Dennis W. Sciama Quotes

The reader has by now probably become accustomed to the reversals of fortune so common in astronomy.

You know my favourite Dirac story: I go up to him once and I say, "Professor Dirac, I've just thought of a way of relating the formation of stars to cosmological things — not galaxies, stars — shall I tell you about it?" And he said, "No."

... I started thinking about gravitational theories and Mach's Principle and so on, I knew already then, very slightly, Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold, and I talked to them a bit about these things, I remember I asked Bondi to tea one day and told him the thoughts I'd had and I said, "Are they rubbish? What should I do?" He said, "Why not go on thinking about them?" I think that was very good of him, because I'm quite sure in retrospect it was rubbish what I said, as I was very immature at that time ...

It has now become clear that the exploration of the Universe, as conducted by physicists, astronomers and cosmologists, is one of the greatest intellectual adventures of the mid-twentieth century.

It is not surprising that it was the Greeks, with their profound understanding of geometrical principles, who were the first to devise methods of measuring the size of the earth and the distance to the sun and the moon. Indeed, their results were not superseded until the eighteenth century, when telescopes had been developed to the point where new methods could be introduced.