How Astronomers Revolutionized Our View of the Cosmos by Martin Rees | Scientific American
"The universe turns out to be much bigger and weirder than anyone thought.
In 1835 French philosopher Auguste Comte asserted that nobody would ever know what the stars were made of. “We understand the possibility of determining their shapes, their distances, their sizes and their movements,” he wrote, “whereas we would never know how to study by any means their chemical composition, or their mineralogical structure, and, even more so, the nature of any organized beings that might live on their surface...”
