I was watching a documentary from the BBC Horizon program (it’s sort of like Nova on PBS) on dark matter. Prof. James Peebles from Princeton came out with this little gem:

Jerry brought to this enterprise a lot of astronomical knowledge that I didn’t have. I was trained as a physicist; the astronomy I know I picked up on the streets.

And exactally what street is it where you can pick up the kind of astronomy you need to research the stuff the universe is made of?