would land in the stands, Halley stated flatly that the comet would return at the end of 1758, from a particular part of the sky, following a specific path.

Newton's laws made it possible for Edmond Halley to see some 50 years into the future and predict the behavior of a single comet.

Using nothing more than Newton's laws of gravitation, we astronomers can confidently predict that several billion years from now our home galaxy - the Milky Way - will merge with our neighboring galaxy - Andromeda. . . . Any life on the worlds of that far off future . . . would be treated to an amazing billion-year-long light show; a dance of a half a trillion stars, to music first heard on one little world, by a man who had but one true friend.