Clyde Tombaugh
Clyde Tombaugh
Clyde William Tombaughwas an American astronomer. He discovered Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper belt. At the time of discovery, Pluto was considered a planet but was later reclassified as a dwarf planet. Tombaugh also discovered many asteroids. He also called for the serious scientific research of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth4 February 1906
CountryUnited States of America
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.
You have to have hope. Otherwise, I don't think you could handle it. Of course, you have to have both luck and pluck to make it.
I used to think about how nice it would be to visit the planets. Of course, I didn't expect to see in my lifetime what has happened. I knew it would happen some day, but it came along faster than I at first thought.
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.
Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.
I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn't think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.
A person that much interested in science is going to neglect his social life somewhat, but not completely, because that isn't healthy either. So one has to work it out according to one's own inclinations, how one wants to proportion these things.
To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.
I used to believe there were people on Mars, and of course now we know there aren't. Mars held particular interest. I was curious what kind of beings they would look like.
The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.
I think there's a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you don't have to think about it.
I guess they just took it for granted that that was what I was interested in and let nature take its course.
Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn't fit the findings of science.
Young man, I am afraid you are wasting your time. If there were any more planets they would have been found long before this.