Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey Season 1 quotes

Some stars are so far away, it takes eons for their light to get to Earth. By the time the light from some stars gets here, they are already dead. For those stars, we see only their ghosts.

When [the light we see today] left the Pleiades, about 400 years ago, Galileo was taking his first look through a telescope.

In the observed universe, everyone gets to feel special . . . at the center of the cosmic horizon. . . . It's what you get when you have a finite speed of light in a universe that had a beginning in time.

Nature commands, "Thou shalt not add my speed to the speed of light." . . . For reality to be logically consistent, there must be a cosmic speed limit.

Black holes may very well be tunnels through the universe. [If you could somehow survive the ride on] this intergalactic subway system, you could travel to the farthest reaches of spacetime, or you might arrive in someplace even more amazing. We might find ourselves in an altogether different universe.

The age and size of the cosmos are written in light. The nature of beauty and the substance of the stars, the laws of space and time they were there all along, but we never saw them until we devised a more powerful way of seeing.

In China, more than 2,000 years ago, a philosopher named Mo Tzu is said to have observed that light could be made to paint a picture inside a locked treasure room. This was the description of the first camera: the camera obscura, the prototype of all image-forming cameras (including the one that's bringing you this picture).

Show me the spectrum of anything, whether here on Earth or from a distant star, and I'll tell you what it's made of. Fraunhofer's lines are the atomic signatures of the elements writ large across the cosmos. As with every other major revelation in the history of science, it opened the way to newer and deeper mysteries.

You never know where the next genius will come from. How many of them do we leave in the rubble? The prince and his kingdom were immeasurably enriched by that act of kindness to a poor orphan.

Confining our perception of nature to visible light is like listening to music in only one octave.

There are more atoms in your eye than there are stars in all the galaxies in the known universe.

The chloroplast is a three billion year-old solar energy collector. This sub-microscopic solar battery is what drives all the forests, and the fields, and the plankton of the seas, and the animals, including us.

Thales kindled a flame that still burns to this day: the very idea of cosmos out of chaos, a universe governed by the order of natural laws that we can actually figure out. This is the epic adventure that began in the mind of Thales.

The nucleus is very small compared to the rest of the atom. If an atom were the size of this cathedral, its nucleus would be the size of that mote of dust.

Are there any mementos from when the Earth was born, objects that could possibly tell us its true age? I know a place where the unused bricks and mortar left over from the creation of our solar system can be found. It lies between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars.