Quotes from Priyamvada Natarajan

The pace and demands in any field, be it genetics, nanotechnology or cosmology, can only be met with increased international cooperation and collaborative projects.

We must face up to a difficult paradox: The U.S. can maintain a leading position in science only by giving up its desire to be number one.

Dark matter is particularly intriguing because it's some kind of particle - that's for sure.

All the particles that we are made of only account for about four per cent of the cosmic inventory.

No one wants to walk across a crowd-sourced bridge.

Black holes are enigmatic astronomical objects, areas where the gravity is so immense that it has warped spacetime so that not even light can escape.

My own day-to-day observations confirm that many Americans can barely make change. At the supermarket where I buy groceries, I've watched more than one encounter at the cash register where both customer and clerk are befuddled at the prospect of double-checking the sums.

In an era of ever-increasing globalization, what it takes to become and remain a science superpower has fundamentally changed.

We cannot decide on the efficacy of a medical treatment by counting the number of 'Likes' an intervention receives on Facebook; no matter what, professionals will still need to conduct continued clinical trials and evaluate their outcomes carefully.

We cannot explain the phenomenon of gravitational lensing without general relativity, and this is where MOND spectacularly fails.

Progress in science occurs in fits and starts, and paradigm shifts occur when evidence can be marshaled to support a new point of view.

Research in any domain of science today requires specialized training to build up knowledge and clinical competence. To make major breakthroughs, we need people with expertise who are engaged in sustained research over a long period of time - in a word, scientists.

We need to make sure that the Voyager probes carrying a record of human civilization speeding beyond our solar system remain an introduction to the world that sent them and not an epitaph for a civilization that caused its own ruin.

We already have a pretty good knowledge of the universe's mass-energy content, so if we can get a handle on its geometry, then we will be able to work out exactly what the fate of the universe will be.

I'm an astrophysicist and a professor, so my day job involves manipulating intractable numbers that characterize our universe.

Everyone acknowledges that there is a political part to tenure, but no one likes to admit it.

Growing up in Delhi, India, I did puzzles, explored numbers, and searched for patterns in everyday settings long before I ever saw an equation.

The early universe was a dusty place, and the UV radiation from the hot, young black holes and stars would get enshrouded by dust, re-radiated, and scattered into red wavelengths like infra-red, causing these objects to remain obscured.

I am obsessed with trying to understand why there is such rampant denialism of science in our country. I find this exuberant irrationalism extremely disturbing. And this is particularly troubling, because I am a professional scientist.

We knew from theoretical models that mergers of massive, gas-rich galaxies were more frequent in the past. Now we've found that these mergers are responsible for producing both the nearby obscured quasar population and their distant cousins.

I am a phenomenologist - I work on developing theoretical models that are constrained by observations.

The existence of dark matter and dark energy are inferred from observations! They are not theoretical constructs. Though invisible, both reveal their presence through the effects that they exert on motions of celestial bodies and in the case of dark matter - the bending of light as well.

If you know the shape of the lens and the image you get, you can work out the path that light followed between the object and your eye.

Being nimble and ready to change our minds if need be is an attribute that is crucial to live and thrive in a society that is powered by science and technology, both as an individual and as an engaged citizen.