Vera Rubin Quotes

As an astrophysicist, my research work involves mapping dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for about a quarter of our universe.

Everything we do understand about the universe - the periodic table of elements, Einstein's laws, Newton's laws, all of chemistry, all of biology - that's 4 percent of the universe. We got to the moon on the 4 percent we do understand. We landed on Mars on the 4 percent we do understand. So the day we crack the nut of the rest of that 95 percent... Oh my gosh.

It is an embarrassment that the dominant forms of matter in the universe remain hypothetical.

All the stuff we've ever seen in the laboratory, all the kinds of particles and matter and energy, that only makes up 5 percent of our universe.

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.

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

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.

'First Light' is nonfiction, a true story about astronomers who are looking for light coming from the edge of the universe. It tells how science is really done - and science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize.

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'm a cosmologist. All I do is cosmology.

Everything we know about the universe is studied by using telescopes or other instruments that look at visible light, infrared, ultraviolet or X-ray - different wavelengths of electromagnetic interactions. Only 4 percent of what's in the universe gives off electromagnetic radiation, so we don't have any handle on the rest.

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.

Every field of astrophysics - whether it's our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe - every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.

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

The realization that baryonic matter is only a trace component of the universe revealed our understanding of the cosmos as shockingly incomplete and was one of the milestones that ushered in the era of modern cosmology.

Dark matter and dark energy are two things we measure in the universe that are making things happen, and we have no idea what the cause is.

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.

We get the exciting result that the total energy of the universe is zero. Why this should be so is one of the great mysteries - and therefore one of the important questions of physics. After all, what would be the use of studying physics if the mysteries were not the most important things to investigate?

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

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.

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

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.

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

The dark energy is not exactly zero, but the first 122 decimal points are zero. That's crazy. That is really one of the craziest things we've ever discovered.

It's an audacious thing to build a model of the cosmos. It's exciting how little we know.