I think the mystery of what's out there in the universe is just very compelling.

I think the universe is just so big that there has to be something else out there.

Until the 1990s, there were few reliable observations about movement at the scale of the entire universe, which is the only scale dark energy effects. So dark energy could not be seen until we could measure things very, very far away.

I think you kind of have to put yourself out there.

We're really just the frosting on a cake and we don't know what's inside the cake.

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.