George Smoot

“Both my parents instilled an interest in science and mathematics.”

“People have contemplated the origin and evolution of the universe since before the time of Aristotle. Very recently, the era of speculation has given way to a time of science.”

“I played football and ran track in junior high, but by high school I was getting serious about my studies.”

“For many centuries, humans have speculated that there might be planetary systems around other stars and that there could be extraterrestrial life there and even intelligent being. However, those were simply speculations, and now we have evidence for the first part of these ideas.”

“I think we all want to know where we came from and how we fit into the world, but some of us need to know how it all works in great detail.”

“When people really understand the Big Bang and the whole sweep of the evolution of the universe, it will be clear that humans are fairly insignificant.”

“I always think of space-time as being the real substance of space, and the galaxies and the stars just like the foam on the ocean.”

“My name is George Smoot III, and I am smarter than a fifth-grader.”

“But every day I go to work I'm making a bet that the universe is simple, symmetric, and aesthetically pleasing—a universe that we humans, with our limited perspective, will someday understand.”

“With something like Chernobyl, the public reaction was 'Oh, my God, science has really done wrong.'”

“When I came to Berkeley, I met all these Nobel laureates and I got to know that they were regular people. They were very smart and very motivated and worked very hard, but they were still humans, whereas before they were kind of mythical creatures to me.”

“The discovery and investigation of life on other planets is likely to change many of our ideas about how life arose on the Earth and even what is life and its natural development.”