John C. Mather

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

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.

Even your chin is made up of exploded stars.

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.

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.

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.

We are discovering what the universe is really like, and it is totally magnificent, and one can only be inspired and awestruck by what we find.