There is strength in numbers, but organizing those numbers is one of the great challenges.
Astronomers can look back in time. We can look at things as they used to be. We have an idea there was a Big Bang explosion 13.7 billion years ago. We have a story of how galaxies and stars were made. It's an amazing story.
Many of the problems facing the nation and the world today may only be solved if their technical elements are understood - climate change, energy supply, health care, and infrastructure, to name just a few.
Even your chin is made up of exploded stars.
Easytrak is no guarantee against mismanagement. But you cannot manage a large program without software like it today. It is a project information management system that helps people develop a solution to a problem with many parts to track.
A mentor enables a person to achieve. A hero shows what achievement looks like.
My mother's father, Hobart Cromwell, was a bacteriologist with Abbott Laboratories in suburban Chicago. I never got to know him well, as he died very young, but he was always a heroic figure in our family, wise and gentle and intelligent by reputation, with the courage to fight against the McCarthyites.
As an eight-year-old, I would listen to stories and biographies of Charles Darwin and Galileo. I also went to wonderful schools and had great teachers who inspired me.
When you have a deadline, or when you know that your equipment is about to go up in a rocket and you won't have another chance to fix it, your mind works in a way that it otherwise never would.
My experience from working with people is that you can have a conversation with someone or have a meeting with a group of people, and from that meeting will derive an answer to a question that no individual could have ever thought of by him or herself.
One of the most powerful scientific tools ever invented is the telephone.
I tried without much success to learn a little of the humanities and the arts, but even passing the courses in art history and music history was a challenge.
It seemed to me that NASA, especially Goddard, was the place where I could carry out the dreams that I had, which were to push forward an experiment that would measure the big bang radiation better than anyone had ever tried before. Therefore, it seemed like the perfect place to go.
We have our religious traditions coming from many thousands of years, and I think to myself, well, you know, if Moses had come down with tablets from the mountain that said, 'And guess what? There are protons and neutrons, and they are made out of quarks,' people wouldn't have understood what he said. So he didn't.
I was thrilled and amazed when I found out we won the Nobel Prize. The dedicated and talented women and men of the COBE team collaborated to produce the science results being recognized. This is truly such a rare and special honor.
Every time we get a story that says there was a Big Bang, then people want to know what was before that. And if we find out, what was before that?
We are discovering what the universe is really like, and it is totally magnificent, and one can only be inspired and awestruck by what we find.
With COBE, we can see things before the lights came on. While we probably will not rewrite the book of cosmology with this mission, we will write another chapter.
Big Bang gave us hydrogen and helium. We couldn't make people out of hydrogen and helium. So we're made out of exploding stars.
My work at NASA has always been about team efforts, and so it's intrinsically about mentoring. I have been blessed with some brilliant colleagues who were able to take on huge challenges without a lot of guidance.
