Barry Barish Quotes

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.

Most gravity has no known origin. Is it some exotic particle? Nobody knows. Is dark energy responsible for expansion of the universe? Nobody knows.

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.

The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we're made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I would like to uncover the secrets of the universe.

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.

For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.

Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it.

It was only about sixty years ago that the expansion of the universe was first observed.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

The universe never did make sense; I suspect it was built on government contract.

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.

Astronomers ought to be able to ask fundamental questions without accelerators.

Pure science - this vision of the universe as 15 billion light years across - I am bedazzled and awed by it.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

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.

The universe at large is full of questions that we still don't know anything about, and there will be always young people, brilliant, who are going to make new discoveries.