Saul Perlmutter Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

We scientists have an obsession with unification, a grand synthesis. And dark matter is an irritating missing piece.

In terms of the most astonishing fact about which we know nothing, there is dark matter and dark energy. We don't know what either of them is. Everything we know and love about the universe and all the laws of physics as they apply, apply to four percent of the universe. That's stunning.

How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

If dark matter and dark energy are 95 percent of everything, shouldn't we all be asking questions about that? What does that look like?

The success of ordinary cosmology speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

So important is this dark matter to our understanding of the size, shape, and ultimate fate of the universe that the search for it will very likely dominate astronomy for the next few decades.

We still don't know what about 96 per cent of the universe is made of. It is dark matter and dark energy, but we have no idea what it is.

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.

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.

You go, dark energy! Go on, dark matter. They don't understand you, dark matter. They don't get you.

When we look at the universe, what we see by eye or with our telescopes is only five percent of the universe. The rest, 95 percent is dark. Dark meaning, first of all, not visible to our instrument. Second, dark also indicates our ignorance. We don't know what's the composition of this part of the universe.

I got fascinated by the idea that our universe itself is comprised mostly of dark matter and dark energy. Things that we can't perceive at all, and we've only discovered that relatively recently. So it's almost as if our universe is the foam on the ocean of things that we can't see, or know, or perceive, and yet we feel the affects of those things right and left.

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.

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