49 Quotes by Jim Peebles

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.

The excitement lies in the exploration of the world around us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I was very uneasy about going into cosmology because the experimental observations were so modest.