John C. Mather Quotes

I'm still amazed at how the universe works.

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

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.

I would like to uncover the secrets 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.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

The universe is a great mystery.

The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study. God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.

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

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.

Something pretty mysterious had to give rise to the origin of the universe.

Although we don't know what is outside our universe, astronomers still wonder. Several pictures of what there might be have been dreamed up. An interesting one, called multiverse, has lots of universes. Picture it as a foam of bubbles. Our universe would be one bubble, and we'd be surrounded by lots of other bubbles.

My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.

Physics grapples with the largest questions the universe presents. 'Where did the totality of reality come from?' 'Did time have a beginning?'

Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex.

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.

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.

About the 50th hour, I was going to start thinking about the edge of the universe. Is there an edge? Is this an envelope we're living inside of, or no, does it go onto infinity in both time and space? And there's nothing like swimming for 50 hours in the ocean that gets you thinking about things like this.

I think the universe is just so big that there has to be something else out there.

The word 'universe' is obviously not intended to have a plural, but science has evolved in such a way that we need a plural noun for something similar to what we ordinarily call our universe.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, we've got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, it's one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe - maybe it's countless other universes.

Space and time may have a structure as intricate as the fauna of a rich ecosystem, but on a scale far larger than the horizon of our observations.

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.