Dava Sobel > Quotes

“He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch. Even when the bulbs of the hourglass shatter, when darkness withholds the shadow from the sundial, when the mainspring winds down so far that the clock hands hold still as death, time itself keeps on. The most we can hope a watch to do is mark that progress. And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don't really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they're able.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“[John] Harrison [could not] express himself clearly in writing.... No matter how brilliantly ideas formed in his mind, or crystallized in his clockworks, his verbal descriptions failed to shine with the same light.... The first sentence [of his last published work] runs on, virtually unpunctuated, for twenty-five pages." Dava Sobel, Longitude, p66”
― Dava Sobel

“One degree of longitude equals four minutes of time the world over, but in terms of distance, one degree shrinks from sixty-eight miles at the Equator to virtually nothing at the poles.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth—temporal—dimension to link points on the three-dimensional globe. He wrested the world’s whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“with its graceful language and poetic conceit, and even more because it expressed his own philosophy of science. To wit: As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic—that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension.”
― Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love

“In the wake of the Longitude Act, the concept of “discovering the longitude” became a synonym for attempting the impossible.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“Time is to clock as mind is to brain. The clock or watch somehow contains the time. And yet time refuses to be bottled up like a genie stuffed in a lamp. Whether it flows as sand or turns on wheels within wheels, time escapes irretrievably, while we watch.”
― Dava Sobel

“The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“Earlier maps had underestimated the distances to other continents and exaggerated the outlines of individual nations. Now global dimensions could be set, with authority, by the celestial spheres. Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“To learn one’s longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is aboard ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known longitude—at that very same moment. The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into a geographical separation. Since the Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete one full revolution of three hundred sixty degrees, one hour marks one twenty-fourth of a spin, or fifteen degrees.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time

“Any clock that can track this sideral schedule proves itself as perfect as God's magnificent clockwork.

Dava Sobel”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child’s play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma—one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time

“Faultfinding is of little use and scant profit, for it is the mark of a shameless mind to prefer the role of the censorious critic to that of the creative poet. —FROM COPERNICUS’S Letter Against Werner, JUNE 3, 1524”
― Dava Sobel, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos

“But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.”
― Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love

“A scientist in the laboratory is not only a technician, but also a child confronted by natural phenomena more enchanting than any fairy tale.”
― Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science

“And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created he used to answer tolerantly that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable.”
― Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love

“As earnestly as men may seek to understand the workings of the universe, they must remember that God is not hampered by their limited logic that all observed effects may have been wrought by Him in any one of an infinite number of omnipotent ways, and these ways, and these must ever evade mortal comprehension.”
― Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love

“He wrested the world’s whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time

“Today, the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes its configuration underneath them—with continents adrift across a widening sea, and national boundaries repeatedly redrawn by war or peace.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time

“The British Parliament, in its famed Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prize equal to a king’s ransom (several million dollars in today’s currency) for a “Practicable and Useful” means of determining longitude.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“In 1884, at the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., representatives from twenty-six countries voted to make the common practice official. They declared the Greenwich meridian the prime meridian of the world. This decision did not sit well with the French, however, who continued to recognize their own Paris Observatory meridian, a little more than two degrees east of Greenwich, as the starting line for another twenty-seven years, until 1911. (Even then, they hesitated to refer directly to Greenwich mean time, preferring the locution “Paris Mean Time, retarded by nine minutes twenty-one seconds.”)”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: A journey through time, astronomy, and horology

“the beaches. In literally hundreds of instances, a vessel’s ignorance of her longitude led swiftly to her destruction. Launched on a mix of bravery and greed, the sea captains of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries relied on “dead reckoning” to gauge their distance east or west of home port. The captain would throw a log overboard and observe how quickly the ship receded from this temporary guidepost. He noted the crude speedometer reading in his ship’s logbook, along with the direction of travel, which he took from the stars or a compass, and the length of time on a particular course, counted with a sandglass or a pocket watch. Factoring in the effects of ocean currents, fickle winds, and errors in judgment, he then determined his longitude. He routinely missed his mark, of course—searching”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time

“Having established itself securely on shipboard, the chronometer was soon taken for granted, like any other essential thing, and the whole question of its contentious history, along with the name of its original inventor, dropped from the consciousness of the seamen who used it every day.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

“To have done work which is widely recognized, to have gained the sincere esteem of many and the real love of even a few, surely these are sufficient reasons to look on life as well worth the living.”
― Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars

“To me it is absolutely indifferent whether a piece of work is carried out by a small woman in Bulgaria or by a tall man in America, as long as it is done well. And this is what we have to do: do things so well that no one would dare to say, “this is good work for a woman,” but that everyone will say, “this is good work.”
― Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science

“I take such great pleasure in speaking of new things with all these lovers of physics.”
― Dava Sobel, The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science

“Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.”
― Dava Sobel

“Newton grew impatient. It was clear to him now that any hope of settling the longitude matter lay in the stars. The lunar distance method that had been proposed several times over preceding centuries gained credence and adherents as the science of astronomy improved. Thanks to Newton’s own efforts in formulating the Universal Law of Gravitation, the moon’s motion was better understood and to some extent predictable. Yet the world was still waiting on Flamsteed to finish surveying the stars. Flamsteed, meticulous to a fault, had spent forty years mapping the heavens—and had still not released his data. He kept it all under seal at Greenwich.”
― Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time

“There was only one trial of Galileo, and yet it seems there were a thousand—the suppression of science by religion, the defense of individualism against authority, the clash between revolutionary and establishment, the challenge of radical new discoveries to ancient beliefs, the struggle against intolerance for freedom of thought and freedom of speech.”
― Dava Sobel, Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love