Chris Impey > Quotes

“Every five minutes, a pair of black holes merges somewhere in the universe, pouring gravitational waves out into space.”
― Chris Impey, Einstein's Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes

“Yet even Newton’s great intellect did not fully illuminate gravity. He couldn’t explain how it operates instantaneously and invisibly across a vacuum. He admitted as much in his masterwork on gravity from 1687, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. He wrote, “I have not been able to discover the causes of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses.”
― Chris Impey, Einstein's Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes

“Nature guards its secrets zealously, and it takes grit and determination to shed light on them.”
― Chris Impey, Einstein's Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes

“Unfortunately life rarely mimics art. If life is like a movie, it doesn’t end with a climactic scene; more often the celluloid gets grainy and frayed and the actors forget their lines. If life is like a concert, it doesn’t end in a crescendo; more often the instruments go out of tune, the musicians wander off, and the music peters out.”
― Chris Impey, How It Ends: From You to the Universe

“The Moon’s low gravity and slow rotation mean that a space elevator could be built with materials already available. The honeycomb fiber called M5 is lighter and stronger than Kevlar; a ribbon 3 centimeters wide and 0.02 millimeter thick could support 2,000 kilograms on the lunar surface or 100 climbers with a mass of 600 kilos each, evenly spaced along the ribbon. We could build a lunar elevator right now.”
― Chris Impey, Beyond: Our Future in Space

“Some cold, hard facts: Cold is more dangerous than heat. Toothpicks are more dangerous than lightning. Pedestrians are more dangerous than fire. Beds are more dangerous than ladders. Snakes are more dangerous than terrorists. Flammable nightwear is more dangerous than a bee sting. Coconuts are more dangerous than sharks.7”
― Chris Impey, How It Ends: From You to the Universe

“Carl Sagan put it best: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
― Chris Impey, Beyond: Our Future in Space