“I think . I never would have guessed it. Even as an undergraduate, once I’d learned a little physics, I would have thought that the universe was eternal, static, and always in equilibrium. So in graduate school when I found out that the universe was expanding, I was awestruck. Then I learned if we could measure the expanding universe, the way we record the growth of a child with marks on a doorframe ... , we could determine the age of the universe and predict its ultimate fate. This was staggering! I knew this is what I wanted to do. Since that time, charting the expanding universe to determine its nature has been my passion. Though I have to add: knowing what I know now, that the , I feel like King Alfonso X of Castile who saw Ptolemy’s and reportedly said “If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on creation thus, I should have recommended something simpler.””
“We know there is gravity because apples fall from trees. We can observe gravity in daily life. If we could throw an apple to the edge of the universe, we would observe it accelerating.”
Adam Riess
“is about the gravity of empty space, the gravity of the vacuum. And the vacuum is a concept that we address in and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is physics on microscopic scales, while Einstein...”
Adam Riess