The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it.

We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a 1 percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant.

In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection.

A significant fraction of evangelical voters appear more likely to ignore the candidates' specific economic and foreign policy platforms in favor of concerns about gay marriage or abortion.

In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.

Celebrate our brief moment in the sun

Now, almost one hundred years later, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much our picture of the universe has changed in the span of a single human lifetime. As far as the scientific community in 1917 was concerned, the universe was static and eternal, and consisted of a one single galaxy, our Milky Way, surrounded by vast, infinite, dark, and empty space. This is, after all, what you would guess by looking up at the night sky with your eyes, or with a small telescope, and at the time there was little reason to suspect otherwise.