“It was first surmised by the ancient philosopher, Democritus, that the faintly white zone which spans the sky under the name of the Milky Way, might be only a dense collection of stars too remote to be distinguished. This conjecture has been verified by the instruments of modern astronomers.”

— Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) , book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 3-4

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Scottish publisher and writer 1802–1871

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“Science is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher, to student, to teacher. A community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars. (From the first Cosmos: ASO episode, Standing Up in the Milky Way.)”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

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“The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had conjectured that Messier's nebulae were distant "island universes" outside our Milky Way galaxy, but many scientists in the early twentieth century disagreed.”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 3, The Beginning Of Modern Cosmology, p. 54

“We may… have surmised nebulae to be no other than clusters of stars disguised by their very great distance, but a longer experience and better acquaintance with the nature of nebulae, will not allow a general admission of such a principle, although undoubtedly a cluster of stars may assume a nebulous appearance when it is too remote for us to discern the stars of which it is composed.”

William Herschel (1738–1822) German-born British astronomer, technical expert, and composer

p, 125
Astronomical Observations relating to the Construction of the Heavens... (1811)

“There is an enormous difference between modern science and Greek philosophy, and that is just the empiristic attitude… Since the time of Galileo and Newton, modern science has been based upon a detailed study of nature and upon the postulate that only such statements should be made, as have been verified or at least can be verified by experiment. The idea that one can single out some events from nature by an experiment… to find out what is the constant law in the continuous change, did not occur to the Greek philosophers. Therefore, modern science has from its beginning stood on a much more modest, but at the same time much firmer, basis than ancient philosophy. Therefore, the statements of modern physics are in some way meant much more seriously than the statements of Greek philosophy.”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

p, 125
Physics and Philosophy (1958)

“Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Stanza 2.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww260.html (1804)

“O star-built bridge, broad milky way!
O star-lit, stately, splendid span!
If but one star should cease to stay
And prop its shoulders to God's plan —
The man who lives for self, I say,
He lives for neither God nor man.”

Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) American judge

The Building of the City Beautiful (1905), Ch. V : How Beautiful!, p. 48.

“Few would have predicted that the discovery of the circulation of the blood would have changed the way philosophers view the world, theologians conceive of God, or astronomers look at the stars, yet all of that happened.”

Richard Bergland neuroscientist

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“I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

"The Sentinel" (1948), originally titled "Sentinel of Eternity" this is the short story which later provided the fundamental ideas for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) written by Clarke and Stanley Kubrick.
1940s
Context: I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait.
I do not think we will have to wait for long

“There is another kind of studies which distinguished from the sometimes opposed to comparative grammar. It is known under the name of general or philosophical grammar, whose principles and observations were articulated by Port Royal and which deals with the relation of the form of language to the operations of the mind.”

Michel Bréal (1832–1915) French philologist

Michel Bréal (1886), cited in Jacek Juliusz Jadacki, Witold Strawiński. In the World of Signs: Essays in Honour of Professor Jerzy Pelc. 1998, p. 255

“The first philosophers were astronomers. The heavens remind man … that he is destined not merely to act, but also to contemplate.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), pp. 101-102
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

“It was first surmised by the ancient philosopher, Democritus, that the faintly white zone which spans the sky under the name of the Milky Way, might be only a dense collection of stars too remote to be distinguished. This conjecture has been verified by the instruments of modern astronomers.”

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