Life lessons from an experimental cosmologist

As some of you know, I work at NASA. I don't do anything particularly brilliant but just upstairs from me is NASA's Nobel-prize-winning pride and joy, John Mather. I sometimes like to think some of his insight and perseverance will rub off on me as we share a few air molecules via the HVAC. (OK that was pathetic.)

Today I attended a luncheon* featuring Dr. Mather. In fewer than 25 minutes, he breezed through his 20 years with the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) (which confirmed that the Big Bang is more than just a clever idea); described the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST); and ended with the lessons he's learned from it all, ... which I felt deserved a broader audience. So, all three of you, listen up:

- Aim high: the world will change in the 20-year lifetime of your project.
- Your space-based telescope should only try to do what ground-based telescopes can't do.
- Don't be intimidated by difficulty of your project, if no law of nature actually forbids it.
- It it's not forbidden, it's required (in the case of science and exploration).
- If it's not required, it's forbidden (in the case of project management).
- If you don't test it, it won't work (confidence is no guarantee of success).
- If you do test it, it still won't work BUT you'll have a chance to fix it before it has to work.
- Elementary things do fail (simplicity is no guarantee of success).
- All the hard work is worth it -- there's no substitute for major space missions.

I'm no cosmologist, yet something tells me the good Dr.'s onto some genuine wisdom here.

He gave another interesting gem to -ah- chew on: We atoms make up only about 4% of the universe. The rest is cold dark matter (23%), which no-one knows much about; and dark energy (73%), which is even more mysterious.

(* Lunch or luncheon? After extensive study, I have concluded that the "-eon" suffix is code for "wear a tie". Then again, the required preliminary chit-chat does fit the other definition.)