State of the Universe
CC Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 4.0 International:
You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Schmidt, Brian
13.8 Billion years ago, something happened - the Big Bang - which set in motion our expanding Universe. Through the systematic process of science, humanity has managed in a very short time to piece together a comprehensive story of our Universe. In 2016 the vital statistics of the universe - its composition, size, density, shape, and age – are known to remarkable accuracy. But the job is nowhere near done. In my lecture, I will discuss what we know, and what we don't know about the Universe, and try to guess likely new areas for discovery in the years and decades to come.
 Thank you. Excellent. So we're going to talk about the state of the universe. And ladies and gentlemen, the state of the universe is good in 2016. The universe is expanding. That turns out to be useful. The universe is 13.8 billion years old, not 13.9, not 13.7. The universe is very close to being geometrically flat. And the universe is composed of dark energy, dark matter, atoms, neutrinos, photons, and perhaps some other things. So I want to talk about is how we know the state of the universe today. So let's start with history. Cosmology really got started in about 1915, both Einstein and the first observations happened in that year. But Hubble was the one who sort of put us on our current track when in 1929, he announced his discovery that the universe was expanding. And the way he did that is he took data, he looked at how bright stars appeared in galaxies and judged their distance by how far away, I mean, how bright the stars were, and therefore inferred their distance. And he, or Vesto Schleifer, really measured redshift, which they thought was Doppler shift. That is, they looked at the spectrum of galaxies, which have nice little narrow lines. And then you can go through and you can judge very accurately the redshift of a galaxy, which we now know as the stretching of space between us and those objects. That is something we can actually measure to about one part and a million right now for objects across the galaxy or potentially across the universe. And that's what's going to allow us eventually to hopefully find planets that are habitable and probably eventually planets that may harbor life. We do not know, but that's coming and that's a different talk. So from this diagram, there was a relationship that the further away, the more the redshift, is what Hubble proclaimed in 1929, meant that the universe was expanding. And so I'm going to expand the universe just to get this idea in your head. So I've expanded the universe for there for you. And let's look what it seems when we look at that expansion. I overlay before and after, and what do I see? I see nearby objects, well, they've moved a little bit. So their redshift is going to be small. The distant objects, well, they've moved a lot in that expansion. Their redshift will be large. In a universe that's expanding, you expect to see what Hubble saw. The further, the more the redshift. Now, Hubble didn't really have his head around how this interacted with general relativity. And so we'll talk about that in a second. But I also want to just take the logical conclusion that if the universe is expanding, then we can run it in reverse. And when you run it in reverse, you sort of come to an almost inevitable conclusion that there will be something like the Big Bang, where everything in the universe is piled up on top of everything else. So that is the thing that we thought happened 13.8 billion years ago. What is the Big Bang? That's one of the most common questions asked of me in talks. I have no idea. I only know what happened after the Big Bang. We think the Big Bang at the time, right after the Big Bang, and I'm not going to even use that, but let's use that for a second. Right after the Big Bang, there was this period of inflation where things at the quantum scales were magnified to the universal scales. Quantum fluctuations were expanded to the scale of the universe. And those are the seeds of what we see in the cosmic microwave background, the sound waves, which I'll talk a bit later, and eventually have led to galaxies, led to the earth, and everything that we know. Now that magnification of the universe from the subatomic to macro scales seems kind of crazy, but it keeps on kind of predicting things that we see in the universe. From my perspective, that period when the universe was exponentially expanding really is the Big Bang. There may be something before it. I don't know. That may be an ill-formed question. But if we were to understand that period, then I think we'd have a much better chance of understanding what the Big Bang really was. As I said, it may well be what the Big Bang is from our perspective. All right. Now, the first thing that Hubble could do is he could do a very simple experiment, and he could say, how fast is the universe expanding now? That's distance divided by redshift. And I could run the universe back in reverse, and therefore you get the age. You run the universe back in the age and back in reverse, and you figure out how old the universe is. So we call that the Hubble constant, and that's exactly what I worked on for my PhD thesis, which I finished in 1993. And so here I am as a much younger person, I'm afraid, doing my first big experiment, showing my PhD supervisor, Bob Kirschner, the age of the universe. And the answer that I got, which turned out to be about right, I wouldn't say I get credit for telling everyone this was the answer, but the age of the universe is about 14 billion years when you linearly extrapolate. All right. General relativity, we haven't talked too much about that. But Einstein, of course, in 1907 came up with the idea of equivalence, that no matter where you are in the universe, you can't separate out the idea of whether or not being in a rocket, being accelerated, or being on Earth, accelerated by gravity. Those things are equivalent. And he had that revelation while watching someone fall off a roof and thinking, wow, that guy doesn't feel gravity. I bet you under no circumstance would that person feel gravity. That is what makes Einstein different than the rest of us, because the rest of us would be thinking something different when we see someone fall off the roof. But he thought about that for eight and a half years. Everyone told him he was crazy. He was never going to get there. He collaborated widely with the best mathematicians of the time, and he struggled. But in the end, he ended up in 1915 with the theory of general relativity. His last person he was working with was Hilbert. Hilbert actually got there four days before he did, a little fact most of you probably won't realize. But I think Einstein did most of the hard work. But Hilbert was a better mathematician than was Einstein. So this is the thing that put Einstein on the world map. He was, when it was shown to be correct via Eclipse's in 1920, all over the front pages of the newspapers. And he became a celebrity in the form that we know him now. He was famous amongst physicists. Before this, this is what made him famous amongst the average people. Even though that's not necessarily what the average person remembers him for today. We always think of E equals MC squared. But the thing that made him famous back in the day was this. All right. And so astronomers, of course, are useful very occasionally for physicists in that we can sometimes make experiments that can show things of physics to be correct. This is something that's become more true recently, but occurred back in 1919 when, by looking at Eclipse's, we could go through and verify that the deviation of light around body like the sun was indeed predicted by Einstein's equation, not by something, for example, a hacked up version of Newtonian physics. Soon after that, as that was shown, relativity, general relativity became a very popular subject and people worked on it the world over. Most notably, Alexander Friedman, who was in St. Petersburg, who was able to think very quickly about the idea of what happens if I have a universe that's full of some sort of material? What's the solution to general relativity? And he's going to make a major approximation, which is the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, but it's the same everywhere. That turns out, as I'll show you in just a second, is a major and very important approximation, which seems to be valid in our universe. The person up here, Georges Lamotte, a Belgian monk and a graduate of MIT in 1927, had a thesis, which was essentially, here's the expanding universe from Friedman's equations, which he derived himself, and with data from Hubble and Schleifer, which showed that the universe was expanding. He showed that in the Solvay conference in 1927 to Einstein, and Einstein, this was too far of a leap for Einstein, and he told poor old Lamotte, your mathematics is fine, your physics is abominable. And so Lamotte, who discovered and derived the expanding universe in 1927, is not as famous as Hubble, even though he got there first. So Lamotte went on to figure out that there should be something like a primeval atom, the Big Bang, and many other things. I think it was a bit of a crank in the days, and people didn't perhaps take them as seriously as they should have, but we should take them seriously. So Friedman is what we call the standard model, Friedman equation from 1923, and essentially you can take the coupled equations that are general relativity, and if you assume that the universe is isotropic and homogeneous, you can break it down to a single differential equation, which is quite easy to solve even as an astronomer. And so it has a few pieces that may be unfamiliar, a scale factor. That's a ruler at any given time of the universe, and since it's kind of hard to define that in absolute terms, we define it in relative terms. We call it A right now, or A at any given time, T, over A naught, the time, the scale right now of the universe. That turns out we can measure extraordinarily accurately through the redshift. It is essentially directly related to the redshift, and so as I said, we can measure that to one part in a million over time. The other thing we have in here is geometry. So of course general relativity says space is warped and we need to worry about that, and so there are actually three families of solutions, which I'll talk about in just a second. The plus one, the zero, and the minus one solutions, which are closed, flat, and open respectively. And finally you have rho, which I'll talk about in just a second, which is the density of what's in the universe. So within that you get a series of solutions, but there are things that are important in these solutions. One is the Hubble constant, so that's how fast the universe is expanding now, and of course that does change over time, but it's the fractional derivative of the scale factor. So in other words, it just tells you in a unit of time how much the scale factor is changing. So that's why one over that gives you the age of the universe as a linear extrapolation. We think that number in astronomers' units is around 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec or a fractional change such that one over 13 or one over 14 billion years, that is the value of that. We have something known as the critical density. That is the density where the universe switches from being closed to open geometrically, flat. So let's say knife edge, universe and practice cannot exactly be flat, although it can be very, very close. And this has a value when you put in that value of the Hubble constant of a very low density indeed, about 9 times 10 to the minus 27 kilograms per meter cube. Now you might wonder, we live here on Earth where the density is 5,500 kilograms per meter cubed. So clearly the universe is closed. Well, no. We live in a very special part of the universe. The Earth is nothing like the rest of space. Space is very empty and so as we'll see, the density of the universe is very close to the critical density. Finally we keep track of how much stuff there is in the universe by this parameter omega, which is the density of the universe divided by that critical density. So for example, I'll show you that the density of matter that gravitates is about 30 percent. So omega is 0.3. But you can have anything. You can have energy in the form of a cosmological constant. You can have atoms. You can have something we'll talk about called dark matter, photons, neutrinos, anything that has energy is expressed as part of that. All right. So the solutions, if you just have matter, which is of course a sensible universe that has normal gravitating matter, then you can have an empty universe. The universe just coasts, gets bigger and bigger. You could have a universe that has some stuff in it so it slows down but keeps on getting bigger over time. You could have a universe that's heavy, has greater than the critical density and it's finite in volume and it's finite in time. And so all universes start with this big bang, but only that one ends with the ganab give the big bang backwards. You can do it through the geometry. If you have a universe that can have these different shapes and if you think of the form of a triangle they have in these hyperbolic geometries, the light universe, k equals minus 1, spherical geometry, k equals plus 1 and then just normal Euclidean geometry and the k equals 0. All right. So how are we going to go out and do this as a measurement? We're going to go out and measure the universe's past and see how it changes. And of course the universe is very big and so if I look further and further away I'm looking farther and farther in the universe's past because light takes many years, billions of years to reach us if we look far enough away. So if I do an experiment to measure the Hubble constant back in time effectively then I can see if the universe is coasting or whether or not it's on the other side of this critical line where the universe is on the knife edge. So one side of that gravity wins, the other side of that gravity loses. That was what we were planning to do in 1994 when we started our experiment to measure the past history of the universe. So to do that we needed something really bright we could see on the other side of the universe and nature gave us something in the form of a type 1a supernova. So imagine you have two stars a little bit bigger than our own sun. They start running out of nuclear energy in their cores, they puff up. If they're in a close binary the bigger star will donate material to the smaller star. Eventually it will lose most of its material as it evolves. You get a white dwarf which is an electron degenerate ball of gas that weighs roughly 0.6 to 1 times the mass of our sun all compacted in something about the size of the earth. You get a planetary nebula we think which you can go out and see is a very pretty object in a telescope. Meanwhile inside the bigger star now it's got all this extra materials heated up and burning its material quickly it'll start to expand and it can donate its material under certain circumstances to the white dwarf and make it grow in mass. And as Shander Sekar showed that when you reach 1.383 times the mass of our sun you become unstable. Turns out in practice just before that the center gets dense enough that carbon starts burning and over about a thousand years runs away and then bam you get an exponential burn and the whole shooting match goes up in a period of about a second. Turning that 1.4 solar mass ball of gas into about 0.6 solar mass of nickel 56 and a mixture of other stuff. And that nickel 56 is highly radioactive and so over 21 days or so or 17 days it's a radio active energy leaks out and you get this incredibly bright ball of gas 5 billion times brighter than the sun that you can conveniently see up to probably 10, 11 or even 12 billion years in the past. A group in Chile that I worked with from my PhD thesis well they figured out how to measure distances with these very accurately. And so that was a key ingredient that happened in the early 1990s and so all you have to do is go out and find them. Now part of going out and making a discovery is starting a team and as I was telling people earlier today when I was 27 I worked with a bunch of people, my mentors to start on this project and I had no power, I had no money, I had enthusiasm. That turns out to be enough to start a team in science. That's why science is so great. So we started our team and the key was to find supernovae. Now in 1994 we would take a thousand, two thousand by four thousand pixel images. That was a lot of data in 1994 and in a period of 24 hours we had to find the needles in the haystack. There was like one object in every 250 frames. And so let's see if we can find one. Here is an object. The reason we know it is we compare a before and after image and so by comparing that you can see what has come out and in that we had to deal with essentially big data of 1994 and we used rudimentary artificial intelligence algorithms back then which I can tell you weren't very good. They are much, much better now. But it was enough. Well enough with a lot of help. In practice this is how we found them. We went off to a telescope in Chile. As the data came down from the sky we had to be extremely well organized. So there is Nick Sunsef who helped form this team with me in 1994. And you want to get six nights a year. Right? And you need two pairs of observations. So you don't want to screw anything up because if you screw up once they are not going to give you any more telescope time. And so as the data comes in we are checking it, checking it, checking it. The software is going through and trying to find the candidates. But it finds lots of drunks, lots, not drunks, finds lots of duds. It finds cosmic rays. It finds asteroids. And occasionally it finds supernovae. So we have literally a team of people there pouring over the data in real time trying to find the things that are most interesting. We get together and then we have to send the data to Hawaii where the 10 meter telescope has just been built. And we have to check because it's the only telescope in the world big enough to take a spectrum. And so there we have this amazing telescope that Adam Reese and Alex Filipinko they are going to take a spectrum so we can get a redshift and make sure that we are seeing really is one of these type 1A supernovae. So after three and a half years of doing this you get to see what the data looks like. And this is what our data looks like. It versus essentially distance where I made it obvious what's going on here. Each supernovae is a point on there. And you compare nearby with the distant objects. And what do we see? Well we see the distant objects are not in the bottom part of the diagram where the universe is slowing down over time. Rather, they're in the top part of the diagram where things are speeding up. So that was a surprise. And you don't go Eureka, you say, oh dear, what have we done for three and a half years that we're getting a wrong answer that no one is ever going to believe. So you spent a lot of time checking your work and trying to understand it. Then something interesting happens. There's a team that you're competing with. And I should say Steve Chu is the boss of this team so I have to make sure that we announce it well or he'll give me a hard time later on. But you're in very strong competition with this group and you suddenly realize both of us are both getting the same crazy answer at the same time. That's very highly motivating for publishing quickly. But in the end there were two papers that came out and we both got this crazy result. That doesn't mean it's correct. We could have made the same mistake. We're using the same basic technique. But at least it provides some assurance. And so it is on the basis of that paper that we were given the Nobel Prize. Here we are, our team. Now you will note there are 19 men on that group. That reflects my discipline in 1993. The good news is right now half my group are women. So we're changing but it takes time. Of course the other team, sorry I need to give Saul a little more time than that. So that is our competition. They came from physics and they actually did have some women which was great for them. I mean that seriously. We should be ashamed of ourselves. They were better up than us on that. So what causes this? Well of course Einstein put the cosmological constant in his equations back in 1917. Probably for a poor reason but he did put it there. And that energy which is part of space which is how you can think of the cosmological constant causes gravity. It has negative pressure and causes gravity to push rather than pull. And so in practice the stuff we call dark energy, well we needed the universe to be about 70% that stuff to explain our answer. The 30% is just normal stuff that we were used to. So if you think about it what we're looking at is a model that looks like this. A universe which spent its first 13.8 billion years slowing down and has only recently started speeding up and we expect to exponentially expand. That's what Einstein, the Friedman equation with the cosmological constant says the universe is going to do. It's a complicated trajectory. The universe should not be doing that. We live in a very specific place where things are changing. It's a funny place to be. It has very conveniently, it gives almost exactly the same age as just a simple extrapolation within 3%. Alright, so let's say you're going to go out and make another measurement. So astronomers can go out and look at galaxies, there are probes of gravity. And of course within a computer you can simulate different universes to see if I start with quantum fluctuations expanded out, I can go through and I can see what the result would look like in terms of large scale structure. And so this is one such simulation done here in Germany and you can see that galaxies start to form as gravity collapses the structures. And then what you do is you say let's make our own universe and see what things look like. So for example here's the data that we took in Australia, there's a similar larger survey done a couple years later in the United States. And you can say model 1, 2, 3 or 4 which one looks right. Now of course we use power specter in ways of statistically quantifying the data. But the statistics show very clearly it's model 3 which interestingly enough essentially had a matter content 30% of flatness, so omega equal 0.3. So that's what they can do, completely insensitive to the cosmological constant these measurements just like it doesn't exist for this type of measurement. So they get this measurement of omega matter equals about 0.3. There's a problem of course because there's about 6 times more matter than there is that we can account for from atoms. And so that brings up the age old problem of dark matter. Whenever we look in the universe whether it be galaxies or in clusters of galaxies there's always more gravity than there are atoms to explain that. So dark matter, how would we find that out? Well the cosmic microwave background is really the thing that allows us to do precision experiments in the universe today. So these as I said are essentially sound waves of matter splashing around the universe after the Big Bang. And so we can go through and we can learn from them because if you have think of the universe as a pond, if you throw a rock at a pond you get wave action. And it depends if the pond is made out of water or treacle you get different waves. And so you can actually use the wave action to figure out what the universe looks like because the Big Bang, those quantum fluctuations are like throwing gravel in the universe and then you let the waves go around for 380,000 years when suddenly the universe turns transparent we get a snapshot and you can look through and say what does the universe look like? Well in detail you can go through and see this is the wave action for different amounts of atoms and different amounts of total matter including dark matter and you can deconstruct that because the data is so insanely good and there's a model that fits through the data beautifully. That is a very complicated model so it's very precisely able to tell you what's the universe made out of 6.5 parts dark matter? Dark matter is stuff that only interacts by gravity. That's as simple as it gets to one part atoms. The other thing you can do is you can use the fact that the universe's geometry magnifies or demagnifies the universe and so depending on which universe in these things are going to appear smaller or larger. And so if you look at the curves you can see that the geometry makes a big difference of magnifying shifting things this way. Dark energy and the acceleration makes a small bit enough to actually measure as well a bit. So what do you end up with? Well you end up with the universe that looks exactly flat when we compare data. It's within 0.5% under almost any set of assumptions. The universe is very close to a mega matter equal one. So you have the cosmic microwave background that says the universe is flat so omega is one. You have 30% from the large scale structure in gravity so that gives you essentially a universe that's 70% mystery matter. The same stuff the supernovae are seeing and so the latest numbers are this. We are in a universe that's only 5% atoms. 69% dark energy, 26% dark matter. It is a messy universe that should not be this way if you are a reductionist and you want to bring things down to simplicity. So the density of the universe, well we know the Hubble constant quite well. Very close to 70 plus or minus about 3 right now. And so we have a very universe made up of these fractions of things. But we can also see how many photons there are for example. You get that from the black body so that's something that George Schmute measured. But he talked about gravity weights so I'm going to talk about George's Nobel Prize here. You can also go through and look at things like neutrinos. The best measurement of the mass of the neutrino, at least the upper mass, now comes from astrophysics. Probably make a couple physicists mad there. But if you have a universe full of neutrinos, you know how many there are compared to the photons due to the physics of the early universe, is they get heavier and heavier the sum of them then it affects the large scale structure. And right now our measurements of galaxies tell us that the mass of the neutrino, the sum of them must be below 0.25 EV. So our cosmological model, well you start with these initial fluctuations from the big bang inflation. You've got a universe made up of all this stuff and that agrees with essentially every measurement we've made in the universe. And that is what science is all about. It's having a theory which predicts things. Now there's some problems which I'll talk about in a second. The only newly-arised issue is that Adam Rees, my Cone O'Bell Prize winner, has measured very accurately now the Hubble constant and he is claiming that there may be a discrepancy between the local value of the Hubble constant and that which you get from the cosmic microwave background. I'm not sure yet. I'd call it 50-50 maybe. Worthwhile looking at. It needs more attention and it's a very hard measurement. So dark matter, dark energy, inflation. Those are our three problems with that model. We don't know what inflation is. We don't know what dark matter is and we don't know what dark energy is. We know how they behave. We just don't know why they'd be there. So the big questions we have to look for is what is dark matter? What is dark energy? Why do neutrinos have mass? That's an interesting one as well, not exactly astrophysics. Why is the universe not just full of photons? The equations of the early universe say everything should have annihilated. We should only not have any atoms or dark matter. What is dark matter? And what is inflation? And just to give you a sense of how astronomers can answer what seems imponderable, how could you figure out what happened when the universe was 10 to the minus 35 seconds old? Well, down in South Pole we had a bit of excitement last year where people measured what they saw was the imprint of gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background through what we call B-moans, which are essentially the cross product of the polarization. Very exciting. Unfortunately, it's a hard measurement because the universe is full of dust, which is also polarized. Here's the Planck measurement and its measurement of polarization. They were looking down in this area and it turns out the polarization there was stronger than their signal. So shame on them? No. Probably shouldn't have done the press release, but it is good they're out there trying to make this measurement. This is profound because if and when we detect this, we are going to get a constraint when the universe was 10 to the minus 35 seconds old, our best chance to understand inflation and what the Big Bang is. And so I will leave you with Einstein's To My Mind Is Greatest quote, which is, if we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it? Want to use when your politician comes up to you and asks you what on earth you're doing? Tell them that. Thank you very much.
 Thank you.  Excellent. So we're going to talk about the state of the universe.  And ladies and gentlemen, the state of the universe is good in 2016.  The universe is expanding. That turns out to be useful.  The universe is 13.8 billion years old, not 13.9, not 13.7.  The universe is very close to being geometrically flat.  And the universe is composed of dark energy, dark matter, atoms, neutrinos,  photons, and perhaps some other things.  So I want to talk about is how we know the state of the universe today.  So let's start with history. Cosmology really got started in about 1915,  both Einstein and the first observations happened in that year.  But Hubble was the one who sort of put us on our current track when in 1929,  he announced his discovery that the universe was expanding.  And the way he did that is he took data, he looked at how bright stars appeared  in galaxies and judged their distance by how far away, I mean, how bright the stars were,  and therefore inferred their distance.  And he, or Vesto Schleifer, really measured redshift, which they thought was Doppler shift.  That is, they looked at the spectrum of galaxies, which have nice little narrow lines.  And then you can go through and you can judge very accurately the redshift of a galaxy,  which we now know as the stretching of space between us and those objects.  That is something we can actually measure to about one part and a million right now  for objects across the galaxy or potentially across the universe.  And that's what's going to allow us eventually to hopefully find planets that are habitable  and probably eventually planets that may harbor life.  We do not know, but that's coming and that's a different talk.  So from this diagram, there was a relationship that the further away, the more the redshift,  is what Hubble proclaimed in 1929, meant that the universe was expanding.  And so I'm going to expand the universe just to get this idea in your head.  So I've expanded the universe for there for you.  And let's look what it seems when we look at that expansion.  I overlay before and after, and what do I see?  I see nearby objects, well, they've moved a little bit.  So their redshift is going to be small.  The distant objects, well, they've moved a lot in that expansion.  Their redshift will be large.  In a universe that's expanding, you expect to see what Hubble saw.  The further, the more the redshift.  Now, Hubble didn't really have his head around how this interacted with general relativity.  And so we'll talk about that in a second.  But I also want to just take the logical conclusion that if the universe is expanding,  then we can run it in reverse.  And when you run it in reverse, you sort of come to an almost inevitable conclusion that  there will be something like the Big Bang, where everything in the universe is piled  up on top of everything else.  So that is the thing that we thought happened 13.8 billion years ago.  What is the Big Bang?  That's one of the most common questions asked of me in talks.  I have no idea.  I only know what happened after the Big Bang.  We think the Big Bang at the time, right after the Big Bang, and I'm not going to even use  that, but let's use that for a second.  Right after the Big Bang, there was this period of inflation where things at the quantum  scales were magnified to the universal scales.  Quantum fluctuations were expanded to the scale of the universe.  And those are the seeds of what we see in the cosmic microwave background, the sound  waves, which I'll talk a bit later, and eventually have led to galaxies, led to the earth, and  everything that we know.  Now that magnification of the universe from the subatomic to macro scales seems kind of  crazy, but it keeps on kind of predicting things that we see in the universe.  From my perspective, that period when the universe was exponentially expanding really  is the Big Bang.  There may be something before it.  I don't know.  That may be an ill-formed question.  But if we were to understand that period, then I think we'd have a much better chance  of understanding what the Big Bang really was.  As I said, it may well be what the Big Bang is from our perspective.  All right.  Now, the first thing that Hubble could do is he could do a very simple experiment, and  he could say, how fast is the universe expanding now?  That's distance divided by redshift.  And I could run the universe back in reverse, and therefore you get the age.  You run the universe back in the age and back in reverse, and you figure out how old the  universe is.  So we call that the Hubble constant, and that's exactly what I worked on for my PhD thesis,  which I finished in 1993.  And so here I am as a much younger person, I'm afraid, doing my first big experiment,  showing my PhD supervisor, Bob Kirschner, the age of the universe.  And the answer that I got, which turned out to be about right, I wouldn't say I get credit  for telling everyone this was the answer, but the age of the universe is about 14 billion  years when you linearly extrapolate.  All right.  General relativity, we haven't talked too much about that.  But Einstein, of course, in 1907 came up with the idea of equivalence, that no matter where  you are in the universe, you can't separate out the idea of whether or not being in a  rocket, being accelerated, or being on Earth, accelerated by gravity.  Those things are equivalent.  And he had that revelation while watching someone fall off a roof and thinking, wow,  that guy doesn't feel gravity.  I bet you under no circumstance would that person feel gravity.  That is what makes Einstein different than the rest of us, because the rest of us would  be thinking something different when we see someone fall off the roof.  But he thought about that for eight and a half years.  Everyone told him he was crazy.  He was never going to get there.  He collaborated widely with the best mathematicians of the time, and he struggled.  But in the end, he ended up in 1915 with the theory of general relativity.  His last person he was working with was Hilbert.  Hilbert actually got there four days before he did, a little fact most of you probably  won't realize.  But I think Einstein did most of the hard work.  But Hilbert was a better mathematician than was Einstein.  So this is the thing that put Einstein on the world map.  He was, when it was shown to be correct via Eclipse's in 1920, all over the front pages  of the newspapers.  And he became a celebrity in the form that we know him now.  He was famous amongst physicists.  Before this, this is what made him famous amongst the average people.  Even though that's not necessarily what the average person remembers him for today.  We always think of E equals MC squared.  But the thing that made him famous back in the day was this.  All right.  And so astronomers, of course, are useful very occasionally for physicists in that we  can sometimes make experiments that can show things of physics to be correct.  This is something that's become more true recently, but occurred back in 1919 when,  by looking at Eclipse's, we could go through and verify that the deviation of light around  body like the sun was indeed predicted by Einstein's equation, not by something, for  example, a hacked up version of Newtonian physics.  Soon after that, as that was shown, relativity, general relativity became a very popular subject  and people worked on it the world over.  Most notably, Alexander Friedman, who was in St. Petersburg, who was able to think very  quickly about the idea of what happens if I have a universe that's full of some sort  of material?  What's the solution to general relativity?  And he's going to make a major approximation, which is the universe is homogeneous and isotropic,  but it's the same everywhere.  That turns out, as I'll show you in just a second, is a major and very important approximation,  which seems to be valid in our universe.  The person up here, Georges Lamotte, a Belgian monk and a graduate of MIT in 1927, had a thesis,  which was essentially, here's the expanding universe from Friedman's equations, which  he derived himself, and with data from Hubble and Schleifer, which showed that the universe  was expanding.  He showed that in the Solvay conference in 1927 to Einstein, and Einstein, this was too  far of a leap for Einstein, and he told poor old Lamotte, your mathematics is fine, your  physics is abominable.  And so Lamotte, who discovered and derived the expanding universe in 1927, is not as  famous as Hubble, even though he got there first.  So Lamotte went on to figure out that there should be something like a primeval atom,  the Big Bang, and many other things.  I think it was a bit of a crank in the days, and people didn't perhaps take them as seriously  as they should have, but we should take them seriously.  So Friedman is what we call the standard model, Friedman equation from 1923, and essentially  you can take the coupled equations that are general relativity, and if you assume that  the universe is isotropic and homogeneous, you can break it down to a single differential  equation, which is quite easy to solve even as an astronomer.  And so it has a few pieces that may be unfamiliar, a scale factor.  That's a ruler at any given time of the universe, and since it's kind of hard to define that  in absolute terms, we define it in relative terms.  We call it A right now, or A at any given time, T, over A naught, the time, the scale  right now of the universe.  That turns out we can measure extraordinarily accurately through the redshift.  It is essentially directly related to the redshift, and so as I said, we can measure  that to one part in a million over time.  The other thing we have in here is geometry.  So of course general relativity says space is warped and we need to worry about that,  and so there are actually three families of solutions, which I'll talk about in just a  second.  The plus one, the zero, and the minus one solutions, which are closed, flat, and open  respectively.  And finally you have rho, which I'll talk about in just a second, which is the density  of what's in the universe.  So within that you get a series of solutions, but there are things that are important in  these solutions.  One is the Hubble constant, so that's how fast the universe is expanding now, and of  course that does change over time, but it's the fractional derivative of the scale factor.  So in other words, it just tells you in a unit of time how much the scale factor is changing.  So that's why one over that gives you the age of the universe as a linear extrapolation.  We think that number in astronomers' units is around 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec  or a fractional change such that one over 13 or one over 14 billion years, that is the  value of that.  We have something known as the critical density.  That is the density where the universe switches from being closed to open geometrically, flat.  So let's say knife edge, universe and practice cannot exactly be flat, although it can be  very, very close.  And this has a value when you put in that value of the Hubble constant of a very low  density indeed, about 9 times 10 to the minus 27 kilograms per meter cube.  Now you might wonder, we live here on Earth where the density is 5,500 kilograms per meter  cubed.  So clearly the universe is closed.  Well, no.  We live in a very special part of the universe.  The Earth is nothing like the rest of space.  Space is very empty and so as we'll see, the density of the universe is very close to the  critical density.  Finally we keep track of how much stuff there is in the universe by this parameter omega,  which is the density of the universe divided by that critical density.  So for example, I'll show you that the density of matter that gravitates is about 30 percent.  So omega is 0.3.  But you can have anything.  You can have energy in the form of a cosmological constant.  You can have atoms.  You can have something we'll talk about called dark matter, photons, neutrinos, anything that  has energy is expressed as part of that.  All right.  So the solutions, if you just have matter, which is of course a sensible universe that  has normal gravitating matter, then you can have an empty universe.  The universe just coasts, gets bigger and bigger.  You could have a universe that has some stuff in it so it slows down but keeps on getting  bigger over time.  You could have a universe that's heavy, has greater than the critical density and it's  finite in volume and it's finite in time.  And so all universes start with this big bang, but only that one ends with the ganab give  the big bang backwards.  You can do it through the geometry.  If you have a universe that can have these different shapes and if you think of the form  of a triangle they have in these hyperbolic geometries, the light universe, k equals minus  1, spherical geometry, k equals plus 1 and then just normal Euclidean geometry and the  k equals 0.  All right.  So how are we going to go out and do this as a measurement?  We're going to go out and measure the universe's past and see how it changes.  And of course the universe is very big and so if I look further and further away I'm  looking farther and farther in the universe's past because light takes many years, billions  of years to reach us if we look far enough away.  So if I do an experiment to measure the Hubble constant back in time effectively then I can  see if the universe is coasting or whether or not it's on the other side of this critical  line where the universe is on the knife edge.  So one side of that gravity wins, the other side of that gravity loses.  That was what we were planning to do in 1994 when we started our experiment to measure  the past history of the universe.  So to do that we needed something really bright we could see on the other side of the universe  and nature gave us something in the form of a type 1a supernova.  So imagine you have two stars a little bit bigger than our own sun.  They start running out of nuclear energy in their cores, they puff up.  If they're in a close binary the bigger star will donate material to the smaller star.  Eventually it will lose most of its material as it evolves.  You get a white dwarf which is an electron degenerate ball of gas that weighs roughly  0.6 to 1 times the mass of our sun all compacted in something about the size of the earth.  You get a planetary nebula we think which you can go out and see is a very pretty object  in a telescope.  Meanwhile inside the bigger star now it's got all this extra materials heated up and  burning its material quickly it'll start to expand and it can donate its material under  certain circumstances to the white dwarf and make it grow in mass.  And as Shander Sekar showed that when you reach 1.383 times the mass of our sun you  become unstable.  Turns out in practice just before that the center gets dense enough that carbon starts  burning and over about a thousand years runs away and then bam you get an exponential burn  and the whole shooting match goes up in a period of about a second.  Turning that 1.4 solar mass ball of gas into about 0.6 solar mass of nickel 56 and a mixture  of other stuff.  And that nickel 56 is highly radioactive and so over 21 days or so or 17 days it's a radio  active energy leaks out and you get this incredibly bright ball of gas 5 billion times brighter  than the sun that you can conveniently see up to probably 10, 11 or even 12 billion years  in the past.  A group in Chile that I worked with from my PhD thesis well they figured out how to measure  distances with these very accurately.  And so that was a key ingredient that happened in the early 1990s and so all you have to  do is go out and find them.  Now part of going out and making a discovery is starting a team and as I was telling people  earlier today when I was 27 I worked with a bunch of people, my mentors to start on this  project and I had no power, I had no money, I had enthusiasm.  That turns out to be enough to start a team in science.  That's why science is so great.  So we started our team and the key was to find supernovae.  Now in 1994 we would take a thousand, two thousand by four thousand pixel images.  That was a lot of data in 1994 and in a period of 24 hours we had to find the needles in  the haystack.  There was like one object in every 250 frames.  And so let's see if we can find one.  Here is an object.  The reason we know it is we compare a before and after image and so by comparing that you  can see what has come out and in that we had to deal with essentially big data of 1994  and we used rudimentary artificial intelligence algorithms back then which I can tell you  weren't very good.  They are much, much better now.  But it was enough.  Well enough with a lot of help.  In practice this is how we found them.  We went off to a telescope in Chile.  As the data came down from the sky we had to be extremely well organized.  So there is Nick Sunsef who helped form this team with me in 1994.  And you want to get six nights a year.  Right?  And you need two pairs of observations.  So you don't want to screw anything up because if you screw up once they are not going to  give you any more telescope time.  And so as the data comes in we are checking it, checking it, checking it.  The software is going through and trying to find the candidates.  But it finds lots of drunks, lots, not drunks, finds lots of duds.  It finds cosmic rays.  It finds asteroids.  And occasionally it finds supernovae.  So we have literally a team of people there pouring over the data in real time trying  to find the things that are most interesting.  We get together and then we have to send the data to Hawaii where the 10 meter telescope  has just been built.  And we have to check because it's the only telescope in the world big enough to take  a spectrum.  And so there we have this amazing telescope that Adam Reese and Alex Filipinko they are  going to take a spectrum so we can get a redshift and make sure that we are seeing really is  one of these type 1A supernovae.  So after three and a half years of doing this you get to see what the data looks like.  And this is what our data looks like.  It versus essentially distance where I made it obvious what's going on here.  Each supernovae is a point on there.  And you compare nearby with the distant objects.  And what do we see?  Well we see the distant objects are not in the bottom part of the diagram where the universe  is slowing down over time.  Rather, they're in the top part of the diagram where things are speeding up.  So that was a surprise.  And you don't go Eureka, you say, oh dear, what have we done for three and a half years  that we're getting a wrong answer that no one is ever going to believe.  So you spent a lot of time checking your work and trying to understand it.  Then something interesting happens.  There's a team that you're competing with.  And I should say Steve Chu is the boss of this team so I have to make sure that we announce  it well or he'll give me a hard time later on.  But you're in very strong competition with this group and you suddenly realize both of  us are both getting the same crazy answer at the same time.  That's very highly motivating for publishing quickly.  But in the end there were two papers that came out and we both got this crazy result.  That doesn't mean it's correct.  We could have made the same mistake.  We're using the same basic technique.  But at least it provides some assurance.  And so it is on the basis of that paper that we were given the Nobel Prize.  Here we are, our team.  Now you will note there are 19 men on that group.  That reflects my discipline in 1993.  The good news is right now half my group are women.  So we're changing but it takes time.  Of course the other team, sorry I need to give Saul a little more time than that.  So that is our competition.  They came from physics and they actually did have some women which was great for them.  I mean that seriously.  We should be ashamed of ourselves.  They were better up than us on that.  So what causes this?  Well of course Einstein put the cosmological constant in his equations back in 1917.  Probably for a poor reason but he did put it there.  And that energy which is part of space which is how you can think of the cosmological constant  causes gravity.  It has negative pressure and causes gravity to push rather than pull.  And so in practice the stuff we call dark energy, well we needed the universe to be  about 70% that stuff to explain our answer.  The 30% is just normal stuff that we were used to.  So if you think about it what we're looking at is a model that looks like this.  A universe which spent its first 13.8 billion years slowing down and has only recently started  speeding up and we expect to exponentially expand.  That's what Einstein, the Friedman equation with the cosmological constant says the universe  is going to do.  It's a complicated trajectory.  The universe should not be doing that.  We live in a very specific place where things are changing.  It's a funny place to be.  It has very conveniently, it gives almost exactly the same age as just a simple extrapolation  within 3%.  Alright, so let's say you're going to go out and make another measurement.  So astronomers can go out and look at galaxies, there are probes of gravity.  And of course within a computer you can simulate different universes to see if I start with  quantum fluctuations expanded out, I can go through and I can see what the result would  look like in terms of large scale structure.  And so this is one such simulation done here in Germany and you can see that galaxies start  to form as gravity collapses the structures.  And then what you do is you say let's make our own universe and see what things look  like.  So for example here's the data that we took in Australia, there's a similar larger survey  done a couple years later in the United States.  And you can say model 1, 2, 3 or 4 which one looks right.  Now of course we use power specter in ways of statistically quantifying the data.  But the statistics show very clearly it's model 3 which interestingly enough essentially  had a matter content 30% of flatness, so omega equal 0.3.  So that's what they can do, completely insensitive to the cosmological constant these measurements  just like it doesn't exist for this type of measurement.  So they get this measurement of omega matter equals about 0.3.  There's a problem of course because there's about 6 times more matter than there is that  we can account for from atoms.  And so that brings up the age old problem of dark matter.  Whenever we look in the universe whether it be galaxies or in clusters of galaxies there's  always more gravity than there are atoms to explain that.  So dark matter, how would we find that out?  Well the cosmic microwave background is really the thing that allows us to do precision experiments  in the universe today.  So these as I said are essentially sound waves of matter splashing around the universe after  the Big Bang.  And so we can go through and we can learn from them because if you have think of the universe  as a pond, if you throw a rock at a pond you get wave action.  And it depends if the pond is made out of water or treacle you get different waves.  And so you can actually use the wave action to figure out what the universe looks like  because the Big Bang, those quantum fluctuations are like throwing gravel in the universe and  then you let the waves go around for 380,000 years when suddenly the universe turns transparent  we get a snapshot and you can look through and say what does the universe look like?  Well in detail you can go through and see this is the wave action for different amounts  of atoms and different amounts of total matter including dark matter and you can deconstruct  that because the data is so insanely good and there's a model that fits through the  data beautifully.  That is a very complicated model so it's very precisely able to tell you what's the universe  made out of 6.5 parts dark matter?  Dark matter is stuff that only interacts by gravity.  That's as simple as it gets to one part atoms.  The other thing you can do is you can use the fact that the universe's geometry magnifies  or demagnifies the universe and so depending on which universe in these things are going  to appear smaller or larger.  And so if you look at the curves you can see that the geometry makes a big difference of  magnifying shifting things this way.  Dark energy and the acceleration makes a small bit enough to actually measure as well a bit.  So what do you end up with?  Well you end up with the universe that looks exactly flat when we compare data.  It's within 0.5% under almost any set of assumptions.  The universe is very close to a mega matter equal one.  So you have the cosmic microwave background that says the universe is flat so omega is  one.  You have 30% from the large scale structure in gravity so that gives you essentially a  universe that's 70% mystery matter.  The same stuff the supernovae are seeing and so the latest numbers are this.  We are in a universe that's only 5% atoms.  69% dark energy, 26% dark matter.  It is a messy universe that should not be this way if you are a reductionist and you  want to bring things down to simplicity.  So the density of the universe, well we know the Hubble constant quite well.  Very close to 70 plus or minus about 3 right now.  And so we have a very universe made up of these fractions of things.  But we can also see how many photons there are for example.  You get that from the black body so that's something that George Schmute measured.  But he talked about gravity weights so I'm going to talk about George's Nobel Prize here.  You can also go through and look at things like neutrinos.  The best measurement of the mass of the neutrino, at least the upper mass, now comes from astrophysics.  Probably make a couple physicists mad there.  But if you have a universe full of neutrinos, you know how many there are compared to the  photons due to the physics of the early universe, is they get heavier and heavier the sum of  them then it affects the large scale structure.  And right now our measurements of galaxies tell us that the mass of the neutrino, the  sum of them must be below 0.25 EV.  So our cosmological model, well you start with these initial fluctuations from the big  bang inflation.  You've got a universe made up of all this stuff and that agrees with essentially every  measurement we've made in the universe.  And that is what science is all about.  It's having a theory which predicts things.  Now there's some problems which I'll talk about in a second.  The only newly-arised issue is that Adam Rees, my Cone O'Bell Prize winner, has measured  very accurately now the Hubble constant and he is claiming that there may be a discrepancy  between the local value of the Hubble constant and that which you get from the cosmic microwave  background.  I'm not sure yet.  I'd call it 50-50 maybe.  Worthwhile looking at.  It needs more attention and it's a very hard measurement.  So dark matter, dark energy, inflation.  Those are our three problems with that model.  We don't know what inflation is.  We don't know what dark matter is and we don't know what dark energy is.  We know how they behave.  We just don't know why they'd be there.  So the big questions we have to look for is what is dark matter?  What is dark energy?  Why do neutrinos have mass?  That's an interesting one as well, not exactly astrophysics.  Why is the universe not just full of photons?  The equations of the early universe say everything should have annihilated.  We should only not have any atoms or dark matter.  What is dark matter?  And what is inflation?  And just to give you a sense of how astronomers can answer what seems imponderable, how could  you figure out what happened when the universe was 10 to the minus 35 seconds old?  Well, down in South Pole we had a bit of excitement last year where people measured what they saw  was the imprint of gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background through what  we call B-moans, which are essentially the cross product of the polarization.  Very exciting.  Unfortunately, it's a hard measurement because the universe is full of dust, which is also  polarized.  Here's the Planck measurement and its measurement of polarization.  They were looking down in this area and it turns out the polarization there was stronger  than their signal.  So shame on them?  No.  Probably shouldn't have done the press release, but it is good they're out there trying to  make this measurement.  This is profound because if and when we detect this, we are going to get a constraint when  the universe was 10 to the minus 35 seconds old, our best chance to understand inflation  and what the Big Bang is.  And so I will leave you with Einstein's To My Mind Is Greatest quote, which is, if we  knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?  Want to use when your politician comes up to you and asks you what on earth you're doing?  Tell them that.  Thank you very much.
2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_0_191.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_192_995.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_996_5255.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_5256_9623.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_9624_11591.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_11592_14987.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_14988_19679.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_19680_20375.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_20376_25343.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_25344_28499.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_28500_28583.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_28584_28979.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_28980_29411.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_29412_29687.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_29688_30035.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_30036_31175.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_31176_39191.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_39192_39755.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_39756_40391.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_40392_40631.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_40632_47507.png 2016_phy_Brian_P_Schmidt_1080p_47508_47945.png