Top 15 John Moffat Quotes

Giving up Einstein's theory of gravity is simply unacceptable to many in the community. It may take a new generation of physicists to view the evidence with unclouded eyes.

This is an extraordinary time in the history of science, in that we cannot only theorize about the beginning of the universe, but actually study the celestial fossils of how it happened.

Indeed, there is a now a minority of cosmologists who question a beginning of the universe at all; instead they favor a cyclic model with a series of expansions and contractions.

This is the only sure way I know to counter the anti-Copernican idea that the universe is accelerating in our epoch - to get rid of the problem entirely!

A large part of the relativity community is in denial - refusing even to contemplate the idea that black holes may not exist in nature, or seriously consider the idea that any kind of new matter such as the new putative dark energy can play a fundamental role in gravity theory.

It is difficult to falsify the hypothesis of dark matter, because, as with Ptolemy's epicycles, true believers can always add additional arbitrary features and free parameters to overcome any conceivable difficulties that occur with the dark matter models.

To physicists such as myself, the huge amount of invisible dark matter needed to make Einstein's theory fit the astrophysical data is reason enough for exploring modified gravity theories.

One truth we have been able to count on concerning scientific persuit over the centuries has been that only testable theories survive the intense scrutiny of experimental science.

In estimating the amount of dark matter, cosmologists developing the standard model have to make some rather strong assumptions about their observations.

Inflation itself proceeds at a speed faster than the measured speed of light.

A much faster speed of light in the infant universe solved the horizon problem and therefore explained the overall smoothness of the temperatures of the CMB radiation, because light now traveled extremely quickly between all parts of the expanding but not inflating universe.

Experimentalists dream of some spectacular discovery such as the proof of the existence of black holes to justify the more than eight billion dollars it has cost to build the LHC.

Is the reader feeling confused about the status of the black hole information paradox and black holes in general? So am I!

It is hard to understand how this infinitely dense singularity can evaporate into nothing. For matter inside the black hole leak out into the universe requires that it travel faster than the speed of light.

It may be that ultimately the search for dark matter will turn out to be the most expensive and largest null result experiment since the Michelson-Morely experiment, which failed to detect the ether.