John C. Mather Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One of the most powerful scientific tools ever invented is the telephone.
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Do not make grand plans. Be flexible.
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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?
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I've always been excited to know how we got here.
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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.
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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.
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When we see what the universe has to show us, we can go no further.
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Many of the problems facing the nation and the world today may only be solved if their technical elements are understood - climate change, energy supply, health care, and infrastructure, to name just a few.
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Talk to people... everything good I've done has come from conversations with people. Science is a very social phenomenon.
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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.
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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.
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A mentor enables a person to achieve. A hero shows what achievement looks like.
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The predominant theory of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think a well-rounded education keeps us from being bored and boring!
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Hubble knows there is interesting stuff out there, but Hubble isn't quite big enough.
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Stars are extremely far apart. We cannot imagine any way currently available to get to the nearest one, besides the sun.
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There is strength in numbers, but organizing those numbers is one of the great challenges.