Quotes from John C. Mather

I tried without much success to learn a little of the humanities and the arts, but even passing the courses in art history and music history was a challenge.

A mentor enables a person to achieve. A hero shows what achievement looks like.

Every time we get a story that says there was a Big Bang, then people want to know what was before that. And if we find out, what was before that?

In 100 billion years, the universe will be a very strange place.

Even your chin is made up of exploded stars.

Stars are extremely far apart. We cannot imagine any way currently available to get to the nearest one, besides the sun.

Do not make grand plans. Be flexible.

If there is an impact on climate change due to natural causes, we need to understand that, and cannot escape responsibility to deal with what we are doing now.

Talk to people... everything good I've done has come from conversations with people. Science is a very social phenomenon.

As an eight-year-old, I would listen to stories and biographies of Charles Darwin and Galileo. I also went to wonderful schools and had great teachers who inspired me.

I think my proper response is complete amazement and awe at the universe that we are in, and how it works is just far more complicated than humans will ever properly understand.

When you have a deadline, or when you know that your equipment is about to go up in a rocket and you won't have another chance to fix it, your mind works in a way that it otherwise never would.

It seemed to me that NASA, especially Goddard, was the place where I could carry out the dreams that I had, which were to push forward an experiment that would measure the big bang radiation better than anyone had ever tried before. Therefore, it seemed like the perfect place to go.

When we see what the universe has to show us, we can go no further.

My mother's father, Hobart Cromwell, was a bacteriologist with Abbott Laboratories in suburban Chicago. I never got to know him well, as he died very young, but he was always a heroic figure in our family, wise and gentle and intelligent by reputation, with the courage to fight against the McCarthyites.

I was thrilled and amazed when I found out we won the Nobel Prize. The dedicated and talented women and men of the COBE team collaborated to produce the science results being recognized. This is truly such a rare and special honor.

There is strength in numbers, but organizing those numbers is one of the great challenges.

My interest in science started quite early. My earliest school recollection, from age 6, is actually of mathematics, realizing that one could fill an entire page with digits and never come to the largest possible number, so I saw what was meant by infinity.

Hubble knows there is interesting stuff out there, but Hubble isn't quite big enough.

One of the most powerful scientific tools ever invented is the telephone.

Easytrak is no guarantee against mismanagement. But you cannot manage a large program without software like it today. It is a project information management system that helps people develop a solution to a problem with many parts to track.

Astronomers can look back in time. We can look at things as they used to be. We have an idea there was a Big Bang explosion 13.7 billion years ago. We have a story of how galaxies and stars were made. It's an amazing story.

My experience from working with people is that you can have a conversation with someone or have a meeting with a group of people, and from that meeting will derive an answer to a question that no individual could have ever thought of by him or herself.

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.