Sublime

For scientists, what remains of a theory after its contact with data is what is deemed beautiful.

Science is not an occupation of the elite in isolated ivory towers but an endeavor that benefits and excites all humans, irrespective of their academic backgrounds.

This would make ‘Oumuamua’s geometry more extreme by at least a few times in aspect ratio—or its width to its height—than the most extreme asteroids or comets that we have ever seen.

Very often, what sets an astrophysicist’s detective story in motion is the discovery of an anomaly in experimental or observational data, a piece of evidence that does not follow our expectations and that cannot be explained by what we know. In such situations, it is common practice to propose a variety of alternative explanations and then rule the

while we cannot control the data that the universe provides, we can control how we go about seeking it, assessing it, and recalibrating our future scientific undertakings. The world of possibilities to which we choose to open ourselves, bounded by the evidence we collect and that we allow our collective intelligence to consider, very much determine

emeritus of physics at Princeton University: “It is an embarrassment that the dominant forms of matter in the universe are hypothetical.”42

One of the most difficult lessons to impart to young scientists is that the search for the truth can run counter to the search for consensus. Indeed, truth and consensus must never be conflated.