Fritz Zwicky Quotes

To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle (God) is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker. [Diary entry, 1971]

Swiss-American astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky.

appears that at least 90 percent of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99 percent, is composed of Fritz Zwicky’s “dark matter”—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us.

dark matter,” which is invisible to us and yet is believed to account for 90 per cent, or more, of all the matter in the universe. Dark matter was first theorized in the 1930s by Fritz Zwicky,

Supernovae are significant to us in one other decidedly central way. Without them we wouldn’t be here. You will recall the cosmological conundrum with which we ended the first chapter—that the Big Bang created lots of light gases but no heavy elements. Those came later, but for a very long time nobody could figure out how they came later. The problem was that you needed something really hot—hotter even than the middle of the hottest stars—to forge carbon and iron and the other elements without which we would be distressingly immaterial. Supernovae provided the explanation, and it was an English cosmologist almost as singular in manner as Fritz Zwicky who figured it out.

To eliminate the discrepancy between men's plans and the results achieved, a new approach is necessary. Morphological thinking suggests that this new approach cannot be realized through increased teaching of specialized knowledge. This morphological analysis suggests that the essential fact has been overlooked that every human is potentially a genius. Education and dissemination of knowledge must assume a form which allows each student to absorb whatever develops his own genius, lest he become frustrated. The same outlook applies to the genius of the peoples as a whole.

In the early 1930s a Swiss astronomer called Fritz Zwicky was studying galaxy clusters through the telescopes of the California Institute of Technology when he noticed an anomaly of extraordinary implications. Clusters are groups of gravitationally bound galaxies, and Zwicky’s work involved measuring the speeds of revolution of individual galaxies in their orbits around the core of the cluster, in order to weigh the cluster as a whole. What Zwicky observed was that the galaxies were revolving much faster than expected, especially towards the outer reaches of the cluster. At such speeds, individual galaxies should have broken their gravitational hold on one another, dispersing the cluster. There was, Zwicky determined, only one possible explanation. There had to be another source of gravity, powerful enough to hold the cluster together given the speeds of revolution of the observable bodies. But what could supply such huge gravitational field strength, sufficient to tether whole galaxies – and why could he not see this ‘missing mass’? Zwicky found no answers to his questions, but in asking them he began a hunt that continues today. His ‘missing mass’ is now known as ‘dark matter’ – and proving its existence and determining its qualities is one of the grail-quests of modern physics

The universe is so unique and perfect that it could not have originated by chance but was divined by flawless, creative design. Fritz Zwicky to youngest daughter, Barbarina Zwicky