Seth Shostak Quotes

It seemed like my favourite kind of job - a wonderful chance to ask something absolutely fundamental: the fate of the Universe and whether the Universe was infinite or not.

I always think of space-time as being the real substance of space, and the galaxies and the stars just like the foam on the ocean.

Even Hubble hasn't found yet the end of this universe, and we don't know that it has any end.

One of the great challenges of modern cosmology is to discover what the geometry of the universe really is.

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

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

We have never observed infinity in nature. Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that's where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it's instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.

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.

There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy.

I think it's amazing that the entire community of astronomy has done what it's done. We've been able to deduce the nature of time and space and where we all came from. It's the most amazing detective story in history.

Hubble has really opened our eyes to what the universe is made of, its structure, and has helped us learn how little we know about the universe.

Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite.

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.

The success of ordinary cosmology speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation.

The Planck satellite may detect the imprint of the gravitational waves predicted by inflation. This would be quantum gravity written across the sky.

They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.

Radio Astronomy has added greatly to our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the universe. The cosmic microwave background radiation, considered a relic of the explosion at the beginning of the universe some 18 billion years ago, is one of the most powerful aids in determining these features of the universe.

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

The age of the universe is not just 'a guess', but rather it is a carefully measured number that is now known to a high degree of accuracy.

I was very uneasy about going into cosmology because the experimental observations were so modest.

I've been working in cosmology since 1964.

How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?

I'm baffled all the time. We don't know what's driving 96% of the universe. Everybody you know and love and heard of and think about and see in the night sky through a telescope: four percent of the universe.

I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.

First of all, the Big Bang wasn't very big. Second of all, there was no bang. Third, Big Bang Theory doesn't tell you what banged, when it banged, how it banged. It just said it did bang. So the Big Bang theory in some sense is a total misnomer.