Vera Rubin Quotes

I'm baffled all the time. We don't know what's driving 96% of the universe. Everybody you know and love and heard of and think about and see in the night sky through a telescope: four percent of the universe.

The realization that baryonic matter is only a trace component of the universe revealed our understanding of the cosmos as shockingly incomplete and was one of the milestones that ushered in the era of modern cosmology.

It seemed like my favourite kind of job - a wonderful chance to ask something absolutely fundamental: the fate of the Universe and whether the Universe was infinite or not.

We already have a pretty good knowledge of the universe's mass-energy content, so if we can get a handle on its geometry, then we will be able to work out exactly what the fate of the universe will be.

I am deeply impressed with the way dark matter has explained cosmological observations.

The geometry, the content, and the fate of the universe are all intricately linked. If you know two, you can deduce the third.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of 50 or 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. And with every step, every window that modern astrophysics has opened to our mind, the person who wants to feel like they're the center of everything ends up shrinking.

We have a remarkably complete picture in many ways - and it could be that we're not accounting for something that's almost three-quarters of the entire universe.

The missing link in cosmology is the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

One of the great challenges of modern cosmology is to discover what the geometry of the universe really is.

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

Scientists have wonderfully explained the organization of the universe, but that's really all it claims to do, and I think it does that very successfully.

The age of the universe is not just 'a guess', but rather it is a carefully measured number that is now known to a high degree of accuracy.

As soon as the idea of the Big Bang was proposed in the 1920s, astronomers set about trying to work out when the bang happened. Initial estimates were, not surprisingly, wildly inaccurate, but by the 1980s it was known that the universe was 15 billion years old, give or take 5 billion years.

Astronomers still can't decide what the shape of our universe is. Is it closed and finite, which is to say, is there a countable tally of all the galaxies that exist, even beyond the ones we can see? Or is it infinite? The latter possibility is still on the table.

And what we know, or think we know, about the universe of space and time is changing very quickly.

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.

The Big Bang theory is the idea that if we go back early enough in the history of the universe - and we can do this, of course, by looking at starlight coming to us from billions of years ago - we will see a very hot and dense period where the universe was much smaller, denser, and hotter.

I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.

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

Until the 1990s, there were few reliable observations about movement at the scale of the entire universe, which is the only scale dark energy effects. So dark energy could not be seen until we could measure things very, very far away.