Phil Plait Quotes

Our solar system is fantastically bizarre. There are worlds with features we never imagined. Storms larger than planets, moons with under-surface oceans, lakes of methane, worldlets that swap places...and that's just at Saturn.

A lot of them complain because they say the word denial puts them in the same bin as holocaust deniers. That's too bad. But the thing is, they do have something in common: a denial of evidence and of scientific consensus.

Pseudoscience is like a virus. At low levels, it's no big deal, but when it reaches a certain threshold it becomes sickening.

I'm tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.

Teach a man to reason and he will think for a lifetime.

How do you convince someone they're not thinking clearly, when they're not thinking clearly? What we're actually saying is no magic, no afterlife, no higher moral authoritative father-figure, no security, and no happy ever after. This is a tough sell.

You can experience the thrill of discovery, the incredible, visceral feeling of doing something no one has ever done before, see things no one has ever seen before, know something no one has ever known before. ... Welcome to science, you're gonna like it here.

If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, 'It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.'

It’s dead obvious that creationism isn’t science, or even bad science. It’s nonsense. But I’ve long stated it’s also bad religion, because it doesn’t just take faith, it also takes a phenomenal disregard of reality.

The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote...

It's amazing to me that not only can we put a probe around Saturn and get images of its moons, but our math and physics are so freaking accurate we can say, "Hey, you know what? On this date at this time if we turn Cassini that way we'll see a moon over 2 million kilometers away pass in front of another one nearly 3 million kilometers away." Every morning, I have a 50/50 chance of finding my keys. That kinda puts things in perspective.

However, science isn't just about showing when you're right; it's also about showing when you're wrong.

The Universe is cool enough without making up crap about it.

Humanity and life are reflected in the stars, and the Universe itself is poetry.

Other job markets may lay claim to the title, but astronomy is actually the world's oldest profession.

I still hear some people say that science takes the wonder out of life. Those people are utterly wrong. Science takes us to the wonder

I'm tired of ignorance held up as inspiration.

If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War, lumped them together and blew them up at the same time, that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment.

Just like people, stars can be important without being terribly bright.

They say that even the brightest star won't shine forever. But in fact, the brightest star would live the shortest amount of time. Feel free to extract whatever life lesson you want from that.

Welcome to science. You’re gonna like it here.

Sometimes, even by accident, the universe makes beauty, and we can stand back in awe of it. Even better - we can figure out why. Science! I love this stuff.

Some people try to tell me that science will never answer the big questions we have in life. To them I say: baloney! The real problem is your questions aren't big enough.

Not everything that’s cool is science, but everything in science is cool.

The best idea ever thought of in the history of humanity is useless unless someone communicates it. It will die in the test tube. And in our case, what we're communicating here to people is not necessarily something they want to hear. And so, our demeanor - how we deliver this message - takes on crucial, crucial importance.

Sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs had a bad day.

Astrology ... makes vague predictions that can always be adapted after the fact to fit observations, as we'll see. Astrologers don't seek causes at all, for a good reason: There isn't any cause to astrology. If you look for some underlying reason, some connection between the stars and planets and our lives, you won't find any. For astrology to sell, buyers must not seek out the fundamental principles behind it, because if they do they'll see that there is none.

When you're dealing with the universe, ignorance can be deadly.