Adam Riess Quotes

The original project began because we know the universe is expanding. Everybody had assumed that gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe and everything would come to a halt and collapse. The big surprise was it was actually speeding up.

You might expect gravity would slow it down, but it's just expanding faster and faster.

Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker.

That's what Hubble can do for us. It can tell us whether the universe is expanding forever or if one day it's going to come back together.

We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive.

I always found it satisfying that gravity was described by Einstein's geometric theory of general relativity.

What really made me think about space and begin to think about ways to use it was Einstein's statement that there are no fixed points in space. Everything in the universe is moving all the time.

What was done is measure directly, with exquisitely sensitive instruments, gravitational waves predicted about 100 years ago by Albert Einstein. These waves are a new way to study the universe and are expected to have significant impact on astronomy and astrophysics in the years ahead.

Einstein got most of the things right about black holes. I'm not an expert, I must admit.

We've known for a long time that the universe is expanding. But about 15 years ago, my colleagues and I discovered that it is expanding faster and faster. That is, the universe is accelerating, and that was not expected, but it is now attributed to this mysterious stuff called dark energy which seems to make up about 70 percent of the universe.

Most gravity has no known origin. Is it some exotic particle? Nobody knows. Is dark energy responsible for expansion of the universe? Nobody knows.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up, the Universe will end in ice.

My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science.

They've discovered that, where all the other galaxies are moving in one direction, ours is going in another. Now, the Big Bang theory says that we're all moving outward.

One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two of our most successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which explains the physics of the small, and Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which explains the physics of the large, including gravity.

They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.

We account for one-sixth of the forces of gravity we see in the universe. There is no known objects accounting for most of the effective gravity in the universe. Something is making stuff move that is not anything we have ever touched.

For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

It was only about sixty years ago that the expansion of the universe was first observed.

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.

And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world.

If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.

If Mr. Einstein doesn't like the natural laws of the universe, let him go back to where he came from.

Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed, because dark energy has no effect on daily life, or even inside our solar system.

Eventually, when the universe expands enough, all that will be left is the dark energy.