Gott first thought of his "Copernicus method" of lifetime estimation in 1969 when stopping at the Berlin Wall and wondering how long it would stand.

Gott postulated that the Copernican principle is applicable in cases where nothing is known; unless there was something special about his visit (which he did not think there was) this gave a 75% chance that he was seeing the wall after the first quarter of its life.

He made a major effort subsequently to defend his form of the Doomsday argument from a variety of philosophical attacks, and this debate (like the feasibility of closed time loops) is still ongoing.

He is an active promoter of the public awareness of science at the popular level, and Princeton students have voted him the school's outstanding professor several times.

He is a Presbyterian who distinguishes physical from metaphysical questions by their teleology; he believes that his writings are entirely scientific (not trespassing into theology) because the motivation for the way things are (or might be) is never examined.