I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.
I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.
It bears mentioning that the Milky Way is only one of 150 billion galaxies visible to our telescopes - and each of these will have its own complement of planets.
Data from orbiting telescopes like NASA's Kepler Mission hint that the tally of habitable planets in our galaxy is many billion. If E.T.'s not out there, then Earth is more than merely special - it's some sort of miracle.
The Keck telescope, which is the largest in the world, had opened just before I began my faculty position at UCLA.
There we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.
Equipped with our five senses - along with telescopes and microscopes and mass spectrometers and seismographs and magnetometers and particle accelerators and detectors sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum - we explore the universe around us and call the adventure science.
He made a style of telescopes that became the standard for amateur astronomers big and cheap. Before that, they were expensive and small. That was an enormous contribution, and he challenges people with telescopes to share them with others who don't.
You don't have to even see the common man anymore if you don't want to! Only through the telescope on your yacht.
Looking at scientific inquiry, next paradigm will be based on very large datasets. Scientists are in the lead in handling very large datasets - Hubble telescope or Large Hadron Collider are massive datasets.