JOHN C. MATHER

Even your chin is made up of exploded stars.

Talk to people... everything good I've done has come from conversations with people. Science is a very social phenomenon.

There is strength in numbers, but organizing those numbers is one of the great challenges.

A mentor enables a person to achieve. A hero shows what achievement looks like.

When you have a deadline, or when you know that your equipment is about to go up in a rocket and you won't have another chance to fix it, your mind works in a way that it otherwise never would.

I think my proper response is complete amazement and awe at the universe that we are in, and how it works is just far more complicated than humans will ever properly understand.

Every time we get a story that says there was a Big Bang, then people want to know what was before that. And if we find out, what was before that?

There's no such thing as saying that we'll ever find the ultimate cause of stuff. We can only work to push our understanding one step further.

In 100 billion years, the universe will be a very strange place.

Big Bang gave us hydrogen and helium. We couldn't make people out of hydrogen and helium. So we're made out of exploding stars.

My mother's father, Hobart Cromwell, was a bacteriologist with Abbott Laboratories in suburban Chicago. I never got to know him well, as he died very young, but he was always a heroic figure in our family, wise and gentle and intelligent by reputation, with the courage to fight against the McCarthyites.

One of the most powerful scientific tools ever invented is the telephone.

My interest in science started quite early. My earliest school recollection, from age 6, is actually of mathematics, realizing that one could fill an entire page with digits and never come to the largest possible number, so I saw what was meant by infinity.

I tried without much success to learn a little of the humanities and the arts, but even passing the courses in art history and music history was a challenge.

Astronomers can look back in time. We can look at things as they used to be. We have an idea there was a Big Bang explosion 13.7 billion years ago. We have a story of how galaxies and stars were made. It's an amazing story.

If there is an impact on climate change due to natural causes, we need to understand that, and cannot escape responsibility to deal with what we are doing now.

As an eight-year-old, I would listen to stories and biographies of Charles Darwin and Galileo. I also went to wonderful schools and had great teachers who inspired me.

We have our religious traditions coming from many thousands of years, and I think to myself, well, you know, if Moses had come down with tablets from the mountain that said, 'And guess what? There are protons and neutrons, and they are made out of quarks,' people wouldn't have understood what he said. So he didn't.

Many of the problems facing the nation and the world today may only be solved if their technical elements are understood - climate change, energy supply, health care, and infrastructure, to name just a few.

My experience from working with people is that you can have a conversation with someone or have a meeting with a group of people, and from that meeting will derive an answer to a question that no individual could have ever thought of by him or herself.

We are now able to put our minds in other places in the universe with the use of telescopes. That is very exciting.

It seemed to me that NASA, especially Goddard, was the place where I could carry out the dreams that I had, which were to push forward an experiment that would measure the big bang radiation better than anyone had ever tried before. Therefore, it seemed like the perfect place to go.

With COBE, we can see things before the lights came on. While we probably will not rewrite the book of cosmology with this mission, we will write another chapter.

When we see what the universe has to show us, we can go no further.

Do not make grand plans. Be flexible.