Priyamvada Natarajan Quotes

The idea of combining the physics of modern particle theory with cosmology was very young when I started working on cosmology.

I'm a cosmologist. All I do is cosmology.

It is an embarrassment that the dominant forms of matter in the universe remain hypothetical.

From a scientific point of view, our mission is to seek answers to the fundamental questions about the universe. Many are open - we don't know about dark matter, which accounts for a quarter of the universe's matter, nor do we know why there's antimatter.

Every field of astrophysics - whether it's our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe - every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.

I am deeply impressed with the way dark matter has explained cosmological observations.

The realization that baryonic matter is only a trace component of the universe revealed our understanding of the cosmos as shockingly incomplete and was one of the milestones that ushered in the era of modern cosmology.

Everything we do understand about the universe - the periodic table of elements, Einstein's laws, Newton's laws, all of chemistry, all of biology - that's 4 percent of the universe. We got to the moon on the 4 percent we do understand. We landed on Mars on the 4 percent we do understand. So the day we crack the nut of the rest of that 95 percent... Oh my gosh.

All the stuff we've ever seen in the laboratory, all the kinds of particles and matter and energy, that only makes up 5 percent of our universe.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

'First Light' is nonfiction, a true story about astronomers who are looking for light coming from the edge of the universe. It tells how science is really done - and science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize.

Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed, because dark energy has no effect on daily life, or even inside our solar system.

I've always really been into science, and in the last five years I've gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.

Now, what space ultimately is - I should confess, I think most physicists believe - we don't yet know.

I'm a person who's very interested in science and the universe and quantum physics and astrophysics.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

We became astronomers thinking we were studying the universe, and now we learn that we are just studying the 5 or 10 percent that is luminous.

A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained.

Until the 1990s, there were few reliable observations about movement at the scale of the entire universe, which is the only scale dark energy effects. So dark energy could not be seen until we could measure things very, very far away.

I wouldn't say that 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of 50 or 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. And with every step, every window that modern astrophysics has opened to our mind, the person who wants to feel like they're the center of everything ends up shrinking.

While I'm a big fan of science fiction, especially as rendered in expensive Hollywood blockbusters, it's the real universe that calls to me.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two of our most successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which explains the physics of the small, and Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which explains the physics of the large, including gravity.

The majority of the world is empty space. Empty space, empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people - it's all empty space. That's amazing!