Scientists on Reddit

John Mather

Astrophysicist, 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, Webb telescope

u/johnmather ↗AMA only

How we know it's theirs

The 2012 r/IAmA AMA, posted from this account

We retrieved 1 post and 25 comments from u/johnmather, all from 2012, most often in r/IAmA.

Best moment

A redditor wrote in r/IAmA

On “I am Dr. John Mather, Nobel Laureate and James Webb Space Telescope Project Scientist, AMA”

Of all the different scientific fields, why did you choose physics? Did your Nobel Prize-winning work come about by accident, or did you set out to find exactly what you found? Along those same lines, what was the moment like when you realized, "Wow, I may actually win a Nobel…

u/johnmather replied

2. The Nobel work came by a roundabout path. My thesis project at Berkeley was chosen because it was exciting and I liked the professors. Then it failed to function and I thought I would give up on the cosmic…

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The Nobel work came by a roundabout path. My thesis project at Berkeley was chosen because it was exciting and I liked the professors. Then it failed to function and I thought I would give up on the cosmic microwave background radiation. Then, I was a postdoc doing radio astronomy and NASA asked for satellite proposals; that was 1974. i said, my thesis project failed, but it should have been done in outer space. So we wrote a proposal and it was chosen.
About the Nobel, a lot of people thought the COBE was Nobel-quality work, but I thought, the competition is fierce, and only people like Einstein get on the list. So it was a lovely surprise!

Excerpt

More moments

A redditor wrote in r/IAmA

On “I am Dr. John Mather, Nobel Laureate and James Webb Space Telescope Project Scientist, AMA”

What is, in your opinion, the most commonly-held misconception people have about planets, stars and outer space?

u/johnmather replied

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I think people have a really hard time grasping how empty outer space is, in the sense of immense distances between objects, and immense time spent going from one to another. There's a lot of talk about space aliens as though it were physically possible for them to get here from somewhere else, and (sorry to say this) talk about human travel out of the solar system. We just don't live long enough to do that.