Quotes from Jim Peebles

It is so easy for us theorists who build wonderful castles, beautiful ideas. Sometimes, it is remarkable, sometimes these beautiful ideas prove to be close to what the observations tell us. But often and also they turn out to be wrong.

I see these people in Princeton, my home town, as they go marching for control of climate. It is a wonderful thing. I love their enthusiasm, their energy, their devotion to something very worthwhile.

I've always been interested in mechanical things. I think I must have been heavily influenced by my father, who is also very good with his hands. He liked to build things. I always loved to watch him do it, and I loved to build things on my own.

As a kid I did enjoy building things; learned quickly how to make gun powder. I built sleighs, forts, houses in the back yards of houses.

Research in the natural sciences operates in successive approximations. We are glad to be able to offer many good problems for research by generations to come.

I have taught a mixture of undergraduate and graduate courses, and found them both stimulating.

I was very uneasy about going into cosmology because the experimental observations were so modest.

I didn't do much in things mechanical in high school, except learn to square dance and other such activities.

I think I'd be depressed if everything were nearly all known, but I don't feel any danger of that happening.

We can be very sure that as we discover new aspects of the expanding and evolving universe, we will be startled and amazed once again.

A static universe isn't physically self-consistent.

It's stimulating to teach a new course. To teach a course three times in a row is, I think, about the maximum for me. On the second year - you know, the saying is that first year you learn how to teach the course, the second year you do it right, and the third year you're coasting and you had better move on to something else.

Certainly to me it has been valuable to have to think through the basics of physics in order to present them in a halfway coherent form for a course. That has led me to ideas in research. Even freshman physics leads to thoughts that lead to other thoughts that are stimulating.

I think that my research is valuable to my teaching. I think that the two complement each other and I'm able to present somewhat more stimulating lectures because of what's happening in research, so it's a good complement.

Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.

Science does not emerge in some perfect, complete crystalline form.