Cosmic%20Quotations,%20Poetry,%20and%20Prose:%20A%20compilation%20of%20reflections%20on%20our%20Universe.

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Cosmic Quotations, Poetry, and ProseA
compilation of reflections on our Universe.
Edited by Julie Ware, Physics 133 Extra Credit
Project
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Introduction

• Einstein, the same man who discovered the Law of
  Relativity, also said that imagination is more
  important than knowledge. This is true because
  to desire an understanding of the heavens, your
  imagination must first be probed by curiosity.
  In order to even begin understanding the laws of
  the Universe, it requires imagination to
  understand just how grand of a scale we are
  talking about. I want to incorporate both science
  and reflections of the imagination by summarizing
  certain astronomical topics, while including
  quotes or prose from famous physicists and
  authors

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Cosmos Dancing, by Jo Ann Durham
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Astronomy Quotes

• Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of
  logical ideas. (Albert Einstein)
• The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was,
  and all there ever will be. (Carl Sagan)
• We especially need imagination in science. It is
  not all mathematics, nor all logic, but is
  somewhat beauty and poetry. (Maria
  Mitchell,1818-1889, astronomer )

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The History of Astronomy
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Archeostronomy

• The history of astronomy is immense because its
  in human nature to be curious. As far back as
  2,500 years ago, Muslim people predicted eclipses
  using saros cycles. Also, the heavens were used
  to keep track of seasons for agriculture, using
  sundials to observe the passing of time. Ancient
  structures were used in search of astronomical
  connections. For example, the Stonehenge was
  built as early as approx. 2,500 BC to mark the
  seasons.
• Before the Copernican revolution, people believed
  that the world was the center of the universe.
  This one misconception led people to entertain
  complex and ultimately untrue laws of nature, for
  example, that the planets traveled around earth
  in complex retrograde cycles.
• In 1542, Copernicus published Concerning the
  Revolutions of the Heavenly Spears, which
  replaced prior geometric layouts and put was
  Heliocentric. Though Copernicus ideas were not
  all right, he did however spark a necessary
  scientific revolution, leading to Kepler,
  Galileo, as well as many others to begin the
  development of modern day scientific principles.
• Keplers laws of planetary motion states that
  every planet orbits around the sun at an ellipse,
  as well as another invisible point, a planet
  sweeps out equal areas in equal times in orbit,
  and more distant planets orbit the sun at slower
  speeds.
• Galileo used the telescope to show that the
  heavens were not perfect, leading us to seek
  natural explanations for phenomena.

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History of Astronomy Quotes

• They came to a round hole in the sky, burning
  like fire. "This," said the Raven, "is a
  star."Inuit creation story
• Even sticks and stones have a spiritual essence,
  a manifestation of the mysterious power that
  fills the Universe.Sioux Indian
• It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy
  sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows
  shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a
  delicious contrast between the world's duration
  and the feeble span of individual experience.
  There is something in Stonehenge almost
  reassuring and if you are disposed to feel that
  life is rather a superficial matter, and that we
  soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial
  gray pillars may serve to remind you of the
  enormous background of time.Henry James 1875 CE

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Pre-Copernican Revolution in Western
Civilizations

• There are forces in nature called Love and Hate.
  The force of Love causes elements to be attracted
  to each other and to be built up into some
  particular form or person, and the force of Hate
  causes the decomposition of things.Empedocles
  430 BCE
• The forces of rotation caused red hot masses of
  stones to be torn away from the Earth and to be
  thrown into the ether, and this is the origin of
  the stars.Anaxagoras 428 BCE
• The Sun is a mass of fiery stone, a little larger
  than Greece.Anaxagoras 434 BCE

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Post Copernican Revolution

• The Universe is populated by innumerable suns,
  innumerable earths, and perhaps, innumerable
  forms of life. That thought expresses the essence
  of the Copernican revolution. No revelation more
  striking has ever come from the scientific
  mind.Robert Jastrow 1989 CE
• You realize the sun don'-go downIt's just an
  illusion caused by the world spinning round
• The Flaming Lips, Do You Realize?

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Key Astronomical Principles
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Making Sense of It All

• The universal law of gravitation states that
  every mass attracts other mass by gravity and is
  directly proportional. The strength of gravity
  between objects decreases with the square of
  their distance between centers. (Inverse square
  law) Our gravity on earth is 9.8 m/s squared.
• Motion Newtons version of Keplers 3rd law
  allows us to measure orbital periods by distance,
  mass, and orbital periods. Also, Velocity is
  equaled to distance divided by time.
• Conservation of angular momentum explains that
  orbits and rotations cannot change course unless
  torque acts upon the paths. Conservation of
  momentum states that nothing can change unless
  acted upon by another force. Conservation of
  energy applies the same principle, that energy
  cannot just disappear or appear, but changes only
  by exchanges of energy.

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Laws of Motion Watch the stars and from them
learn.To the Master's honor all must turn,Each
in its track, without a sound,Forever tracing
Newton's ground.Albert Einstein
Orbital Velocity
But on your tiny planet, my little prince, all
you need to do is move your chair a few steps.
You can see the day end and the twilight falling
whenever you likeOne day, you said to me, I
saw the sunset forty-four times!And a little
later you addedYou know--one loves the sunset,
when one is so sadWere you so sad, then? I
asked, on the day of the forty-four
sunsets?But the little prince made no reply.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery The Little Prince
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• Universal Concepts
• Observations always involve theory.
  Edwin Hubble
• Gravity
• Gravity is only the bark of wisdom's tree, but it
  is what preserves it.Confucius 500 BCE
• Time
• For us physicists, the distinction between past,
  present, and future is only an illusion.Albert
  Einstein
• A day is a miniature eternity.Ralph Waldo
  Emerson
• To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven
  in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of
  your hand, and eternity in an hour.William Blake
  1800 CE
• Time begins from some placeMeasured by the age
  of light.It began from the furthest thingWe see
  flicker in the night.Art Mason

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Our Solar System
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ets.montage.jpl.jpg
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The Sun and Its Planets

• The earth rotates, thus making it appear that
  stars rise and set, (including our sun.)
• The tilt of the earth as it revolves around the
  sun causes seasons, or different hemispheres to
  feel light more or less directly.
• Planets that are closer to the sun are
  Terrestial, or, earthlike and rocky.
• Planets that are farther from the sun are Jovian,
  or jupiterlike and gaseous.
• The origin of the solar system is thought to be
  by the Nebular Theory, a giant gaseous explosion.
  Condensation and Accretion help support the
  nebular theory.
• We are able to know the composition of the sun by
  observing absorption lines, which serve as
  fingerprints formed in the photosphere.
• The Sun is composed of many layers, including the
  core, radiation zone, convention zone,
  photosphere, chromosphone, and the corona. Its
  energy source can be found through EMC2

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The Sun

• The Sun, with all the planets revolving around
  it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch
  of grapes as though it had nothing else in the
  Universe to do.
• Galileo Galilei
• I say Live, Live because of the Sun, The Dream,
  the excitable gift.
• Anne Sexton, 1928-1974, P 495

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Earth
The Evolution of the world may be compared to a
display of fireworks that has just ended some
few red wisps, ashes, and smoke. Standing on a
cooled cinder, we see the slow fading of suns,
and we try to recall the vanished brilliance of
the origin of the worlds. (G. Lemaitre,
1864-1966). P 235 See the world as it truly
is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal
silence where it floats.Archibald Macleish
www.weathernewengland.com
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The Moon

• Is the moon tired? she looks so paleWithin her
  misty veilShe scales the sky from east to
  west,And takes no rest.
• Before the coming of the nightThe moon shows
  papery whiteBefore the dawning of the dayShe
  fades away.
• - Christina Rossetti

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Stellar Lifestyles
http//www.nasaimages.org/luna/servlet/detail/nasa
NAS121264139168522Story-of-Stellar-Birth
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Stars

• Constellations are familiar patterns that help us
  to identify regions of the sky with well defined
  borders. The International Astronomical union has
  divided the sky in 88 constellations.
• We use the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram to
  determine properties of stars, which shows that
  Luminosity is relative to the Temperature 4 by
  the Radius 2 (The Stefan Boltzmann Law)
• The life of a star is based on its mass because
  its mass determines its how much energy it gives
  off.
• Temperature is classified by OBAFGKM.
• The 5 classes of Luminosity include
• I Supergiants
• II Bright Giants
• III Giants
• IVSubgiants
• V Main sequence stars

• - The life of a star is a constant battle between
  gravity and pressure.
• Highmass stars die by becoming a supernova, then
  either a black whole or neutron star.
• Low mass stars die by becoming a planetary
  nubula, then a white dward.

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Stars

• Composition
• It is remarkable that the elements diffused
  through the host of stars are some of those most
  closely connected with the living organisms of
  our globe.W. Huggins, 1865 CE
• God is mostly hydrogen.Bradley Snowder 1988 CE

• we are, therefore, made out of star stuff we
  feed upon sunbeams, we are kept warm by the
  radiation of the Sun, and we are made out of the
  same materials that constitute the stars.
• Harlow Shapley, The Universe of Stars

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• Star Clusters
• There are too many stars in some places and not
  enough in others.Mark Twain
• It is nothing else but a mass of innumerable
  stars planted together in clusters.Galileo
  Galilei 1611 CE (the Milky Way)
• Many a night I saw the Pleiads,Rising thro' the
  mellow shade,Glitter like a swarm of
  fire-flies,Tangled in a silver braid.Tennyson
• May it not be that the brighter stars are like
  our Sun, the upholding and energizing centers of
  systems of living beings?William Huggins 1865 CE

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Constellations Why did not somebody teach me the
constellations, and make me at home in the starry
heavens, which are always overhead, and which I
don't half know to this day?Thomas Carlyle 1880
CE
O had I power like inclination,I'd hoist thee up
a constellation!To canter with the Sagittare,Or
leap the Ecliptic like a bear,Or turn the Pole
like any arrowOr when old Phoebus bids
good-morrowDown the Zodiac urge the race,And
cast dirt on his godship's faceFor I could lay
my bread and kaleHe'd ne'er cast salt upon thy
tail!Robert Burns 1788 CE The wind-shak'd
surge, with high and monstrous main, Seems to
cast water on the burning Bear, And quench the
guards of the ever-fixed pole.Shakespeare,
(Othello)
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The Stellar Graveyard

• When I had satisfied myself that no star of that
  kind had ever shone before, I was led into such
  perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing
  that I began to doubt the faith of my own
  eyes.Tycho Brahe (supernova 1572)

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Our Galaxy- The Milky Way
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yway.jpg
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• Galaxies
• In the early 1600s Galileo used the telescope to
  show that the milky way is composed of individual
  stars.
• We are a spiral galaxy with many spiral arms that
  revolve around a bulge on a relatively flat disk,
  surrounded by a dimmer halo. The Halo contains
  about 200 globular clusters of stars.
• Our galaxy is abour 100,000 light years in
  diameter.
• We can use stellar orbits to measure galactic
  mass through Keplers third law.
• Were recycled throughout our galaxy through the
  star-gas-star cycle.
• The other types of galaxies are elliptical and
  irregular. Elliptical galaxies are most often
  found in clusters , containing 100s to thousands
  of other galaxies.
• Andromeda is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way
  at about 2.5 million light years away.
• Local groups consist of about 40 galaxies, with 3
  million light years across.

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Galaxy Quotes

• The infinitude of creation is great enough to
  make a world, or a Milky Way of worlds, look in
  comparison with it what a flower or an insect
  does in comparison with the Earth.Immanuel Kant
• Torrent of light and river of air,Along whose
  bed the glimmering stars are seen,Like gold and
  silver sands in some ravine Where mountain
  streams have left their channels bare!H.W.
  Longfellow 1880 CE (the Milky Way)
• Who are we? We find that we live on an
  insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a
  galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a
  universe in which there are far more galaxies
  than people.Carl Sagan

• That is the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. It is as
  large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred
  million galaxies. It consists of one hundred
  billion suns. Now I think we are small enough.
  Franklin D. Roosevelt

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The Universe

• - Our observable universe is about 14 Billion
  years old. We
• know this because we are able to see 14 Billion
  light years in
• all directions around us.
• The Universe is expanding and can be measured by
  Hubbles Law, where H tells us the rate of
  expansion that galaxies are moving apart. 1/H
  tells us how long the universe has been expanding
  (age.)
• -Our observable universe is growing 1 light year
  every year.
• - An objects distance is easier to be expressed
  in look back time.
• Lookback time is directly proportional to
  cosmological redshift, and thus we can record how
  the expansion of the universe expands photons,
  shifting them to redder wavelengths.

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Universe Quotes

• "What did you see?" I asked, "Before beginning's
  Big Bang lights?" (I reviews and interviews, I
  edits and I writes). "Before the start of time,
  before the Universe's birth?What did the Hubble
  show, ten billion years before the Earth?"He
  told me. Now I writes no more. I drinks a bit, I
  edits."Right before the beginning, " he said,
  "is when they roll the credits!"Jonathan Vos
  Post
• Images of broken light which dance before me like
  a million eyes that call me on and on across the
  Universe. Limitless undying love which shines
  around me like a million suns, it calls me on and
  on across the Universe.The Beatles 1968 CE

The universal spectacle throughoutWas shaped for
admiration and delight,Grand in itself alone,
but in that breachThrough which the homeless
voice of waters rose,That dark deep
thoroughfare, had Nature lodgedThe Soul, the
Imagination of the whole. (Wordsworth)
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• Our eyes prefer to supposeThat a habitable
  placeHas a geocentric view,That architects
  encloseA quiet Euclidian spaceExploded myths -
  but whoCould feel at home astraddleAn ever
  expanding saddle? W.H.
  Auden

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Starry Night
Vincent Van Gogh
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Works Cited

• Artwork
• Durham Collection." Welcome to Tarleton State
  University - Tarleton State University. 10 May
  2009 lthttp//www.tarleton.edu/langdoncenter/Durha
  mCollection/pages/Cosmos20Dancing.htmlgt.
• Van Gogh, Vincent. Starry Night, oil on canvas
  by Vincent van Gogh, 1888 in the Musée dOrsay,
  Paris.
• Books
• Bennett, Jeffrey. Cosmic Perspective. 5th
  Edition. San Francisco Pearson Educ. Inc., 2008.
  
• Saint-Exupery, Antoine de. The Little Prince. San
  Diego New York London Harcourt, Inc., 2000.
• Poetry
• Auden, WH. Poetry, After Reading a Child's Guide
  to Modern Physics, The New Yorker, November 17,
  1962, p. 48
• Rossetti, Christina, Poetry, Sing Song, Ed.
  Arthur Hughes. London MACMILLAN AND CO.,1893.
• Wordsworth, William. Climbing Snowdon (Book
  XIII, ls 1-119.) The Prelude. Ed. Harold Bloom.
  New York Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
• Quotations
• Western Washington University Planetarium
  Collection. Ed. Brad Snowder. 2006. Western
  Washington University. 10 May 2009
  lthttp//www.wwu.edu/depts/skywise/cosmo.htmlgt
• On Truth RealityThe Spherical Standing Wave
  Structure of Matter in Space. Ed.Geoff
  Haselhurst.1997-2009. WSM. 9 May 2009
  lthttp//www.spaceandmotion.com/mathematical-physic
  s/famous-mathematics-quotes.htmgt