Opinion
Mather: Extraterrestrial life is likely frequent but mostly elementary
“I think the answer is, no, we're not alone, and I think life will occur quite frequently, but it will mostly be rather elementary.”
Opinion
Mather: Unexplained phenomena on Earth are unlikely to be space aliens
“Probably we're not gonna find the neighbors. Similarly, that we're not in danger from the neighbors. So, yeah, maybe we got lots of unexplained things here on planet Earth, but it's not very likely to be space aliens.”
Assertion Supported
James Webb Space Telescope showed early galaxies grew faster than predicted
“We built the web telescope, it did what it was supposed to do, it produced beautiful pictures, and right away we could see that the galaxies grew even faster than we thought. And so even though we had the information from Hubble and all the simulations and cal…”
Assertion Supported
Mather: Small Earth-like exoplanets analyzed so far lack detectable atmospheres
“And so, the technique works, and now we're just now busy analyzing the small stars that have potentially small Earth-like planets, and I can't say that we're really surprised, but so far the little ones do not have atmospheres that we can tell.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Oct 2028
Mather: Habitable Worlds Observatory will directly image Earth-like planets
“And the next one we're going to build is called Habitable Worlds Observatory. And so when we do that, we'll be able to see an image with a little dot next to the other Big dot, and it'll be an Earth-like object around a star like the Sun”
Assertion Supported
Stephen Hawking called COBE map the century's greatest scientific discovery
“Stephen Hawking looked at our map of the pink and blue blobs, and he said it was the most important scientific discovery of the century, if not of all time.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mather: In 100 billion years, most galaxies will recede beyond detection
“If you were to come back in another, say, hundred billion years, most of the galaxies that we know about would have receded from us so far away that we couldn't see them anymore. So the universe will be in the process of appearing to empty itself out, and if y…”
Assertion Supported
Mather: CMB observations verified predictions made by cosmic inflation theory
“There are a few predictions that it makes that, ah, we verified by observation of the cosmic background radiation.”
Assertion Supported
Mather: Physics currently has no successful predictions from quantum gravity
“We have no successful theoretical predictions based on that idea of quantum gravity.”
Assertion Supported
COBE map proved the early universe was not uniform
“Our map showed pink and blue blobs across the entire sky. It's very blurry, but it was enough to say, The early universe was not the same everywhere. There were hot and cold spots.”
What-if
Without early universe density variations, gravity could not form galaxies
“If the universe had been completely exactly uniform, gravity wouldn't know what to do. It would not have any way to pull material back together again. To stop the expansion locally and make galaxies and stars and planets and people.”
Assertion Supported
COBE satellite spectral measurements proved the hot Big Bang theory
“They knew basically that not only was the equipment working, but the story of the hot Big Bang was basically right.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Understanding errors in early galaxy formation models could take decades
“It's gonna take us a good long time, could be decades before we really, really deeply understand what we were wrong about.”
Assertion Supported
Mather: Gravitational Lensing Enables JWST to See Early Galaxies
“And nature has given, given us lenses, extra lenses in space to magnify, ah, the more distant universe. And this is something that Einstein predicted, and we never thought it would be useful, ah, except in the most abstract way, but So now what we see is somet…”
Assertion Partly supported
Mather: Most gold on Earth originated from colliding neutron stars
“For instance, when you look at your ring, if you have a wedding ring of gold, then we know that most of the gold in that wedding ring came from neutron stars that collided and blew up, and material came back out into space and was recycled.”
Assertion Supported
Mather: Scientists have not detected Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars
“So far, we don't know of any like that, because it's a really hard observational problem.”
Assertion Supported
Mather: Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will directly image exoplanets
“We are finishing up one now called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and it will have an equipment to look for planets as direct images, a device called a coronagraph.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mather: Decades of laboratory searches yielded no promising dark matter candidates
“We have been hunting in laboratories for decades, and darn it, there isn't a single thing that's ever said this is a good promising candidate.”
Assertion Supported
Subsequent satellites confirmed COBE measurements, validating Mather's Nobel Prize
“Since the COBE satellite was flown, two more satellites were built and flown, and they confirmed our original measurements, which is nice, because that meant we could get a Nobel Prize for discovering the thing that turned out to be true.”
John Mather