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.”

“There is no limit to what astrophysicists can do. We can be very curious.”

“Big Bang gave us hydrogen and helium. We couldn't make people out of hydrogen and helium. So we're made out of exploding stars.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I've always been excited to know how we got here.”

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

“We are now able to put our minds in other places in the universe with the use of telescopes. That is very exciting.”

“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.”

“There's no such thing as saying that we'll ever find the ultimate cause of stuff. We can only work to push our understanding one step further.”

“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.”

“My work at NASA has always been about team efforts, and so it's intrinsically about mentoring. I have been blessed with some brilliant colleagues who were able to take on huge challenges without a lot of guidance.”

“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.”

“I think a well-rounded education keeps us from being bored and boring!”

“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.”

“We have our religious traditions coming from many thousands of years, and I think to myself, well, you know, if Moses had come down with tablets from the mountain that said, 'And guess what? There are protons and neutrons, and they are made out of quarks,' people wouldn't have understood what he said. So he didn't.”

“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.”