Science Quote by Clyde Tombaugh

There is something quietly disarming about a major astronomer admitting he once pictured Martians. Tombaugh, the farm-boy-turned-planet-hunter who found Pluto in 1930, isn’t confessing gullibility so much as describing the engine of science before it gets cleaned up for textbooks: curiosity first, certainty later.

The line toggles between wonder and correction. “I used to believe” opens a gap between the imaginative self and the disciplined self, and “of course now we know there aren’t” lands with the clipped finality of someone who has made peace with disenchantment. That “of course” matters: it signals a community verdict, the slow accumulation of evidence that replaces romance with rigor. Yet Tombaugh immediately circles back to the romance anyway. Mars “held particular interest” not because it was trendy, but because it was legible. Unlike the distant gas giants, Mars offered seasons, markings, and a tantalizing proximity that made projection feel almost responsible.

The subtext is a defense of speculative desire, carefully fenced in by epistemic humility. He doesn’t say he wanted Martians to be real; he says he was “curious what kind of beings they would look like.” The visual emphasis reveals how deeply early 20th-century astronomy was entangled with popular culture, from Lowell’s canal fantasies to pulp sci-fi. Tombaugh’s intent is less to retract a childhood belief than to model scientific adulthood: keep the imaginative question alive, accept the answer when it arrives, and don’t pretend the question was never thrilling.