Words matter. These are the best Jim Peebles Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As a kid I did enjoy building things; learned quickly how to make gun powder. I built sleighs, forts, houses in the back yards of houses.
I had good time in high school, but I don’t think I learned a lot.
The sun can’t shine forever.
I see these people in Princeton, my home town, as they go marching for control of climate. It is a wonderful thing. I love their enthusiasm, their energy, their devotion to something very worthwhile.
I love physics because it’s neat and it’s orderly in its own peculiar way.
Research in the natural sciences operates in successive approximations. We are glad to be able to offer many good problems for research by generations to come.
I came from a very small high school in which there was no guidance and not any appreciable amount of physics taught, nor much mathematics. So I didn’t know what academia was all about until I got to college.
Clocks around our house were in danger because I loved to take things apart, and failed to put them back together.
Certainly to me it has been valuable to have to think through the basics of physics in order to present them in a halfway coherent form for a course. That has led me to ideas in research. Even freshman physics leads to thoughts that lead to other thoughts that are stimulating.
I arrived at Princeton as a graduate student from the University of Manitoba in 1958. To my great good fortune, I fell into work with Bob Dicke, a truly great physicist who decided a few years before that that gravity is too important to ignore, as it had been in recent years in physics.
I think that my research is valuable to my teaching. I think that the two complement each other and I’m able to present somewhat more stimulating lectures because of what’s happening in research, so it’s a good complement.
I’ve always been interested in mechanical things. I think I must have been heavily influenced by my father, who is also very good with his hands. He liked to build things. I always loved to watch him do it, and I loved to build things on my own.
It is so easy for us theorists who build wonderful castles, beautiful ideas. Sometimes, it is remarkable, sometimes these beautiful ideas prove to be close to what the observations tell us. But often and also they turn out to be wrong.
I went to public schools, which is to say publicly financed.
I didn’t do much in things mechanical in high school, except learn to square dance and other such activities.
Sciences evolve.
I was never exposed as a kid to any real science. I read the occasional popular science book, and I loved Mechanics Illustrated, which had a lot of pseudo-science in it: It wasn’t until I got to college that I began to appreciate what physics is all about, and that was really an accident also.
You should enter science because you are fascinated by it. That’s what I did.
I’ve been working in cosmology since 1964.
I’ve always loved Bob Dylan.
I’ve always, since I was a kid, been interested in how things work.
I think I’d be depressed if everything were nearly all known, but I don’t feel any danger of that happening.
Life will go on. I suppose the aura of the Nobel is such that my life will change, but I don’t think I’m going to let it change much. You understand, I’m used to a quiet life.
Science does not emerge in some perfect, complete crystalline form.
My father worked at the Grain Exchange.
I was very uneasy about going into cosmology because the experimental observations were so modest.
Sometimes one must make extended conclusions from limited data.
One thing that sticks in my mind is when I was a kid, and I had just learned to read, I came across one of my older sister’s textbooks that explained compound pulley. I thought that was really neat, and I still do.
One of my earliest memories was throwing a tantrum because I wasn’t allowed to put together the coffee percolator.
We can be very sure that as we discover new aspects of the expanding and evolving universe, we will be startled and amazed once again.
I loved teaching. In addition to that, I love physics. And so what could be better than to talk physics to bright young students?
There must be enormous numbers of planets around the stars in the many galaxies in our observable universe. We may be sure that wonderful things are happening on these planets that the human race never will observe.
My advice is not to aim for prizes and awards. We are in this for the joy of research, the fascination, the love of science. That’s the reward, really.
I have taught a mixture of undergraduate and graduate courses, and found them both stimulating.
Research such as ours is driven by the human imperative to understand where we are. It motivates the study of our positions in family, or in society, or on earth. The results may be termed geology, or sociology, or poetry.