John C. Mather, Ph.D. | Academy of Achievement

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The life of a scientist is all about the creative process.

John C. Mather was born in Roanoke, Virginia. There were scientists and teachers on both sides of his family. Shortly after John Mather was born, the family moved to a research farm operated by Rutgers University in rural New Jersey, where his father, a research scientist with expertise in statistics and animal husbandry, conducted studies on milk production.

In this 1993 photo, taken at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, John Mather stands before an image representing the distribution of matter in the early universe, as revealed by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) project. Mather holds a model of the COBE satellite in his hands. (© Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS) — In this 1993 photo, taken at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Dr. John C. Mather stands before an image representing the distribution of matter in the early universe, as revealed by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) project. Mather holds a model of the COBE satellite in his hands. (Roger Ressmeyer)

Growing up in farm country, with his father’s scientific equipment close at hand, young John Mather took an early interest in nature and science. Far from city lights, he had an excellent opportunity to study the stars with the aid of the telescopes he assembled from mail order kits. He fed his mind with books from the Sussex County bookmobile, built shortwave radio kits and designed projects for the school science fair, including a remote-controlled robot that failed to perform as hoped.

Between terms of high school he attended summer science programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation, including a summer physics program at Cornell University. He placed first in a statewide physics competition for high school students, and chose to attend Swarthmore College for its excellent physics program. He continued to excel in physics as an undergraduate and received a National Science Foundation Fellowship for graduate study. Although he initially chose Princeton University for graduate school, a summer job at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California changed his mind, and he pursued his graduate studies in the physics department of the University of California at Berkeley.

John Mather displays radio maps made by the COBE satellite. The satellite discovered variations in the universe's background radiation, helping to refine the Big Bang theory. (© Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS) — Nobel Prize laureate John Mather displays radio maps made by the COBE satellite. The satellite discovered variations in the universe’s background radiation, helping to refine the Big Bang theory. (Roger Ressmeyer)

Extreme nearsightedness disqualified Mather for military service during the Vietnam War, and he was able to concentrate on his graduate studies, despite the turbulent atmosphere of Berkeley in the late ’60s. While looking for a topic for his doctoral thesis, he was drawn into the orbit of Dr. Charles Townes, a Berkeley professor who had received the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics. The doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows working with Dr. Townes were exploring cosmic background radiation, a phenomenon that had only recently been discovered but which could provide a record of the earliest history of the universe. This microwave radiation, dispersed throughout space, is the cool remnant of the first light released when the universe began its expansion 13.7 billion years ago.

Mather imagined that if he could measure variations in the temperature of this radiation from one part of the universe to another, he could trace the paths the newborn galaxies traveled from their common starting point. As his doctoral thesis project, Mather sought to devise a system for measuring this radiation, known as CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation). He and his colleagues installed their device, a far infrared spectrometer, on a mountaintop, but their spectrometer could not overcome atmospheric interference and failed to gather the data they had sought. They next attempted to launch a spectrometer in upper atmosphere with a weather balloon, but this too failed. Mather received his doctorate for the design of the system, but his exploration of cosmic origins had come to a dead end. Instead, he took a National Research Council postdoctoral position in radio astronomy with the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City.

John Mather recounts the arc of his career in a symposium discussion with the Academy student delegates and members during the 2007 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. (© Academy of Achievement)

In 1974, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Agency (NASA) invited the scientific community to submit proposals for satellite projects to be launched on the Scout and Delta rockets. Mather reviewed his old project, and concluded that the background radiation could be most accurately measured from outer space, where no earthly noise or heat could disturb it. With the assistance of his postdoctoral advisor, Patrick Thaddeus, and a small team of his colleagues at Goddard, Mather proposed launching a satellite to measure CMBR from outer space. Mather presented his proposal at an international conference in Amsterdam, where it was poorly received. Many who read the proposal could not imagine that such an experiment would succeed in finding anything significant, but Mather’s colleagues back at Berkeley had made progress with their balloon technology, and Mather continued to refine the proposal.

In the fall of 1976, NASA decided a satellite mission was worth a try and began initial studies. The project was dubbed the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), and Mather was named as Study Scientist. Mather joined the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. By 1979, initial studies were complete and NASA was ready to begin construction of the project. Changes were underway in Mather’s personal life at this time too. In 1974, he had met Jane Hauser, and the two were married in 1980.

At NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., John Mather takes questions from the press after receiving word he has won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics. Mather's studies of cosmic radiation helped determine the age of the universe and have added weight to the Big Bang theory of its origin. (© Larry Downing/Reuters/CORBIS) — At NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., Dr. John C. Mather takes questions from the press after receiving word he had won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics. Mather’s studies of cosmic radiation helped determine the age of the universe and have added confirmation to the Big Bang theory of its origin. (© Larry Downing/Reuters/CORBIS)

For the rest of the decade, Mather led a team of over 1,000 scientists and engineers, designing and building the exquisitely calibrated instruments required for the COBE project. The project had to be re-designed for launch from the Space Shuttle when Congress cancelled further production of the Delta rocket. After the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, the project was re-designed again, and in 1989, COBE was finally launched into space, by one of the remaining Delta rockets in NASA’s inventory.

John C. Mather and his wife Jane arrive for the Nobel Prize dinner at the Royal Palace in Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 2006. (AP Images/Scanpix, Janerik Henriksson) — 2006: John C. Mather and wife, Jane, arrive for the Nobel Prize dinner at the Royal Palace in Stockholm, Sweden.

With breathtaking precision, the COBE satellite recorded the temperature of radiation released 13 billion years ago, when the universe was in its infancy. The satellite gathered its data for four years, and although it took many more years to analyze the data it collected, Mather had found what he was looking for: small temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background that fills space. The comparison of these small variations revealed trails of cooler temperature, spreading in a fanlike pattern across the warmer background of the universe, exactly the “blackbody” pattern predicted by the Big Bang theory. No other theory yet offered could explain this distribution of radiation. Mather’s discovery validates the work of Stephen Hawking and other cosmologists, and provides a rough sketch of the universe as it appeared 389,000 years after the Big Bang.

John Mather receives the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics from King Carl Gustaf of Sweden at the Concert Hall in Stockholm. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences made the award jointly to Mather and his fellow scientist George Smoot III "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation." (© BOB STRONG/Reuters/ CORBIS) — Dr. John Mather receives the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics from King Carl Gustaf of Sweden at the Concert Hall in Stockholm. The Swedish Academy of Sciences made the award jointly to Mather and his fellow scientist George Smoot III “for discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.”

In 1995, John Mather began work developing the most sophisticated telescope in history. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), for which Mather serves as senior project scientist, will orbit the sun in synchronization with the Earth. From there, it will detect infrared light from distant stars, emitted billions of years ago, and penetrate the dust clouds where stars are born. In 1996, Dr. Mather published a memoir of the COBE project, The Very First Light: The Inside Story of the Scientific Journey Back to the Dawn of the Universe.

Dr. John C. Mather, astrophysicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, receives the Golden Plate Award presented by Awards Council member Ralph Nader during the 2007 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C.

The Swedish Academy honored Dr. Mather’s achievement with the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is the first of NASA’s civilian scientists to receive the award. He used the prize money to endow a scholarship program, through the National Space Grant Foundation, to enable NASA and Goddard Center interns to present their research at professional conferences. In 2007, John Mather was promoted to the post of chief scientist of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, advising the agency on all its scientific programs, from Earth science to cosmology.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as it will appear in orbit. The telescope will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in October of 2018. JWST will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System. — The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as it will appear in orbit. The telescope will be launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana in October of 2018. JWST will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our Solar System. John Mather is the senior project scientist for the Webb Telescope.

In 2016, Dr. John Mather and NASA administrator Charles Bolden unveiled the James Webb Space Telescope’s mirror at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The $8 billion Webb Telescope is a technologically ambitious project, requiring ten new technologies to make it work. The telescope’s mirror is twenty-one feet in diameter which is three times larger than the Hubble Telescope’s mirror. The objective of the Webb Telescope is to “explore a realm of cosmic history about 150 million to one billion years after time began — known as the Reionization Epoch, when bright and violent new stars in the searing radiation from quasars were burning away a gloomy fog of hydrogen gas that prevailed at the end of the Big Bang.” One particular goal involves observing some of the most distant events and objects of the Universe, such as the formation of the first galaxies.

December 25, 2021: NASA ‘s James Webb Space Telescope, riding an Ariane 5 rocket, successfully lifts off from the European Space Agency’s base in French Guiana to start its long flight into space to replace the Hubble telescope.

On December 25, 2021, dubbed a ‘Christmas miracle’ after the project suffered a series of delays in the South American country’s rainy season, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, riding a European Ariane rocket, lifted off from the European Space Agency’s base in French Guiana. After a perfect flight out of the Earth’s atmosphere and into space, the James Webb telescope module detached from the body of the Ariane 5 rocket. The $10 billion observatory hurtled toward its destination 1 million miles away or more than four times beyond the moon. It will take a month to get there and another five months before its infrared eyes are ready to start scanning the cosmos.

Inducted in 2007

The Big Bang theory proposes that the universe we know emerged from a uniformly hot and impenetrable mass of protons, electrons and radiation. But until recently, we knew very little of the first stages of the 13-billion-year process in which our cosmos took shape. In 1974, a young astrophysicist, fresh from graduate school at Berkeley, set out to fill in this gap in human knowledge.

John Mather devised a proposal for a satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), to measure the microwave background radiation in space. The scheme seemed far-fetched, but Mather persuaded NASA to undertake the mission, and was hired by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center to guide the project. In 1989, COBE was launched into space. Analysis of the data took many years more, but by 1992, Mather had found what he was looking for. With this data, we can draw a map of the universe as it existed roughly 389,000 years after the Big Bang, “a baby picture of the universe.”

Mather’s discovery has been hailed as “the missing link in cosmology.” The Swedish Academy praised Mather for elevating cosmology to a precision science, and honored his achievement with the Nobel Prize. Today, he leads a NASA team building the most sophisticated telescope ever devised. We can only guess what wonders it may reveal.

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When did you first know that you wanted to pursue astrophysics and cosmology?

Keys to success — Passion

John Mather: When I was a child, I was really interested in astronomy, and it was just one of those things that was full of mystery at that time. I studied lenses and telescopes, and I saw the surface of the sun with a little telescope that I made with lenses in a cardboard tube. So I was all enthusiastic about astronomy when I was in grade school. And then I learned a little bit more in high school, and I took physics courses. And finally, through graduate school, I was thinking I wanted to be a particle physicist, because that was the biggest mystery of that time. Then I was looking for a thesis project, though, and I found an advisor who had this new idea to measure the cosmic microwave background radiation — the primordial heat of the universe. It had just been discovered five years before that, so it was time to go measure. So okay. Well, I’ll try that. So that was the beginning of my career as an astrophysicist. Most of my training is as a physicist rather than as an astronomer.

At the 2007 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C., Dr. John Mather of NASA describes the dispersion of galaxies after the Big Bang. (© Academy of Achievement) — At the 2007 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C., Dr. John Mather of NASA — recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics — describes the dispersion of galaxies after the Big Bang. (© Academy of Achievement)

What did you find intriguing or challenging about this work?

John Mather: Well, that particular project was just laboratory work. “Let’s build an apparatus to measure something.” I’ve always loved the idea of building things to measure things, so that was my perfect thing. It turned out to be very hard to do, and my career took a few turns. In particular, my thesis project didn’t work after it was launched. There’s a story there. But anyway, here I am.

What happened when you hit that setback? What did that teach you?

John Mather: I got to write a thesis about a project that didn’t quite work. And I declared to myself — I thought to myself — “Well, this is way too hard for a young person. I’m going to get out of this field.” So I got a job offer to become a radio astronomer. “Okay, I’ll do that.” And I got a post-doc position at the NASA laboratory in New York City with a radio astronomer. By then, NASA had another idea. They announced an opportunity for proposals — in 1974 this was. So I said to my advisor, “Well, you know, my thesis project failed, but it really should have been done in outer space.” So he said, “Well, we’ll call up our friends. These are people who know what to do with an idea like this.” We had a meeting and created the concept for a satellite mission that would measure the cosmic microwave background radiation the way that it should be measured. It was a long process after that, but 15 years later we launched it and it worked that time. So my thesis project basically lasted for 25 years.

In a 2006 press conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., John C. Mather shows some of the earliest data from the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. (© NASA/Bill Ingalls/ CORBIS) — 2006: Dr. John C. Mather shows some of the earliest data from the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite.

What do you learn from setbacks? We’ve become something of an “instant gratification” society, and with the whole process of science you have to have so much patience.

John Mather: To me, it was never a matter of patience. It was a matter of “That’s the only way to go.”

Keys to success — Preparation

The setback of the failure of that apparatus really showed me something truly important, which was: If you don’t test it, it’s not going to work. People sometimes would say to you, “Well, why don’t you just take a risk and push the button and it will work?” It might work. And I think we learned that that’s cheating. Nature knows when you’re trying to cheat. If you don’t build it right, it won’t work. So that turned out to be extremely important to me later, because when we were building the satellite, we knew that we didn’t have a chance to do it over, and so it darn well better work. So it gave me the heart to say, “You know, if we don’t test it, it won’t work.” That was pretty important at a time when the project that we were doing was running out of money and time and we might not be able to test it properly. So I finally said, “Well, you know, we’ve got to test.” And my colleagues at NASA, the engineers, they know this. They know if you don’t test it, it won’t work. They’re very determined. But it was really important for me to back them up and say, “Yes, we will test it.” So it did work and then it did wonderful things.

Dr. John Mather presents the Golden Plate Award of the Academy of Achievement to Dr. Adam Riess, a fellow recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, at the 2012 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. (© Academy of Achievement) — Dr. John Mather presents the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement to Dr. Adam Riess, a fellow recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, at the 2012 International Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C.

Do you ever think that an age of space exploration has come to an end? Have we given up on that kind of exploration?

Keys to success — Passion

John Mather: Personally my experience is we are going like crazy for ambitious projects to explore the solar system, to explore the cosmos, doing everything we possibly can. Our technology has gotten better and better and we can do these amazing things. Our application to things at home keeps on improving too. So as far as I can tell, we are continuing to do even more than we ever could before. Maybe the public isn’t noticing, because their attention is on other things. Among other things we didn’t have any big disasters lately. When the Hubble telescope was launched and was a problem, then everybody knew about it, and then we fixed it. So we were in the news. When you do everything right, people don’t notice. They just say, “Oh, that’s cool. They must not be doing anything exciting.” But to me, what we’re doing scientifically is as exciting as you could possibly imagine. I guess, perhaps you’re also talking about the manned program, which has come to a temporary end in the sense of we no longer have a space shuttle to fly. But we’re very close now to getting people to ride on our commercial launch vehicles that were set out as part of the plan. So pretty soon we should be able to do that again. That’s pretty important.

What has really surprised you in your own study of the cosmos? Was there something that you never expected to find?

John Mather: I was surprised by the importance of the discoveries we made with the COBE satellite. The number one was within a few weeks after launch. I showed a graph of the cosmic background spectrum to the astronomers. I got a standing ovation for a graph! And I really didn’t think I would. I thought, “Doesn’t everybody know that’s the right answer?” I knew it was the right answer because I’d seen it, but they didn’t all know.

We had some bad measurements. We had some really bad theories. And we had some serious doubt about whether our expanding universe story is correct. So now we know that one. When we designed the project the first time, we didn’t know that we would ever be able to find what we call the cosmic anisotropy, which is to say the map of the Big Bang radiation — the heat radiation — is not uniform. There are hot and cold spots on it which are not very bright and really hard to find. We didn’t know they’d be there. There was no serious theory to tell us they would be there when we conceived the mission. When we got the data, it was fabulously important, and I didn’t know how important it would turn out to be. I just couldn’t have guessed that. Now we know that Mr. Hawking was right. It really is the most important discovery of the century — if not of all time — for scientists. At least for cosmologists. So what it meant was now we can explain our existence. Those little hot and cold spots measure the details of the early parts of the universe. They tell us about the gravitation that was there then. They tell us about the gravitation that should cause galaxies to exist today. They tell us about the cosmic dark matter and the cosmic dark energy. All of those things have their effects on those patterns of little spots. No one knew in 1974, when we conceived this mission, that any of that could be done. Now it’s practically an industry. There have been now three space satellites, besides the COBE satellite, that were launched for this purpose. One came before, two after. And it’s still an extraordinarily rich subject. So I never guessed how rich a subject it would be. More papers have been written about those spots than there were spots on the map by far. So this is huge. I just never guessed.

Those spots tell us a great deal about the past. Do they tell us anything about the future?

John Mather: They do tell us about the story of the universe, and so they do confirm the other discovery — the one that got the Nobel Prize last year — about the accelerating universe. One of the reasons they could give a prize was it’s been measured more than one way. So the spots confirm that story. Okay, so the universe is accelerating. It means that distant galaxies are going away from us faster and faster. If you wait enough billion years, not only will the stars go out, but the galaxies will go away. So if you’re the one astronomer left in the universe, it will be very lonely. You won’t see a single other thing besides your own star and your own galaxy. So that’s something that we can tell is probably coming if our story is correct, which I can’t promise.

Looking out at the universe, do you think that there are other places like Earth, or are we unique?

John Mather: I feel sure that there are other places like Earth. I also feel sure that we are unique. And I feel also quite sure that we will never find signals from another civilization, just because the universe is so large and it’s so difficult to hunt through it. I feel sure there are other civilizations, but just that we can’t find them. So we sort of know these things just from the large numbers. Carl Sagan explained it all very well many years ago. I think he was right. So we’re on our own. It’s our job to preserve our civilization, expand it as far as possible, conceivably even to build a robot that can travel to another star and set down and land on a planet out there. So it’s going to have to be a pretty smart robot and it has to be pretty patient. But it’s not impossible as far as I know. It’s pretty hard for us to go there, but it’s possible to build a robot to go there. So we’re thinking.

How much of a role does the creative process play in what you do? Obviously there are physical and mathematical components that are fixed. But in terms of understanding those or putting them together in new ways, does the creative process play a role?

John Mather: It seems to me that the life of a scientist is all about the creative process. People think, “Scientists are so smart, they must know a lot.” That’s really not how it feels to be a scientist. How it feels to be me, and I think to my fellow scientists, is we’re always working on the part that we don’t understand yet: the equipment that doesn’t work right, the theory that doesn’t function right, the algebraic mistakes that we haven’t found yet, the computer program that doesn’t work right yet. We spend relatively little of our time thinking about the stuff we already know. It’s all about the creative process for understanding what we don’t know. So we’re on this huge quest. Personally, a lot of my creative moments come from conversations with other people. Someone says, “Well, I could do this…” and I say, “Well in that case, why don’t we try that?” So at least two major concepts for observatories have come from concepts that I’ve been discussing with friends. So that’s part of how creativity occurs, is somebody offers you a problem and you say, “I could solve that,” or vice versa — challenge other people to solve a problem.

Are there other disciplines, interests or hobbies that nourish your scientific creativity?

John Mather: I read a lot of things outside my area of science. I’m so excited to read about what the biologists are finding these days. It’s such an enormously productive subject. I love reading Popular Science and Scientific American, and magazines that tell me what other scientists are doing, in a way where I don’t have to go into the detail and I get the inspiration of it. Those are things I like to pursue. I like to keep up with current events and understand the chaos of the world as well. Partly, I’m just curious. Partly, I’d like to have some influence, if I could understand what to do.

Were you always curious? Were you curious as a child?

John Mather: So I’m told. I’m told I was curious enough to get all the doorknobs off the house when I was three. So I figured my parents knew something was going to happen. I do remember being curious as a child, being interested in everything that I could understand, and I read a lot of books. I had a very quiet childhood, in the sense of growing up in the country on a research farm for Rutgers University. After a while, the county library started sending around a library bookmobile. So a truck full of books came every couple of weeks, and I would get everything I could about science. So it was an interesting time to be a child, and to read about things, because that was also right around Sputnik time. So we go from, “Well, it’s cool to be a kid interested in science,” to being, “Gosh, you could save the country when you grow up!” So that was a very exciting time too. It wasn’t only just curiosity, but I loved the curiosity part.

Was there anyone in particular who inspired you when you were young or fostered your interest in this direction?

John Mather: I think my parents had more to do with it than most people. They made sure I had opportunity to do things. And when I wanted to accomplish something, they would usually help a little bit. Now they didn’t have that great of resources either, where we were in the country. You couldn’t just go down to the shop and buy a lens. But when I wanted something, they usually figured out how to get something for me. They made sure I got off the farm to go away for summer camps in science a couple of times. That was cool. And they found ways to get me off to summer science programs in high school too, twice. So these were enough of an adventure outside my home district to find out, “Yeah, I have other friends like myself. I’m also pretty good at what I do.” So that was tremendously important actually. You have to discover you can accomplish what you want to accomplish to give yourself the courage to continue, because otherwise you could just get frustrated and give up. There were times that things were pretty hard to do, and I was thinking, “How is this going to go?” But I would remember, “Yeah, I’ve done hard things before. Maybe I can actually do this.” Some people have to discover their courage in that way.

Were you thought of as a gifted child, or as more of a curious one?

John Mather: I don’t know how people felt about me. I actually got to see my high school math and physics teachers again a few years ago, and they sort of knew that I was a special person, but they didn’t let on while I was there. They didn’t treat me as though I were super-special. They were just sort of, “Let John do what he wants.” My parents told me, “When you go to college, you’ll find out there are other people just as smart as you. You’re going to have to work hard.” That was their advice. It was true.

How would you explain — to someone who knows nothing about your field — what makes it so exciting to you?

John Mather: To me, the excitement is that we have a chance to really understand our human history. I think that’s exciting. Other people seem to also, although they concentrate on other things like genealogy and human history. I like to reach back as far as possible, because there are so many discoveries currently being made about the nature of the universe, how the physical universe has been expanding all these many billions of years, and how stars and galaxies are formed from that. We’re even beginning to learn how the Earth comes to be, how common are planets around other stars. To me, this is a fascinating story, and I think the public is interested too. So it’s not just because I’m interested. It’s because I can tell other people care about this also. There are even a lot of people who care because they already disagree with the story, but they care. So I take that as a tremendous vote of how important it is to people.

What do you see as the next great challenge or frontier in cosmology?

John Mather: I think the thing that I’m working on is one of the great frontiers. It’s the new telescope — it’s called the James Webb Space Telescope — which will be able to observe things farther back in time than Hubble can see, and to see inside dust clouds where stars are being born today. There’s a new star being born more or less once a year in our Milky Way. It would be pretty cool to watch that happen, because maybe we’d understand how the sun was made. We’re finding more and more planets around other stars, so we hope to learn something about whether ours is in fact unique, like we were speculating before. So to me, this is a fascinating set of things to be working on. So it’s one of the — this is an observational frontier. We’re building a new tool. And in truth we don’t really know what they’re going to find. One of the great confident hopes that we have is that there will be a big surprise there — that we will not predict everything. That seems to be the nature of astronomy. We almost never predict what we’re going to see and get it right. There were so many wonderful predictions made before the Hubble telescope was launched and so many of them were wrong, it was great. And basically almost none of the predictions that people made about exoplanets — the planets around other stars — almost none of those were right. So it’s been almost entirely determined by observing. So it’s full of surprises. And my perspective on that is getting to be, “Well, if you can imagine it, it probably happens somewhere.” So we are limited by our imagination and we should expect surprises.

How do you see back in time?

John Mather: We see back in time really easy. I see you as you were about four nanoseconds ago. Light travels fast, but its speed is not infinite. So if we look at something that’s really far away, we see it as it was. Very simple. So if you see the middle of our own galaxy, it’s about 25,000 years ago that it had to send the light to us. If you look at something like the Andromeda Nebula, several million years ago as it was. If you look at the farthest things you can see, it’s 13 billion years. You’re looking back in time already, and that’s almost all that there is –13.75 is the estimated age of the universe. By the way, the cosmic microwaves that we measure, they show the universe as it was when it was only about 400,000 years old. We have its baby picture, and we’d like to know, “How did that work? How did it grow up?”

What was the impetus behind coming up with an idea like the Big Bang? What’s the thought process that goes into that? Is there a decisive moment when an idea like that comes into focus, or is it more of a cumulative process?

John Mather: I think the recognition of the expanding universe was somewhat sudden. On the other hand, the evidence was building up over time and — I expect — in the early part of the 20th Century. First it was necessary to find out what galaxies are. And they found the distant galaxies actually have stars in them. Then the next question was, “Are they moving?” And they seem mostly to be moving away. Then the next question is, “How far away are they?” And people started to get measures and especially Edwin Hubble got measurements of this. Then in 1929 was the big “Aha!” moment, because he made a graph, and he showed about 20 or 30 galaxies, and he showed that there’s this trend that the farther away they are, the faster they’re going. And it’s a pretty good trend. So, okay. Now maybe this is true. Now I see the universe is expanding. So this was the sort of sudden moment. People had predicted it. Two theorists had predicted it, and Einstein said it can’t be right. But then it was right, so that was a big “Aha!” moment for science, but it was something that developed over time.

By the way, we still call it the Big Bang, but we really shouldn’t. We should be calling it the expanding universe. And the reason that I say that, is that people immediately picture a little hand grenade going off when you say a Big Bang, and what we actually mean is the universe is expanding. We did not see a bang. It did not have a start that we can see. We know that the clock hasn’t ticked very long. It’s ticked for 13.7 billion years. But we do not see the moment before that. We do not see that event. We see the universe as it was when it was young. We don’t see it being born. That’s a pretty big thing we have to think about, but so far all we have in science is the process for one thing turning into another. We don’t have anything that says, “There was nothing, and then there was something.” It’s curious, because almost all of the public thinks we mean something else. But we don’t. We mean we see the expanding universe, and we trace its history back. We do not see that it comes into existence.

Can we predict the lifespan of our sun?

John Mather: We can predict the lifespan of our sun. It’s been going for four-and-a-half billion years about, and it’s got another billion or so before it’s too bright for us to live here. When it’s another five billion –roughly — from now, it will be expanding to the size of the Earth’s orbit roughly, and it will be turning into what we call a “red giant star.” After 7.6 billion or so, that’s over too and it will shrink down to become a white dwarf star. So that means its nuclear interior fuel is used up. It will get fainter and cooler over many billions of years. So that’s probably its life cycle. So maybe we get some space travel before that.

Then what happens to our solar system?

John Mather: Our solar system will continue orbiting around our galaxy for a few billion years. But it’s an interesting question, because in about two billion years — maybe three or four, but soon anyway in cosmic terms — the Andromeda Nebula is coming at us. It’s that big beautiful thing you can see with binoculars in the autumn sky, over in the east. So it’s coming towards us. When galaxies collide, the parts go flying every which way. Stars mostly do not collide with each other. The planets are not likely to be ripped away from the sun. But the sun could be flung off into intergalactic space. As I like to say, we could get voted off the island. Now it will be pretty spectacular to be there as a witness, because cosmic collisions will occur, and the black holes that are at the middles of the galaxies — they will probably have a merger event — will be spectacular. So something amazing will happen. We can only tell this is likely because we measure the velocities. The Andromeda Nebula is coming towards us. We see what happens when other galaxies collide, because we can take their pictures out there. We even make movies of what it should be like, because we can simulate everything in computers now. So it’s spectacular even just to watch the movie.

Did ancient civilizations — like Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome, which didn’t have the benefit of all the technology, and some of the math and the science — did they get things right about our cosmos that surprise you?

John Mather: Some of the Ancient Greeks were astonishingly thoughtful. So some of them knew the size of the Earth. Some of them knew the distance to the moon. There’s a small mechanism that was made, perhaps by Archimedes and his shop, which would calculate the motions of the planets as you would see them from here. It was a gearbox, like a giant clock. Probably some rich person ordered it. So they knew a vast amount about how things actually work. I don’t know whether any of them guessed that Earth was not the middle. There are certainly people that understood the process of change. There were people that had the idea of atoms, as you know, as the word is a Greek word anyway. Some people really got it pretty good all along, considering how little they had to work with. But then it’s a little bit of a mystery to me how come such things slowed down as much as they did between, say, the beginning of the Roman Empire and its decay. Then some science went into hibernation, and some was probably being done and was being lost. So then we have this amazing flowering all over again in the late 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries, where suddenly science takes off. And who knows why that was? But it did.

What so far has been the most interesting or exciting moment in your career?

John Mather: I think, in a way, the most exciting moment is seeing the rocket go up that carried the COBE satellite into space, because, you know, we’d worked for 15 years to make that happen. And you realize, as you’re watching it, that there’s nothing you can do if there’s a fault there in the rocket. So you just say, “Well, hmm, I hope that works.” Of course, it’s four or five o’clock in the morning. You’re standing out in the middle of a field on the California coast and thinking about your future and what happens. So that’s exciting, and it’s also — when it works, of course — it’s a bit of an anticlimax. “Now what do I do?” Well, you know what you have to do. You have to head home and get ready to operate the observatory. But that was a pretty exciting moment, I have to say.

Once you’ve answered one question that’s puzzled you, where does the next question come from?

John Mather: In a way, the questions that scientists ask are community products. People are always asking questions, and most often we can’t work on them yet. But almost none of the questions that I’ve worked on were my idea. Almost all of them are just sitting there as challenges for all of us to think about. So what’s more likely is that scientists may have a personal idea about what to do about that. But the big questions have been sitting there a long time.

How would you describe your contribution to your field? What do you think you’ve brought to it that’s unique?

John Mather: The particular idea of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite was one of my ideas. But is it really my idea? It’s hard to tell. Like I say, these things are community property almost. I happen to be the person who said, “My thesis didn’t work. We should have done it in outer space.” But in truth I wasn’t the first person to think that sort of thought. I remember a review committee came around to review my thesis project when I was at Berkeley. It was a NASA committee, and they said, “Why aren’t you doing this in outer space?” So it wasn’t really my idea alone. I just was the one that stood up and said, “Yeah, maybe we should try that.” So that’s an interesting thing because — so the ideas themselves are not so unusual. What I think was as important though, was I had somehow the ability and the team to work with to continue through until it worked, and that’s pretty special. And you can’t claim responsibility for that either. You go into an environment at NASA where there are many, many people that it takes to operate this system. In the back of our book about the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite are the names of about 1500 people. So they all worked on it. Many of them were completely essential, where if they hadn’t done what they did, it wouldn’t have worked.

How do you approach solving problems? Especially when you’re working with such large groups?

John Mather: Well, it’s pretty important to parse the problem out into parts if you can. If you want to, say, do you design a giant telescope? You have to describe what the scientific purpose is, what you want it to accomplish. Then you have to set up a process with an engineering team to say, “Let’s translate these wishes into drawings, concepts.” This is something called systems engineering. It’s a specialty in engineering to be able to translate the wish into the parts. So that’s one thing to do. Then another thing is, if you’re working on something — which I often did personally during the COBE project — say you’re sitting there with a problem that has to be solved, and you’re working with engineers to solve the problem. It’s been my faith that I’m not usually the one that knows the answer. Somebody sitting in the corner not saying anything could be the one that knows the answer to this one, and has been waiting for you to call on him or her to say so. So a lot of it is a group process management to encourage the people who could solve the problem to speak up. So it’s saying basically it’s a social endeavor. Science and engineering together are both. And very rare for a single person to do it alone.

What do you know now about achievement that you didn’t know when you were younger?

John Mather: I think when I was younger, I just didn’t know what I could accomplish. I didn’t start out with a plan to do anything particular. Most of my life was not planned in advance. I didn’t know where I was going to go. Mostly, I would say, my life strategy has been to respond to opportunity. And then when somebody gives you a responsibility, then stick to it. So it’s worked out. I didn’t have a plan when I left Berkeley to build this COBE satellite. In fact, I was going to do something else, because I thought it was too hard. But somebody said, “Well, write a proposal.” I thought, “Well, it’s pretty unlikely to be chosen, but it might be and that would be glorious.” So then when we got a chance to do it, of course I said yes. Then when it turned out to be a lot harder than people thought, well, okay, I’ll stay with it anyway. So I don’t give up. I think that’s part of the achievement. I think that’s what we’ve heard from a lot of the other speakers at this event as well today — that you just don’t give up. When something is hard, you just get more resources and keep on going.

What do you hope will be one of the big achievements of the next quarter century?

John Mather: I think astronomy will make huge progress. Biology is closer and closer to understanding detailed molecular approaches to managing diseases. I think that some of the big diseases of today will be mastered in some way. I think artificial intelligence will come along to be much more important than it is today. I think IBM’s demonstration of their Watson Program on TV was pretty spectacular. And I know they’re working on making it useful to people. So I think we’re going to see incredible growth of artificial intelligence and distributed computer systems to where they’re actually useful and it’s not just, “I’d like to look up something cool on Google.” I think maybe someday the computer will actually be able to help us think. It’s not impossible. It’s pretty complicated. As you know, it’s been in our future for a long time and it’s turned out to be much harder than the original proponents thought. But it’s not impossible, as far as I can tell. And I wouldn’t be too surprised if, say, in 50 years I could come in — if I’m still alive — and say to the computer, “Well, it’s time to go to Mars.” And the computer will say, “Okay, I know what to do.”

What can artificial intelligence do that the human mind can’t?

John Mather: It’s hard to tell what it could possibly do. What we know already is that it can help us represent our thoughts and it can help us remember what we thought before.

One thing we don’t have as far as I know in engineering is a kind of archive, or a library of all the successful things we’ve ever done. If somebody says, “I need to have a ball that spins in space, so how do I lubricate it?” you would think that by now a computer could say, “I know how to do that because it’s been done before,” and it would show you drawings. As far as I know, it’s not available. But why couldn’t it be? So if we need to send people to Mars, we need something that’s at least that helpful, otherwise it’s just too hard. So I think that’s a way in which even elementary artificial intelligence could be extremely helpful to us. Another application would be — if we have enough of it, we can send it to Mars by itself. “Okay, Mars Rover, drive around by yourself and find something interesting.” As compared to waiting for us to send a command every day to please go another few feet. So there’s a huge amount that’s possible, with even a little bit of improvement, of autonomy for our remote roboting sensors. So I think there’s a lot of possibility there. It’s pretty hard to do, otherwise we would have done it. But I think it’s worth doing, and will have tremendous effects on practically everything else we do too.

What role does life experience play in creativity and problem solving?

John Mather: What role? It seems to me life experience gives you some range of things to remember and connect. Part of our intelligence is connecting the dots, seeing the patterns that are there or could be there. It’s also that we gradually develop a point of view that says, “Creativity is something we know how to do and it’s worth doing and we’re going to try.” I’ve gotten more and more interested in thinking of new ways to do space missions, so that’s part of where my creativity goes. I enjoy having conversations with people about, “What if we try this?” Some of it’s intentional. I would say, “I’m looking for a problem to solve. Let’s go solve something.” That drives creativity. That’s part of it.

What do you think matters most in life?

John Mather: What matters most in life? That’s very personal, isn’t it? What matters most is different for each person. For me, I think, it matters a lot to know that I have done what I can for my fellow human beings, that I’ve behaved with integrity, that the scientific discoveries that I claim are true are actually correct. Because if they are or not is going to be found out sometime. So I would like to be known as the person who did find it out and it was right. That’s sort of a really basic part of our scientific creed that we have to get it right and help people tell. So we publish; that’s part of what we do. I do want to be remembered also for what good I can do with other people — for other people. Trying to help the next generation get started in doing things, support kids who want to grow up to become scientists and engineers. Of course, that’s not the only subject we need to be working on, but that’s something I know we need to work on. I also think people need to cultivate an attitude of appreciation. I’d like to be known as a person who did recognize and appreciate the contributions of his friends and family — basically expressing love where it belongs. That’s some of what I’m thinking of. I think that’s a very deep question though.

What would you say to encourage somebody who is interested in the sciences today? What should they do to prepare themselves to pursue a scientific career?

John Mather: That’s a huge question. Number one: be curious. Number two: be open to opportunity. Three: help cause that opportunity to occur. If somebody knows that you want to be a scientist, they maybe wish to help you. A lot of people grow up in areas where it’s not easy to get started. But if you’re inspired, maybe you can make something happen. You have to somehow find the way to cause your dreams to come true. I think this is true across all areas of growing up. You need to find a way to cause your dreams to come true. Sometimes it’s a matter of figuring out what they are, or noticing what they are, and sometimes it’s a matter of reaching out to other people to say, “I’ve got this great idea. Can you help me do this?” Sometimes it’s a crazy idea. “Maybe you should tell me that it’s crazy and I should stop.” In any case, we need to encourage the communication and the resourcefulness of young people. And older people. We’re all creative at all ages. Maybe we should all consider what we can do to realize those dreams.

I’d say one of the important things to know is it’s not just about thinking of stuff and doing stuff, it’s also communicating stuff. If you want to do what you want to do, you have to explain it to people well so they will support it. Science is almost never done just because it’s cool. It’s done because somebody really wants to help you find out. So you have to ask for a company to sponsor your work, or your family to sponsor your work, or your government to sponsor your work. One way or another you’re always persuading somebody of something’s importance. So think about persuasion. Study English and writing, and master the art of explaining things. So if your mom can understand why you’re excited about what you do, maybe the funding agency will also. So my advice there is to give a lot of thought to good writing and good communicating. Practice it.

Do we value science enough in this country? Or are we endangering science?

John Mather: In our country we value science immensely, and we once in a while pretend that we don’t. Part of the pretense is that certain forces exist, because if we actually took action based on the science then somebody would lose some money. An example is pretty clear about the tobacco industry. Science proved a long time ago that people got cancer from smoking, and other bad things would happen to us too. Well, certain forces said, “We don’t want you to tell anyone that, so we’ll pretend that science doesn’t matter. We’ll pretend you didn’t find that out.” Similar forces are at work in every other area that really matters in life. If there’s money involved, somebody will say, “I don’t want you to regulate me. I think I’ll pretend your science isn’t right.” So we shouldn’t be surprised. In fact, to me it means that science is even more important than people let on. It’s one of those curious thing that — it’s the two sides of a coin. If it’s really important and we don’t want to pay attention, we’ll pretend it isn’t true. But it doesn’t make anything change. Nature doesn’t care what we think. Nature does what nature does, and doesn’t particularly respond to pretending that it’s not there. So we’ve got huge challenges on governing the entire world’s future, about energy, climate, water supply, practically everything that you can name about the global world economy, the global world health. Everything depends on science and engineering in tremendously deep ways. So all we can do is really work on it, and keep on going, and provide the information to the people who have to make decisions. Scientists don’t make decisions for the world, other people do. So we try to do our best to give the right information.

Does winning the Nobel Prize change your life?

John Mather: Yes, it does. It gives tremendous opportunity for communication that you didn’t always have, or maybe you didn’t know you had. But aside from that, my life is about the same as before. I continue to have the same job title, and continue to talk to the public, only just more so. So the change for me has been somewhat gradual. I was a little afraid of it when I first heard the call. Yeah, your life is changed now. But it’s as much like it was before as I can make it.

Dr. Mather, thank you for giving us this interview.

John Mather: Well, thank you. That was a lovely interview. I enjoyed doing that.

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