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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index B > Ben Bova Quotes

Ben Bova
(8 Nov 1932 - )

American writer and journalist who has written many books, both of science fiction (from 1959) and non-fiction (from 1961).

Science Quotes by Ben Bova (3 quotes)

At the planet’s very heart lies a solid rocky core, at least five times larger than Earth, seething with the appalling heat generated by the inexorable contraction of the stupendous mass of material pressing down to its centre. For more than four billion years Jupiter’s immense gravitational power has been squeezing the planet slowly, relentlessly, steadily, converting gravitational energy into heat, raising the temperature of that rocky core to thirty thousand degrees, spawning the heat flow that warms the planet from within. That hot, rocky core is the original protoplanet seed from the solar system’s primeval time, the nucleus around which those awesome layers of hydrogen and helium and ammonia, methane, sulphur compounds and water have wrapped themselves.
— Ben Bova
Jupiter
Science quotes on:  |  Ammonia (15)  |  Appalling (10)  |  Awesome (15)  |  Billion (104)  |  Centre (31)  |  Compound (117)  |  Contraction (18)  |  Convert (22)  |  Core (20)  |  Degree (277)  |  Down (455)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Energy (373)  |  Five (16)  |  Flow (89)  |  Generate (16)  |  Gravitation (72)  |  Heart (243)  |  Heat (180)  |  Helium (11)  |  Hot (63)  |  Hydrogen (80)  |  Immense (89)  |  Inexorable (10)  |  Jupiter (28)  |  Large (398)  |  Layer (41)  |  Least (75)  |  Lie (370)  |  Mass (160)  |  Material (366)  |  Methane (9)  |  More (2558)  |  Nucleus (54)  |  Original (61)  |  Planet (402)  |  Power (771)  |  Press (21)  |  Primeval (15)  |  Raise (38)  |  Relentlessly (2)  |  Rocky (3)  |  Seed (97)  |  Seething (3)  |  Slowly (19)  |  Solar System (81)  |  Solar Systems (5)  |  Solid (119)  |  Spawn (2)  |  Squeeze (7)  |  Steadily (7)  |  Stupendous (13)  |  Sulphur (19)  |  System (545)  |  Temperature (82)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Thirty (6)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Time (1911)  |  Warm (74)  |  Water (503)  |  Wrap (7)  |  Year (963)

Jupiter is the largest of all the solar system’s planets, more than ten times bigger and three hundred times as massive as Earth. Jupiter is so immense it could swallow all the other planets easily. Its Great Red Spot, a storm that has raged for centuries, is itself wider than Earth. And the Spot is merely one feature visible among the innumerable vortexes and streams of Jupiter’s frenetically racing cloud tops. Yet Jupiter is composed mainly of the lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, more like a star than a planet. All that size and mass, yet Jupiter spins on its axis in less than ten hours, so fast that the planet is clearly not spherical: Its poles are noticeably flattened. Jupiter looks like a big, colorfully striped beach ball that’s squashed down as if some invisible child were sitting on it. Spinning that fast, Jupiter’s deep, deep atmosphere is swirled into bands and ribbons of multihued clouds: pale yellow, saffron orange, white, tawny yellow-brown, dark brown, bluish, pink and red. Titanic winds push the clouds across the face of Jupiter at hundreds of kilometers per hour.
— Ben Bova
Jupiter
Science quotes on:  |  Across (32)  |  Atmosphere (117)  |  Axis (9)  |  Ball (64)  |  Band (9)  |  Beach (23)  |  Big (55)  |  Brown (23)  |  Century (319)  |  Child (333)  |  Clearly (45)  |  Cloud (111)  |  Compose (20)  |  Dark (145)  |  Deep (241)  |  Down (455)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Easily (36)  |  Element (322)  |  Face (214)  |  Fast (49)  |  Feature (49)  |  Great (1610)  |  Helium (11)  |  Hour (192)  |  Hundred (240)  |  Hundreds (6)  |  Hydrogen (80)  |  Immense (89)  |  Innumerable (56)  |  Invisible (66)  |  Jupiter (28)  |  Kilometer (10)  |  Large (398)  |  Largest (39)  |  Less (105)  |  Light (635)  |  Look (584)  |  Mainly (10)  |  Mass (160)  |  Massive (9)  |  Merely (315)  |  More (2558)  |  Orange (15)  |  Other (2233)  |  Pale (9)  |  Pink (4)  |  Planet (402)  |  Pole (49)  |  Push (66)  |  Race (278)  |  Rage (10)  |  Red (38)  |  Ribbon (2)  |  Sit (51)  |  Sitting (44)  |  Size (62)  |  Solar System (81)  |  Solar Systems (5)  |  Sphere (118)  |  Spin (26)  |  Spinning (18)  |  Spot (19)  |  Squash (4)  |  Star (460)  |  Storm (56)  |  Stream (83)  |  Stripe (4)  |  Swallow (32)  |  Swirl (10)  |  System (545)  |  Tawny (3)  |  Time (1911)  |  Titanic (4)  |  Top (100)  |  Visible (87)  |  Vortex (10)  |  White (132)  |  Wide (97)  |  Wind (141)  |  Yellow (31)

They were in orbit around the planet now, and its giant curving bulk loomed so huge that he could see nothing else, nothing but the bands and swirls of clouds that raced fiercely across Jupiter’s face. The clouds shifted and flowed before his eyes, spun into eddies the size of Asia, moved and throbbed and pulsed like living creatures. Lightning flashed down there, sudden explosions of light that flickered back and forth across the clouds, like signalling lamps.
— Ben Bova
Jupiter
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Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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