John Mather
Senior Astrophysicist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
scientistacademicauthorscience.gsfc.nasa.gov ↗Wikipedia ↗
John Mather shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work measuring the cosmic microwave background radiation using the COBE satellite. He also served as the Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope and co-authored the book The Very First Light.
1shows
2appearances
19statements
12resolved
11supported
0contradicted
92%fully supported
Everything John Mather said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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”
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.”
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…”
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.”
Mather: Physics currently has no successful predictions from quantum gravity
“We have no successful theoretical predictions based on that idea of quantum gravity.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens John's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Senior Astrophysicist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | 2 | 19 | 92% 11/12 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |