Jim Peebles Quotes

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.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

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

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

Astronomers still can't decide what the shape of our universe is. Is it closed and finite, which is to say, is there a countable tally of all the galaxies that exist, even beyond the ones we can see? Or is it infinite? The latter possibility is still on the table.

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.

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.

It's everywhere, really. It's between the galaxies. It is in this room. We believe that everywhere that you have space, empty space, that you cannot avoid having some of this dark energy.

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

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn't even nothing or once.

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.

And what we know, or think we know, about the universe of space and time is changing very quickly.

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.

The original project began because we know the universe is expanding. Everybody had assumed that gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe and everything would come to a halt and collapse. The big surprise was it was actually speeding up.

We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive.

We have a remarkably complete picture in many ways - and it could be that we're not accounting for something that's almost three-quarters of the entire universe.

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.

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.

According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a slightly lower density of matter, maybe right where we're sitting right now, caused our galaxy to start collapsing around here.

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

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

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.