He memorably described the Earth as looking like a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam", such was its apparent insignificance in the vastness of space.
It has always been easy to make fun of cosmologists, confined to a dust mote lost in space, pronouncing judgment on the fate of the universe or the behavior of galaxies billions of light-years away, with only a few scraps of light as evidence.
Mote, of Binsted, Hampshire, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment at Southwark crown court on Monday.
The melody picked up slowly, and I could see his every mote of concentration focused on figuring out the tune.
The Landfill A Search for Finality In a Mote of Dust Diane Horning finds her destiny at a garbage dump.
Exactly how the mote of energy, called an inflaton field (pronounced IN-flah-tahn), would have appeared remains in contention.
Mr Mote, of Binsted, Hampshire, will appear before magistrates next month.
But recall that, at the time, Amazon was a mote of dust in terms of scale.
Its creator calls it the hempmote, which makes it sound like a little tiny mote of hemp.
Each starts as a mote of atmospheric dust.
