I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaître first proposed this [Big Bang] theory. ... There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed …

- Hannes Alfven

To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of spac…

- Hannes Alfven

Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territory. In many instances, such parochialism is founded on the fear that intr…

- Hannes Alfven

Most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe. Every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few…

- Hannes Alfven

Students using astrophysical textbooks remain essentially ignorant of even the existence of plasma concepts, despite the fact that some of them have …

- Hannes Alfven

I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our…

- Hannes Alfven

I have never thought that you could obtain the extremely clumpy, heterogeneous universe we have today, strongly affected by plasma processes, from th…

- Hannes Alfven

The technologists claim that if everything works [in a nuclear fission reactor] according to their blueprints, fission energy will be a safe and very…

- Hannes Alfven

It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

- Hannes Alfven