John N. Bahcall Quotes

Every time we get slapped down, we can say, Thank you Mother Nature, because it means we're about to learn something important.

The earth’s atmosphere is an imperfect window on the universe. Electromagnetic waves in the optical part of the spectrum (that is waves longer than X rays and shorter than radio waves) penetrate to the surface of the earth only in a few narrow spectral bands The widest of the transmitted bands corresponds roughly to the colors of visible light waves in the flanking ultraviolet and infrared regions of the optical spectrum are almost totally absorbed by the atmosphere. In addition atmospheric turbulence blurs the images of celestial objects even when they are viewed through the most powerful ground-based telescopes in an article promoting the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects that we can not yet imagine.

We often frame our understanding of what the space telescope will do in terms of what we expect to find, and actually it would be terribly anticlimactic if in fact we find what we expect to find. … The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.

John Bahcall, an astronomer on the Institute of Advanced Study faculty since 1970 likes to tell the story of his first faculty dinner when he found himself seated across from Kurt Gödel a man dedicated to logic and the clean certainties of mathematical abstraction Bahcall introduced himself and mentioned that he was a physicist Gödel replied“I don’t believe in natural science.