Hannes Alfven Quotes

Gravitational waves, because they are so imperturbable - they go through everything - they will tell you the most information you can get about the earliest instants that go on in the universe.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

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

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.

A full understanding of what happens in our everyday lives needs to take into account what happened at the Big Bang. And not only is that intrinsically interesting and just kind of cool to think about, but it's also a mystery that is not given much attention by working scientists; it's a little bit underappreciated.

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

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

We'll have four different gravitational wave windows open within the next 20 years, and each of them will see something different. We'll be probing the birth of the universe with this. The so-called 'inflationary era' of the universe. We'll be probing the birth of the fundamental forces and how they came into being.

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.

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

I've been working in cosmology since 1964.

The predominant theory of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang.

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.

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'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.

The Big Bang theory is the idea that if we go back early enough in the history of the universe - and we can do this, of course, by looking at starlight coming to us from billions of years ago - we will see a very hot and dense period where the universe was much smaller, denser, and hotter.

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

It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time.

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.

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.

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.

People have contemplated the origin and evolution of the universe since before the time of Aristotle. Very recently, the era of speculation has given way to a time of science.

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

The missing link in cosmology is the nature of dark matter and dark energy.