Radio astronomy was not born with a silver spoon in its mouth. Its parents were workers. One parent was the radio-telescope, the other was radar.
The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) August 25, 1952
But even if radio astronomy has not so much destroyed our older astronomical viewpoint, it has enormously enlarged and enriched it. It is like that magical moment in the old Cinerama, when the curtains suddenly opened still further, unveiling the grandeur of the wide screen. Optical astronomy in the 1950s, on that narrow, central screen, offered a quiescent view of a slowly burning universe, the visible radiations from thermal disorder. But then the curtains abruptly parted, adding a grand and breathtaking vista, a panorama of swift and orderly motions that revealed themselves through the synchrotron radiation they generated— the so-called violent universe.
In W.T. Sullivan The Early Years of Radio Astronomy Radio Astronomy and the Nature of Science (p. 404)
The radio sky is no carbon copy of the visible sky; it is a new and different firmament, one where the edge of the universe stands in full view and one which bears the tell-tale marks of a violent past.
Big Ear Chapter 21 (p. 166)
During the last 20 years radio astronomers have led a revolution in our knowledge of the Universe that is paralleled only by the historic contributions of Galileo and Copernicus. In particular, the poetic picture of a serene Cosmos populated by beautiful wheeling galaxies has been replaced by a catalogue of events of astonishing violence: a primeval fireball, black holes, neutron stars, variable quasars and exploding galaxies.
Newest Probe of the Radio Universe (p. 138) Volume 56, Number 816,19 October 1972
The old dream of wireless communication through space has now been realized in an entirely different manner than many had expected. The cosmos' short waves bring us neither the stock market nor jazz from distant worlds. With soft noises they rather tell the physicist of the endless love play between electrons and protons.
In W.T. Sullivan, III Classics in Radio Astronomy Preface (p. xiii)
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