John Moffat Quotes

British-Canadian physicist

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John W. Moffat (born 1932) is a Canadian physicist and cosmologist, Professor Emeritus in physics at the University of Toronto and adjunct Professor in physics at the University of Waterloo.

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Alternative Names: John W. Moffat

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Hunting for elusive dark matter is now a multibillion dollar international scientific industry.

Today, like the elusive planet Vulcan in the nineteenth century, dark matter is accepted by the majority of astronomers and physicists as actually existing. Dark matter, although it has never been seen, is part of the generally accepted standard model of physics and cosmology, which also includes the big bang beginning of the universe.

The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had conjectured that Messier's nebulae were distant "island universes" outside our Milky Way galaxy, but many scientists in the early twentieth century disagreed.

Einstein entertained counterintuitive notions that allowed him to pull physics from the mechanistic, clockwork universe of the eighteenth century up into the twentieth century.

When I was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1950s, Sir Isaac Newton's presence was still almost palpable.

Almost 30 percent of the total matter-energy budget is said to be composed of so-called cold dark matter and almost 70 percent of "dark energy," leaving only about 4 percent as visible matter in the form of the atoms that make up the stars, planets, interstellar dust, and ourselves. Such is the degree of discrepancy between theory and observations today.

Could it be, nevertheless, that Einstein's theory is wrong? Might it be necessary to modify it—to find a new theory of gravity that can explain both the stronger gravity and the apparent antigravity being observed today—rather than simply throwing in invisible things to make the standard model work?