Heidi Hammel Quotes

Heidi Hammel

Profession : Scientist

Birth : March 14, 1960

I don't think I could advocate for increasing NASA's budget by a factor of two or ten, because I want us to have good roads in our country. I want us to have good education in our country. And NASA's budget is part of a discretionary budget, and we can't make that bigger without taking away other things.

Heidi Hammel

We need to be very thoughtful about how we propose to spend the money that NASA does have for space exploration. And we need to be clear that there's the human spaceflight part of NASA, and there's the science space part of NASA, and there's also aeronautics. Those are all very different things that NASA does.

Heidi Hammel

My sense, talking to the general public around the country, is that most people don't have a very high level of scientific literacy.

Heidi Hammel

People seem to be afraid of science, and certainly, people seem to be afraid of mathematics. And I think that's such a shame, because I don't think it's as hard as people seem to think it is.

Heidi Hammel

People have this idea that if you're not brilliant like Einstein, you can't be a scientist. And that's just a myth. He was the one out of a million scientists, but there were 999,999 other scientists who were not as brilliant but who just do great science, as well.

Heidi Hammel

We need to know math to be a good scientist, but math is a language, and we need to learn the language because that's the language of science.

Heidi Hammel

Whatever I was going into, whether it was going to be chorus or history or astronomy or whatever, do it right. Be a professional. Don't just do a half baked job. Do everything correctly. Get down. Learn the details of what you're going to do.

Heidi Hammel

When I was in college, I didn't like physics a lot, and I really wasn't very good at physics. And there were a lot of people around me who were really good at physics: I mean, scary good at physics. And they weren't much help to me, because I would say, 'How do you do this?' They'd say, 'Well, the answer's obvious.'

Heidi Hammel

C is a passing grade. You don't need straight A's to be a scientist, despite what you may have heard.

Heidi Hammel

One of the things I've learned that has made me very successful, I think, as a scientist in general, sometimes you just have to take a chance.

Heidi Hammel

Scientists normally like to do experiments. You know, they like to mix this with that and see what happens. They like to take this thing and poke it and see how it reacts. In astronomy, we can't do that. The stars, the planets, the galaxies, are so far away that we just look at them, and we have to learn things by looking at them.

Heidi Hammel

I think religion and science operate in different regimes. Religion is a belief system that tries to give meaning and comprehension to peoples' lives. Science is more about the mechanics of the universe around us and the way in which it works. And I don't think those things have to be mutually exclusive.

Heidi Hammel

Climates always change. The question is, how are we going to adapt to climate change? Now, it may be true that we are accelerating it inadvertently by messing with our atmosphere, but regardless of that, the climate will change.

Heidi Hammel

I think we need to be very careful if we want to do things like further modify our atmosphere. And similarly, I think we need to be very worried about unintentional modification, which is basically what's been going on.

Heidi Hammel

It's very clear that global climate change is occurring on earth, but it's also been very clear that that has always happened on earth. We've always had a changing climate on earth. We all know about ice ages. We know when our continent was covered with ice sheets. We know glaciers come and they go. It puzzles me that people forget that.

Heidi Hammel

It's clear that the only thing that is inhibiting us from doing further human exploration of space is money and the will to do it.

Heidi Hammel

I'm happy here on the surface of the earth. If space travel ever got to be as simple as jet travel today, yeah, I'd take a jet flight to the moon.

Heidi Hammel

Because exploration is not science driven, you've got to ask what is it driven by? And it's driven by politics.

Heidi Hammel

I think the only way that the U.S. human spaceflight program is going to get really revitalized, really put sort of an Apollo level push on it, is if some other country, perhaps China, were to actually have a landed flight to the moon and brought back our American flag and put it in Tiananmen Square.

Heidi Hammel

I would say the biggest challenge I had as a woman in science is be a mom. It's really hard. It's very hard work having children, and I tell kids this all the time.

Heidi Hammel