Timothy Ferris

Timothy Ferris (born August 29, 1944) is an American science writer and author of twelve books. He won the 1986 Klumpke-Roberts Award and for the academic year 1986–1987 was a Guggenheim Fellow. His 1988 book Coming of Age in the Milky Way was awarded the 1989 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award. He is a professor emeritus in the departments of journalism and astronomy of the University of California, Berkeley.

Quotes

• In all, Kepler tested seventy circular orbits against Tycho's Mars data, all to no avail. At one point, performing a leap of the imagination like Leonardo's to the moon, he imagined himself on Mars, and sought to reconstruct the path the earth's motion would trace out across the skies of a Martian observatory; this effort consumed nine hundred pages of calculations, but still failed to solve the major problem.
  • Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Anchor Books. 1989. p. 79. ISBN 0385263260.  1st sentence of quote; 2nd sentence of quote; 1st edition 1988

• Neuroscience has begun to reveal some fascinating things about how the brain works, shedding light on the concept of personal identity, the data-handling limitations of the central nervous system, and the way that the brain smooths over its liabilities and discontinuities to sustain a sense of unified consciousness. We are beginning to realize that each of us really does contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman put it, and that the chorus of voices within was built up over eons of evolution, like geological strata in the Burgess Shale or the White Cliffs of Dover.
  • The Mind's Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context. Bantam Books. 1993. pp. xi–xv. ISBN 978-0-553-37133-8.  (quote from p. xiii; 1st edition 1992)

• … For more than a thousand years it was thought that the heavens obeyed a different physics than pertains here on Earth. With the scientific renaissance that culminated in Isaac Newton’s work it became clear that, on the contrary, the same natural laws rule the earth and the sky. The cosmos came to be viewed as a clockwork marvel, events following from causes like the tickings of brass cogs. The realm of the inexplicable—where dwell the gods of those dazzled by the unexplained—was thereafter relegated to the first moment of time, when the universe somehow blossomed into being. Then quantum chance reared its indeterminate face, as a creative agency that authored the first phenomena of cosmic time. So we are obliged to consider that even the largest systems are ruled by quantum precepts that govern nature on the smallest scales, and that the origin of the universe may itself have been a cosmic flux.
  • The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe Report. Simon & Schuster. 1998. ISBN 978-0-684-83861-8.  (quote from pp. 11–12; pbk reprint of 1997 1st edition)

• The most dramatic burst of biological inventiveness came here, just over half a billion years ago, when a whole array of creatures equipped with claws and teeth and tentacles appeared, in what is aptly called the Cambrian "explosion". Its cause is something of a mystery, but the forms taken on by nearly of the organisms on Earth today represent variations of the plans invented during the Cambrian. It makes you wonder just how exotic extraterrestrial life might be.
  • Life Beyond Earth. Simon & Schuster. 2000. p. 40. ISBN 0-684-84937-2. 

• This book argues that ... the democratic revolution was sparked—caused is perhaps not too strong a word—by the scientific revolution, and that science continues to foster political freedom today. It's not just that scientific creativity has produced technological improvements, which in turn have enhanced the prosperity and security of the scientific nations, although that is part of the story, but that the freedoms protected by liberal democracies are essential to facilitating scientific inquiry, and that democracy itself is an experimental system without which neither science nor liberty can flourish.
  • The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature. Harper Collins. 2010. p. 6. ISBN 978-0-06-078150-7.