Primordial Fluctuations Quotes

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

A universe that came from nothing in the big bang will disappear into nothing at the big crunch. Its glorious few zillion years of existence not even a memory.

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

The original project began because we know the universe is expanding. Everybody had assumed that gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe and everything would come to a halt and collapse. The big surprise was it was actually speeding up.

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

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.

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.

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.

If there was a Big Bang, there must have been a Big Banger.

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.

A static universe isn't physically self-consistent.

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

For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

The cyclic universe theory predicts no gravitational waves from the early universe.

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.

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.

With COBE, we can see things before the lights came on. While we probably will not rewrite the book of cosmology with this mission, we will write another chapter.