John C. Mather

I was thrilled and amazed when I found out we won the Nobel Prize. The dedicated and talented women and men of the COBE team collaborated to produce the science results being recognized. This is truly such a rare and special honor.

Stars are extremely far apart. We cannot imagine any way currently available to get to the nearest one, besides the sun.

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.

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.

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.

My mother's father, Hobart Cromwell, was a bacteriologist with Abbott Laboratories in suburban Chicago. I never got to know him well, as he died very young, but he was always a heroic figure in our family, wise and gentle and intelligent by reputation, with the courage to fight against the McCarthyites.

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.

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

We have our religious traditions coming from many thousands of years, and I think to myself, well, you know, if Moses had come down with tablets from the mountain that said, 'And guess what? There are protons and neutrons, and they are made out of quarks,' people wouldn't have understood what he said. So he didn't.

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.

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.

I think a well-rounded education keeps us from being bored and boring!