Jim Peebles

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

“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.”

“Sciences evolve.”

“One thing that sticks in my mind is when I was a kid, and I had just learned to read, I came across one of my older sister's textbooks that explained compound pulley. I thought that was really neat, and I still do.”

“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.”

“We often say that our science is objective and accurate, but we don't often say that our science is incomplete - that although the established parts of natural science are very well tested and the evidence makes a compelling case for things being as they've been described, there nevertheless are open questions that we cannot answer.”

“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.”

“There must be enormous numbers of planets around the stars in the many galaxies in our observable universe. We may be sure that wonderful things are happening on these planets that the human race never will observe.”

“I simply liked looking at the world around us.”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“One of my earliest memories was throwing a tantrum because I wasn't allowed to put together the coffee percolator.”

“I had good time in high school, but I don't think I learned a lot.”

“I loved teaching. In addition to that, I love physics. And so what could be better than to talk physics to bright young students?”

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

“I went to public schools, which is to say publicly financed.”

“I came from a very small high school in which there was no guidance and not any appreciable amount of physics taught, nor much mathematics. So I didn't know what academia was all about until I got to college.”

“Let the universe show us what it is.”