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.
Jim Peebles
I started in engineering, where I think I could have happily remained and, who knows, made a bundle as a civil engineer or mechanical engineer. But more of my friends happened to be majoring in physics than engineering, so I switched over. No more compelling reason than that.
I simply liked looking at the world around us.
My father worked at the Grain Exchange.
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.
Sciences evolve.
Teaching teaches not only the students, it also teaches the teacher, and physics is so full of complications that you can't in your career have thought of everything.
Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.
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've always loved Bob Dylan.
I loved teaching. In addition to that, I love physics. And so what could be better than to talk physics to bright young students?
We can be very sure that as we discover new aspects of the expanding and evolving universe, we will be startled and amazed once again.
Life will go on. I suppose the aura of the Nobel is such that my life will change, but I don't think I'm going to let it change much. You understand, I'm used to a quiet life.
One of my earliest memories of something that caught my attention was of a steam locomotive. I guess mainly because they have so many moving parts that are out in the open. You can watch the valves moving back and forth - the driving rods.
One of my earliest memories was throwing a tantrum because I wasn't allowed to put together the coffee percolator.
My advice is not to aim for prizes and awards. We are in this for the joy of research, the fascination, the love of science. That's the reward, really.
I went to public schools, which is to say publicly financed.
A static universe isn't physically self-consistent.
I arrived at Princeton as a graduate student from the University of Manitoba in 1958. To my great good fortune, I fell into work with Bob Dicke, a truly great physicist who decided a few years before that that gravity is too important to ignore, as it had been in recent years in physics.
You should enter science because you are fascinated by it. That's what I did.
I loved to take things apart and put them back together. I loved the way things work.
Science does not emerge in some perfect, complete crystalline form.
The sun can't shine forever.
I was very uneasy about going into cosmology because the experimental observations were so modest.
My mother was a housewife, and she had no job throughout her entire life.
What might we learn from lines of research that are off the beaten track? They check accepted ideas, always a good thing, and there is the chance nature has prepared yet another surprise for us.
I was born in Saint Boniface, which is a small city right next to Winnipeg, nominally French speaking.
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.
It's stimulating to teach a new course. To teach a course three times in a row is, I think, about the maximum for me. On the second year - you know, the saying is that first year you learn how to teach the course, the second year you do it right, and the third year you're coasting and you had better move on to something else.
I have taught a mixture of undergraduate and graduate courses, and found them both stimulating.
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 was never exposed as a kid to any real science. I read the occasional popular science book, and I loved Mechanics Illustrated, which had a lot of pseudo-science in it: It wasn't until I got to college that I began to appreciate what physics is all about, and that was really an accident also.
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.
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.
I didn't do much in things mechanical in high school, except learn to square dance and other such activities.
I had good time in high school, but I don't think I learned a lot.
It is so easy for us theorists who build wonderful castles, beautiful ideas. Sometimes, it is remarkable, sometimes these beautiful ideas prove to be close to what the observations tell us. But often and also they turn out to be wrong.
I've been working in cosmology since 1964.
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.
I've always, since I was a kid, been interested in how things work.
Clocks around our house were in danger because I loved to take things apart, and failed to put them back together.
The excitement lies in the exploration of the world around us.
Let the universe show us what it is.
I love physics because it's neat and it's orderly in its own peculiar way.
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.
I think I'd be depressed if everything were nearly all known, but I don't feel any danger of that happening.
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.
Sometimes one must make extended conclusions from limited data.
I am deeply impressed with the way dark matter has explained cosmological observations.
