“John Bahcall, an astronomer on the Institute of Advanced Study faculty since 1970 likes to tell the story of his first faculty dinner when he found himself seated across from Kurt Gödel a man dedicated to logic and the clean certainties of mathematical abstraction Bahcall introduced himself and mentioned that he was a physicist Gödel replied“I don’t believe in natural science.”
John N. Bahcall
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“The earth’s atmosphere is an imperfect window on the universe. Electromagnetic waves in the optical part of the spectrum (that is waves longer than X rays and shorter than radio waves) penetrate to th...”

John N. Bahcall

“Every time we get slapped down, we can say, Thank you Mother Nature, because it means we're about to learn something important.”

John N. Bahcall

“We often frame our understanding of what the space telescope will do in terms of what we expect to find, and actually it would be terribly anticlimactic if in fact we find what we expect to find. … Th...”

John N. Bahcall