John C. Mather Quotes

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.

I have never thought that you could obtain the extremely clumpy, heterogeneous universe we have today, strongly affected by plasma processes, from the smooth, homogeneous one of the Big Bang, dominated by gravitation.

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.

We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe.

If the universe sprung into existence and then expanded exponentially, you get gravitational waves traveling through space-time. These would fill the universe, a pattern of echoes of the inflation itself.

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.

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.

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

Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?

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.

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.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

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.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

It may be that we live in an endless universe, both in space and in time. And there've been Bangs in the past, and there will be Bangs in the future.

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

Radio Astronomy has added greatly to our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the universe. The cosmic microwave background radiation, considered a relic of the explosion at the beginning of the universe some 18 billion years ago, is one of the most powerful aids in determining these features of the universe.

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.

The geometry, the content, and the fate of the universe are all intricately linked. If you know two, you can deduce the third.

The James Webb Space Telescope was specifically designed to see the first stars and galaxies that were formed in the universe. So we're gonna see the snapshot of when stars started. When galaxies started. The very first moments of the universe. And my bet? There's gonna be some big surprises.

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.

Maybe we'll understand more about how the universe came to be, and what forces drove it in the early days and which forces drive it now.

A hydrogen bomb, for me, was puny compared to the Big Bang - the creation of the universe. That's what I really wanted to work on - the nature of the universe itself, and that's what I do for a living.

Scientists estimate the universe unfolded from its state of infinite destiny* - a moment commonly referred to as "the big bang" - approximately 1.3-2 x 10^10 years ago. *Typo: "destiny" should read "density.