"Where do we come from?" "How did the Universe begin?" "Why... is the universe the way it is?" "Morning welcome to Gonville and Caius." "MoreConly known as Caius College." "Caius College was founded in 1348... by EdmundGonville." "Where are we going?" "Here we come to the portrait of probably our most famous Caian" "Professor Stephen Hawking, the world famous cosmologist." "And like his predecessor Sir Isaac Newton before him" "He is lucasian professor of mathematics for the university" "And his particular sphere is... research of the black hole and the history of the universe culminating in his book The Brief History of Time which worldwide has sold over 8 million copies." "All of my life..." "I have been fascinated by the..." "big questions that face us, and have tried to find answers scientific to them." "Perhaps that's why I have sold..." "more books on physics than Madonna has on sex." "This is Professor Hawking's study, which he will use when he's in residence in college." "Who he'd use for his tutorials or meetings or any... private work he needs to do" "It's very much personal room with his books and his portraits." "So it's really home from home when their in college" "He's got inherited disease motor neurone disease He projects his voice with a synthesiser attached to his wheel chair." "I hope you enjoyed your visit." "Bye, bye." "If you have looked at the stars and tried to know what you see you too have started to wonder what makes the universe exist." "The questions are clear and deceptively simple." "But the answers have always seemed well beyond our reach," "For thousands of years our view of the universe changed very little." "But the discoveries of scientists from Gallilleo to Einstein over the past four hundred years... have advanced our understanding at an ever increasing rate" " And revolutionised the way we think." "Further breakthroughs over the last few decades have brought us closer than ever to secrets of the cosmos." "These dramatic scientific discoveries reveal a universe full of strange sounding ideas and " remarkable images; the Big Bang"" "black holes, invisible or dark matter, and a possible big crunch." "The story of how we arrived at this picture is the story of learning to understand what we see." "80 years ago at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, a young astronomer looked through the 100 inch telescope deep into space." "What Hubble saw revolutionised our view of our place in universe" "We know thanks to Hubble, that altogether within the limits of the observable universe there's something like 100 billion trillion stars, a lot of stars." "And we now by recent discoveries, very recent discoveries also what we had believed but had no proof of is that many of those stars have planets." "So there are countless trillions of planets in the observable universe." "Today we see deeper into the universe than ever before, thanks to the space telescope named after Edwin Hubble." "The more we see, the less special our place in the universe seems." "Two thirds of the stars and planets and life, if it's there, in the universe are billions of years older than we are." "And if you ask what a billion years means in the history of life," "A billion years ago the highest form of life on the earth was a worm, 3 billion yeas ago the highest form of life on the earth were bacteria" "So we must ask ourselves are so proud of our accomplishments what is our place in the cosmic perspective of life if most of those beings out there, if they are there, are stand in relationship to us as we do to the worms on this planet" "and that is not meant to be a denigrating remark but only to... suggest that humankind's greatest experiences still lie ahead of us." "Today's scientific approach to understanding the universe really began about 3,000 years ago." "Before than people based their ideas on myths and legends." "They could see the stars and wonder about the sky and the heavens, but they had indeed, very little information just what their eyes could pick up." "They thought that everything they knew came out of the water." "Obviously water was very important substance, so that they gave water a sort of cosmic significance." "They thought the heavens are made of many holes and these holes represent the stars and just behind, they had this divine fire." "But then Greek philosophers like Pythagoras in Samos, saw the universe in a totally new way." "They thought they had to find a more accurate way of expressing their views about the universe, and er that way dramatically turned out to be mathematics." "Using mathematics the Greeks began to question ancient beliefs" "To prove that the earth was not flat a greek philosopher called Eratosthenes devised an experiment." "The scientific method was born." "He realised that identical objects on a flat earth should always cast identical shadows." "So at the same time of day, in two places, many miles apart, he put this to the test." "It was a beautiful way that he discovered where he used 2 sticks" "He noticed that the rays coming from the sun... produced different amounts of shade in each of the two sticks." "Since the two sticks cast shadows of different lengths... the earth's surface had to be curved." "And from the angle of the shadows," "Eratosthenes estimated the earth's circumference." "At twenty five thousand miles he was less than a hundred miles out" "Mathematics had begun to reveal the universe as we see it today." "The earth was not flat, it was round." "Today's scientists also rely on mathematics." "Einstein's equations for gravity predict what are called black holes." "A black hole is a gaping void in space that sucks in and devours anything that gets too near." "It becomes compact, massive and therefore able to, if it encounters something else, able to eat some more matter." "It becomes the eater of all things." "But mathematically beautiful theories are not always supported by observation." "In the earliest days of astronomy, the ancient Greeks found the heavens less perfect... than they had first imagined." "Looking at the skies more closely, they began to see stars move in a way which defied their logic." "If every night you have a careful look seeing towards south, after two or three days if you watch again you'll see 5 stars moving from west towards the east sometimes they look staying still then they begin to move more from the east towards the west... and this is something unusual in respect to the other stars" "which don't change any position." "They gave these wandering stars a name: planetos." "They were seeing the five nearest planets" "The Greeks were convinced the planets had to be perfect spheres orbiting in perfect circular motion." "But that did not fit with their observations." "Ptolemy finally found a way to explain what they saw." "he added tiny circular adjustments to circular planetary orbits and put everything inside a sphere of fixed stars, with the earth at the centre." "Ptolemy lived over a century after the death of Christ." "The newly formed Christian church taught that we on earth were he centre of God's creation" "The cosmology of er the church is the cosmology of the Genesis and er if something has the same ideas as they are described in Genesis it's okay." "For those who could understand the mathematics of Ptolemy's model, well it's a model which can foretell the position of the planets with any accuracy which is satisfying." "And er on the other hand there is nothing which can contradict the idea of the Genesis." "Three, two, one, zero..." "Lift off" "Today the claims of the scriptures are being put to test by experiments launched into the heavens." "The COBE satellite was able probe deep into space, and back in time, to detect what our universe was like during its earliest moments." "If you're religious it's like you know you're seeing the handwriting of God when he wrote out how he was going to make the universe" "Here's how the universe is put together right, just you know read between the lines and you'll and you'll know the rest of you for making the universe." "belief in any theory was as much a matter of faith and conviction... have enabled us to test our theories about the universe." "But before such detailed observational evidence was available... belief in any theory was as much a matter of faith and conviction... as the result of any scientific scrutiny." "Ptolemy's model of the universe, went virtually unchallenged for... 1500 years, supported all the time by the Church, which was at that time the repository of learning." "Lord receive our gifts." "Let our offerings make us holy and bring us salvation." "But by the sixteenth century c atholic scholars were faced with increasingly accurate observations of the heavens." "It was only a matter of time before the church's teachings were undone by its own scholar priests" "Copernicus was a church man not just in the sense he was a catholic, but he actually held a church office, as a canon of a cathedral..." "He had a great admiration for Ptolymaic astronomy." "Copernicus return to a simple idea of planets moving in perfect circles without the need for Ptolemy's adjustments." "He found their orbits would almost meet this ideal if he took the earth from the centre of the universe and replaced it with the sun" "It was a revolutionary moment for cosmology." "Copernicus had radically re-organised the model of the universe, which had lasted for centuries." "He began began an irreversible process... that has downgraded us from the centre of the universe... to the outer suburbs of one among millions of galaxies." "We now have evidence that we are not important in yet another way." "It seems that the kind of matter that we are made... constitutes only a small fraction of the universe." "Over ninety percent is something we can not even see." "Dark matter." "It sort of puts one as a human being in some perspective, that you know we we, the earth is not the centre of the solar system and we're not even made of particularly Con matter that's around," "because most of it's dark matter." "In the sixteenth century the Church was sure that God had put man and earth at the hub of the universe." "And Copernicus's idea that planets should orbit the sun in perfect circles did not quite match observations." "So Ptolemy's earth centered universe seemed preferable." "Copernicus died in 1543." "60 years later, Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer provided strong support for the sun centered theory after he discovered a new way to explain the motion of planets." "He broke with two thousand years of... philosophical and astronomical tradition." "What Kepler finished up with was non-circular motion." "He realised that the planets are a ctually travelling in elliptical orbits." "The great thing about Kepler's system is he can do everything Copernicus did simply with... one clear curve of the eclipse, a colossal achievement." "At first the church failed to see what was coming." "But when the Italian scientist Gallileo Gallilei published Copernicus's idea for everyone to read, the Vatican finally took drastic action to curb his populist instincts." "We are now at the top floor of the villa II Juliello and the place where Gallileo spend his last years of life as a prisoner." "In isolation, all Gallileo could do was finish his work on the laws of motion which he had begun long before his house arrest." "One problem he solved was why the earth seems to be still." "As it moves we move with it." "We simply ride on its surface." "But he couldn't explain why we didn't fall off." "It was while working on the laws of motion that Gallileo stumbled on something which was destined to make nonsense of the Church's view of the Universe." "At the end of 1609 he heard that there were in into the market some funny objects which were a tube with some glasses, who were giving some funny performance." "This instrument was coming from Holland and was sold as a toy." "When Gallileo took it he began to be transformed from a toy to an instrument." "He started to use the powers of the telescope to look at the skies." "This is a major step in his career and also in the history of modern cosmology." "The telescope transformed what could be seen." "Gallileo became fascinated by distant planets like Jupiter." "According to the Church his telescope should have revealed a Universe where everything orbits the Earth." "A system of perfect spheres." "But it wasn't like that." "The moon was not so polished and so round as people believed, but they were presented with valleys and mountains exactly as the earth." "He moved afterwards to other bodies, he started to observe Mercury, Mars." "But he was captured by Jupiter." "He started to observe seriously Jupiter in January 1610 and diary notes is very touching, says I have discovered a funny body, something like that which is circulating around Jupiter, 7 January:" "And the day after he was immediately at the sunset at the telescope." "Hardly believing his eyes he sketched what he saw." "In a few days he became aware that these moons as he called them, were four, and they were satellites because they were doing... rhythmic and cyclic performances around the body of Jupiter." "Anything orbiting Jupiter could not be orbiting the Earth." "The church's model of the universe no longer made sense." "in the marshy Irish countryside outside Dublin." "so he started to publish and started to produce... work saying be careful we cannot stay anymore with Ptolemy." "What the bible was saying in many times about the position of the sun and the motion of the sun around the earth was not tenable anymore." "Gallileo entered a fight with the authorities... the book of Copernicus was suspended and sent to correction." "Gallileo was called to Rome at the Tribunal of Inquisition." "Finally he was condemned." "Gallileo retracted his claims, rather than face the full wrath of the Church, perhaps even death at the stake." "He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life under house arrest." "It's the beginning of conflict between science and religion, science and and theology a nd it's attention which is going to be many other episodes during the modern age." "Anyone who looks through a telescope today will feel the same sense of wonder that Gallileo did..." "We can now see stars and galaxies so far away that the light... from them travelling across space takes billions of years to reach us." "We are looking back in time, seeing how they were light years ago" "Observing is almost mystical." "It's the act that really puts me in contact with the rest of the universe." "I often think if someone's looking back at me" "I wonder if their telescope is bigger than mine." "Today's telescopes depend on refinements introduced by Newton, who was born in 1642, the year Gallileo died." "I feel I have links to both Newton and Gallileo." "I now hold the same professorship at Cambridge that Newton once held, and I was born 300 years to the day after Gallileo died." "In 1660, with no formal education" "Newton left this house in Woolsthorpe to go to university" "At Cambridge by chance he picked up about 4 or 5 books on mathematics and he set to work to read them." "6 months later he was making important contributions to mathematics, 18 months later he was the greatest mathematician alive." "Just staggering, he taught himself," "Just from 4 or 5 books and it all came out of that." "Newton's refinements to the design of Gallileo's telescope proved that he was more than just a theoretician." "By incorporating an internal mirror he doubled the telescope's power." "The news of this telescope was distributed around Europe... and that's actually what made his name." "And later on that design of telescope turned out to be the best one of all so er in that way he greatly advanced astronomy." "Newton had been at Cambridge for several years when the plague forced him to come back home here to Woolsthorpe and at the time he left Cambridge he was beginning to think about the laws of motion, how things are moving and he had the idea" "that basically things would essentially move in a straight line if they were left on their own." "He was beginning to think of the forces that might be at work and one of the most obvious is the pull of gravity which is pulling an object towards the earth." "There's a popular myth that Newton discovered gravity after watching an apple fall from a tree" "I think it's probably true that he did start thinking about these things from seeing apples fall, but I'm absolutely certain that he didn't have the complete theory of universal gravitation back here in the plague year" "that the full working out came much later." "His idea of gravity and he called it universal gravity, because that is a very important thing, is that... every single piece of matter in the universe pulls every otherpiece of matter in the universe towards it and vice-versa." "The earth is billions of times more massive than the apple so basically the earth is moving ever so slightly towards the apple but you just can't see that." "The motion of the apple is much more pronounced than that of the earth." "The importance of the apple is that it symbolises the idea that the laws of nature that are working on the earth are also working throughout the whole universe." "Newton tuned his theory of gravity to the heavens to see if Kepler's ideas would match up with his own." "He combined Gallileo's laws with his own equations." "And he saw that together they explained precisely the path of the moon round the earth." "And that was enough to give Newton the hints to then apply those same techniques of Gallileo but now to the planets and that essentially the whole of the universe." "Even the Church was finally convinced." "Newton swept away the last vestiges of the old Ptolemaic system." "He believed that gravity would control the whole universe." "It was gravity which kept us on a moving Earth." "And gravity would keep all the stars in the universe moving." "Newton's universe would stretch out forever." "He was the first person who had a mathematical description of the universe which manifestly worked." "And the title of his great book, the Principia that makes the point, he described it as the mathematical principals of natural philosophy." "According to Newtons theory the universe ran like clockwork forever" "I think people were comforted by the thought that even though they grew old and died the universe was eternal and unchanging." "Inspired by Newton's ideas an age of gentlemen astronomers began." "I am William Brandon the 7th Earl of Rosse, great great grandson of the 3rd Earl, who is also another William." "His great achievement was the building of the... great six foot telescope or the Leviation of the Parsons Town," "That was the biggest and the most powerful telescope in the world up to the present century." "The 3rd Earl built his telescope in 1850, in the marshy Irish countryside outside Dublin." "He made everything he needed himself here." "He made it in a foundry that he set up in the bottom of the moat, that was fuelled by the turf from the local bogs by making the most of all the resources he had." "My name is Francisco Diego, I am involved with optical design at University College London and we are planning to build a new mirror for this telescope." "The Leviathan of Parsonstown worked in the same way as Newton's telescope" "It's a blue shift." "If the light source is receeding," "In Newton's telescope this mirror was five inches wide." "200 years later the 3ed Earl had built himself a." "Mirror with a massive six foot diameter." "With telescopes like Gallileos's or Newton's... you could only see the solar system." "I mean the moon, the sun, the planets and almost nothing else." "And you see here a plate of the six foot telescope with an observer... here in position." "Remembering of course that this is a reflecting telescope so the observers had to get into position at the at the top to look right down the length of the tube to see the image reflected in the giant six foot mirror at the bottom." "I was browsing in your library and found this book." "This is a transactions of the Royal Society 1850 or something like that." "And there is the 3rd Earl's lovely drawing of the Whirlpool." "The first time the whirlpool galaxy was ever seen." "The telescope gave new detail to what had been assumed to be clouds of gas." "However at the time observers didn't realise that they were actually seeing through the millions of stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy to other equally vast galaxies of stars." "Meanwhile scientists were beginning to realise that some of the secrets of the universe lay hidden in light itself..." "A technique was soon to be found to unlock them." "It was called spectroscopy." "Spectroscopy is the analysis of light." "The information that we get from starlight or from sunlight or from light in general is tremendous, is enormous." "Spectroscopy was discovered in 1814, by a German optical physicist..." "Joseph Von Frauenhofer." "He was an optical manufacturer." "He was working in a company which was building lenses for astronomers." "He was very methodical, he used to write everything he he did... and we have these texts of his own very words of the fantastic discovery." "In a shuttered room I allowed sun light to pass through a narrow opening in the shutters onto a prism." "I found with the telescope almost countless... strong and weak vertical lines crossing the spectrum which however are darker than the remaining part of the spectrum of the colour image." "Some seem to be nearly completely black." "He couldn't explain the origin of these lines, he just saw that part of the spectrum was missing." "Hidden in these black lines was extraordinary new information about the chemical structure of the Universe." "Light is originated in atoms." "Light is originated every time that um electrons in these atoms are jumping up and down." "It's a emitting or absorbing light at a particular frequency." "So each chemical element has a particular way of behaviour, the the electrons are jumping in particular places." "So depending on these places is the position of the line in the spectrum." "So if the line appears here you may say ah this is hydrogen, but if the line appears here no this is not hydrogen this is sodium." "So in the solar spectrum we have the finger prints of a lot of chemical elements that we can identify in our labs, because with the same equipment we take a spectrum of a lamp, say for example an arc of iron and we can produce the same lines" "and we match the lines from the sun with the lines from the, from the lamp, in our laboratory and the match is perfect." "Using spectroscopy it was found that the chemical content of our sun was identical to that of any star in the Universe." "Our sun and our solar system itself, was just one of an infinite number of others." "Perhaps we ourselves have no special place in the universe." "The chemistry of stars is more or less the same as the sun, so the sun becomes a star or stars become suns." "This is a big revolution." "This is like Copernican revolution when when you abandon the idea that the earth is the centre of the universe and you say well it's no longer the centre of the universe, now the sun may be the centre at least of the solar system" "and that was a major revolution in science." "Now we have another revolution in which we say well we are not so special about it because uh our own bodies, our own chemistry, our blood, our bones, our skins, they are made of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium etc" "and we find hydrogen and oxygen in nebulae, in stars, in in the universe." "So it is the same chemistry, so there's nothing special about it." "If people and planets share the same chemistry, perhaps everything in the Universe has the same beginning." "The clue to our Con origins came from another discovery about light... by the Austrian scientist, Christian Dopler." "The Dopler shift has been... perhaps one of the most important tools in astrophysics, I would say in cosmology now, because it is our speedometer if you like, it is the, the meter that we use to measure the speed of almost everything in the universe." "Dopler suggested that if an object emitting light is moving towards or away from us, then the light it gives off will appear to be altered." "We can't observe this is in everyday life, because light moves too fast." "But we experience the same effect with sound." "As the source of the sound moves the sound waves change their shape" "They are squashed together as the sound approaches and stretched as the sound moves away." "The change in pitch is audible and this is the Dopler shift." "By analysing star light... scientists found the Dopler shift at work in the spectrum." "If the light source was approaching, the Frauenhofer lines are shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum." "It's a blue shift." "If the light source is receeding, these lines move towards the red end of the spectrum." "A red shift." "These extraordinary patterns in starlight brought the dawn of a new age for cosmology." "It became possible to tell not only what the universe was made of but also how it was moving." "The breakthrough came by analysing light from deep in the universe." "Light seen through powerful new telescopes in America." "They could reveal details of the universe never seen before." "Everybody knew what the Milky Way galaxy was, the collection of billions of stars to which the sun belonged, but nobody knew what these little patches of nebulas material, that looked like spirals and pancakes and so on were and some" "people thought that the Milky way galaxy was the whole universe and these little spirals were wisps of gas in that universe." "The most famous person that worked at Mount Wilson was Edwin Hubble... who came here, right after his service in World War 1," "He had the golden touch, a knack of picking the important problems." "Using the new hundred inch telescope, Hubble looked deep into space at the nebulous objects first identified in Ireland by William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse." "Using the extraordinary clarity of the atmosphere over Mount Wilson, which is the best on the continent." "He was able to distinguish individual stars in these little clouds of gas, these so called nebulae and that told him in itself that they were not wisps of gas in our galaxy, but galaxies in their own right, each one containing billions of stars... and that the universe, the true universe was populated with" "countless numbers of island universes, like our Milky Way galaxy." "The distances that he measured were absolutely stupefying to the astronomers at that time." "He found that the andromida nebular which is the closest galaxy to us, was at least one million light years away and a light year is six trillion miles, a very very great distance, far outside the edge of our Milky Waygalaxy." "For the first time we knew how big the universe was with that discovery." "A colleague of Hubble's, Vesto Slipher, began to use Doppler's theory to analyse light." "All of the galaxies that he could see around him had red shifts, they were shifted towards longer wavelengths and that would mean that relative to us they were moving away." "When Slipher gave this report everybody stood up and cheered." "They didn't know what it meant, but they had a gut feeling that is was something cosmic in significance" "Unknown to Slipher, an obscure German physicist was working on a theoretical explanation." "It was an extraordinary undertaking for a patent clerk, who had shown little academic promise, but he was about to devise a revolutionary view of the universe, in which he pictured space and time as the same thing." "He was Albert Einstein" "He was forced to learn a lot of very complicated mathematics, in order to do so." "But in 1915 finally the theory was born." "Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity published in 1915 overturned Newton's theory of gravity." "In Einstein's theory objects did not pull directly on one another." "Instead they made dimples or warps in space and time." "One object passing another would have its path deflected by these warps and therefore would seem to be attracted towards it." "And the equations had further implications." "So one thing to understand about general relativity is that you can't have a whole collection of matter say of galaxies or stars which are sitting in static configuration with respect to each other and expect them to stay there." "They won't, they are going to collapse in towards each other." "So this means that... you can't have a static model of the universe in general relativity." "The model, the universe either has to be expanding or it has to be contracting." "It has to be dynamical in some way it can't possibly be static." "Even Einstein resisted the implications of his theory at first and he adjusted the maths to avoid them." "But he couldn't prevent other scientists from seeing the possibilities." "The astronomers looked..." "at Slipher's discovery of the motion of the galaxies and the prediction that the universe expands and said ah ha these are two sides of one coin, they fit together." "And Hubble again with that golden touch for working on the big problems turned his attention to this question and he asked himself how can I investigate it." "And the way he did so was to start to measure the red shifts as they're called, the velocities with which these uh galaxies are moving away from us." "Hubble began the process of systematically analysing light from thousands of galaxies using spectroscopy." "The results were staggering." "And he found something known today as Hubble's Law, quite extraordinary that the red shift or the velocity of recession from us is proportional to distance." "If a galaxy at this distance is moving away from you at a certain speed a galaxy twice as far away will be guaranteed to be moving away from you at twice the speed." "Hubble actually changed..." "the picture of the universe, because the Ptolemaic picture was static and Newton's picture of the universe was static" "Uh but Hubble showed that the universe is dynamic." "Everything is moving away from everything else." "Greek astronomers thought most of them, not all of them... that the earth was the centre of the universe." "Copernicus showed that was not so and thought the sun was the centre of the universe." "Later astronomers showed no the sun was not the centre of the universe, but they thought that our galaxy was the centre of the universe." "Hubble showed that there is no centre and that was a tremendous scientific accomplishment." "He showed that the universe is as far as the telescope can see is populated with countless numbers of island universes and there is no difference whatsoever." "There is no centre." "The second implication of his finding was, imagine that the picture of the expanding galaxies, moving away from us and one another is a movie strip." "Now run that in reverse and all the galaxies going backward in time come closer and closer together and finally they all meet together at onepoint, speaking loosely because there is no one point, there is no centre in the universe, they all come together." "At an infinitely dense and yet infinitely extended er moment and beyond that of infinite density one cannot go." "So that moment marks the beginning of the birth of the universe and all of the things that we see around us, every star, every planet, every living thing on the earth and in the cosmos owes it's genesis to that moment." "You can call it the Big Bang, but you can also call it with accuracy the moment of creation." "Today, the space telescope named after Hubble, sends us these photographs from the furthest corners" "Confirming that seeing truly is believing" "From sitting at the centre of the universe... we now find ourselves orbiting an average sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy." "And our galaxy itself is just one of billions of galaxies, in a Universe that is infinite and expanding." "But this is far from the end of a long history of enquiry." "Huge questions remain to be answered, before we can hope to have a complete" "For thousands of years, people have wondered about the universe." "Did it stretch out forever, or was there a limit?" "And where did it all come from." "Did the universe have a beginning, a moment of creation, as the church taught?" "Or had the universe existed forever, as many philosophers believed." "The debate between these two views raged for centuries without reaching any conclusions." "But while I was growing up, the debate was virtually settled." "One view of the universe prevailed" "The story begins with a priest, a scientist and an astronomer." "We're at an altitude of just over a mile and there's cool air coming in from the ocean, on top ofa layer that's in Los Angles basin below." "So there's a pressure lid in the atmospherethat keeps the warm air and the haze down below and keeps the smooth cool air flowing over the mountain top." "The images are the crispest and sharpest in the American Continent." "In 1917, a company which usually built battleships came to this mountain in Los Angeles, to weld and rivet the largest and most optically perfect telescope the world had ever seen." "The observatory on top of Mount Wilson would give us a totally new view of the cosmos." "At the same time Einstein unveiled his theory of general relativity, which seemed to be predicting a universe that couldn't stand still." "The models of the universe we build have to have the universe either expanding or contracting, they can't they can't be static." "But this disturbed Einstein." "His assumption that the universe was static was so strong he didnt see the expansion or contraction of the universe as a prediction of the theory he just thought of it as a problem that had to be overcome by changing the theory in some way." "Einstein fudged the theory, by adding a quantity called the cosmological constant to allow the universe to remain of constant size." "But it wasn't long before his ideas were challenged by others, including a Catholic priest, George Lemaitre." "Father Heller believes that science and religion go hand in hand." "There are 2 ways of making dialogue between science and religion." "One is direct, when theologians and scientists sit together and they try to speak to each other and usually it's a disaster." "But there is another way of making a dialogue between them, when for instance a priest or a religious man simply does science." "Over the centuries, the scientific work carried out inside the church has had a profound influence on the outside world." "Father Heller has been called to Rome to attend a conference at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences." "The Vatican established the Pontifical Academy to have scientific council to the pope." "The idea was engage the church into the dialogue with science and the best way of doing this is doing science with the Vatican." "At the beginning of this century, the issue at the Academy was how did the universe begin?" "One of the first with a scientific answer was George Lemaitre" "George Lemaitre was elected memberof this academy," "He studied both theology and mathematics." "He was rather mathematician by training, but he got very very interested in Einstein's theory of relativity" "Lemaitre decided to challenge Einstein and most of the scientific Bunity of the day." "with his own ideas of the creation" "He suggested, in a vivid description almost more poetic than scientific, that the universe did indeed have a precise moment of creation:" "and that everything expanded from a very dense primeval atom." "The evolution of the world can be compared to a display of fireworks that just has ended." "Some few red, wisps ashes and smoke, standing on the well chilled cinders we see the slow fading of the suns and we try to record the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds." "This cataclysmic beginning and expanding universe that Lemaitre proposed are what we now accept as the Big Bang." "Few scientists took the beginning of the universe seriously." "Lemaitre battled on with his ideas." "He even tackled Einstein face to face, but Einstein wouldn't relent." "Einstein definitely rejected the model as something unpleasant and he told Lemaitre that his physics was not very good." "Everyone assumed that the universe was static and Einstein too." "So probably the idea that the universe was expanding was just simply not something he was prepared to consider." "It was clear that new observations were needed to settle the debate." "The hundred inch telescope was the largest in the world when it was builtin 1917, it drew observers here the people who could use the telescopes best to tickles out the details of how the cosmos operated." "The most famous observer was an American, Edwin Hubble." "He was destined to end the argument between Lemaitre and Einstein." "Edwin Hubble came to Mount Wilson in the early1920's and for his thesis he had made a guess, which is unlike Hubble to have done, a speculation." "He thought that some of the faint wispy clouds that you could see in the night time sky, and these are clouds on the sky and not in the earth's atmosphere, these nebulae as they're called had a spiral shape," "and he thought they might be external to our own galaxy." "What Hubble was suggesting must have seemed extraordinary." "The bright clouds that could be seen in between the stars in the night sky might actually be other galaxies, far outside our own." "They were so far away that before the hundred inch telescope they had never appeared as more than wispy clouds." "Hubble aimed the telescope at one of these clouds and took the first ever detailed picture of it." "This was not easy." "To track a cloud out in space, as the earth is turning, took great strength and endurance." "To take a photograph at the same time keeping thousands of stars in perfect registration was almost a miracle." "Some of the exposures are..." "30 or 40 hours, which means he did this for one night left the plate in came back the next night and re-opened the palate and began exposing again." "Hubble would be standing on this platform all night long, guiding..." "Hubble found that the faint clouds in the sky were indeedgalaxies outside our own." "He developed this clear picture of the Andromeda spiral galaxy." "By meticulous measurements of the brightness of individual stars" "Hubble could tell howfar away the galaxy was." "He found that our..." "nearest neighbouring galaxy was over a million light years away." "So he turned around our notion of the size of the universe." "He increased the volume by something like a factor of a 1000 million because now all these faint smudges of light were not interior to our small milky way galaxy, but were each individual galaxies holding a 100 billion stars or so." "So you increased the vastness, the size of the universe into this vast cosmos that we know today and also made our place simultaneously, made the universe large and own place very humble." "Once Hubble had identified the galaxies he took his research a step further." "By looking at the light from galaxies, he could tell they were moving" "Hubble looked at the galaxies and as he analysed their light within the light that he is looking at he could tell whether or not or how fast the galaxies are moving, towards or away from us and he found out that the more distant a galaxies was" "the faster it was moving away from us and this is Hubbles Law." "The fact that the galaxies were all moving away from us suggested that the universe was expanding." "But Hubble was cautious and didn't want to jump to conclusions." "Nor did Einstein want to believe that the universe was expanding even though his theory said it should." "But when George Lemaitre heard ofHubbles's discovery, he knew this was the proof he'd been waiting for." "In 1931, while Einstein was visiting Hubble," "Lemaitre journeyed to California to confront them." "When science and observation come together, science often takes a great leap forward" "The basis of modern cosmology was established at this meeting." "Looking back, I can recognise this as the foundations for my own work." "Lemaitre had to work through Einstein's theory, through the mathematics which are extraordinarily complex and after presenting this to Einstein and pressing and pressing his point and then having the evidence of Hubble there to top this all off" "Einstein was beginning to be convinced of the expansion." "He begins to realise as Lemaitre presses his point that he had made a great blunder, that is putting in this cosmological constant to offset the natural expansion that falls out of his theories." "Einstein rose at the end of the meeting and said this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen." "From then on Einstein called the cosmological constant, the 'biggest blunder' of his life." "Hubbles' work, Lemaitre and Einstein make up the big bang of cosmology, that is this is the origins of modern cosmology." "Hubbles work started it off first by investigating what these nebula were and then seeing this motion, this large scale motion of the universe the expansion, how that linked to Einstein's theory, showing that the universe had a beginning in time and space" "some billions years ago and this is where cosmology has risen from." "I was fascinated by the expansion of the universe when I heard." "of it as a boy at school" "But many scientists didn't like the idea that the universe had a beginning, a moment of creation" "The BBC presents the nature of the universe:" "The speaker is Fred Hoyle, a Cambridge mathematician and Fellow of St. John's College." "In this talk he discusses the theory of continuous creation." "Mr. Hoyle." "Perhaps like me you grew up with the notion that the whole of the matter in the universe was created in one bigbang at a particular time in the remote past." "What I'm now going to tell you is that this is wrong." "Fred Hoyle's attack contradicted Lemaitre, Einstein and all the supporters of the Big Bang." "Dennis Sciama now lives and teaches in Italy, but as a young graduate in Cambridge, he remembers being swept along by the ideas of Hoyle." "Like many young cosmologists Sciama preferred Hoyle's Theory to one that started with a Big Bang." "At the time there were not "many people working in cosmology; "" "so rebellious characters could make a big impact on the subject." "Now this Big Bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory even before details examination, for its irrational process" "That can't be described in scientific terms." "So in1948 they proposed the famous steady state theory whichwas a contradiction "to the Big Bang;"" "accepting the universe was expanding, but supposing that as the galaxies move away from one another, new matter was created between the galaxies continuously on this idea." "As the universe expands, everything should spread out." "It should become less densely packed." "So new matter had to materialise somehow, to keep the overall density of the universe in an everlasting" "steady state." "If you go backwards in time there's no increase of density and therefore no Big Bang." "So you have this rather grand picture of a universe which is expanding but which stays the same in it's overall properties for all time." "I liked the theory because it had a grand architectural sweep" "It just seemed so grand to have a universe that didn't change in its large scale structure ever, and had no awkward initial moment." "But one thing the Steady State theory didn't have was an answer to where all the matter in the universe could have formed." "Supporters of the Big Bang seemed to have the best explanation of where matte was made." "To them, everything was created in a hot Big Bang." "Hoyle developed this idea that we wanted to do without the hot Big Bang." "The question was where to make the heavy elements." "Hoyle had to find places in the universe which were hot enough for the nuclear reactions make the elements we now see." "The earth and everything on it are formed from combinations of less than a 100 basic elements." "But where did they all come from?" "Geologist Chris Halls is fascinated by this question." "To learn the geology of a place he uses traditional panning techniques to sift out key elements including heavy metals, like gold." "The heaviest elements don't dissolve, they seem to survive anything." "Gold isn't subject to chemical break down in the atmosphere and once you have gold accumulating in a river it's likely to stay there." "One suspects of course that are so durable must themselves have had their origin in some place of very intense physical conditions" "There is nowhere on Earth with conditions extreme enough to form the elements" "The steady state school had to prove that the Big Bang wasn't responsible." "So they looked to the stars" "The great achievement, in terms of understanding the origin of the elements, came from the work done by the astronomers of the steady state school and they were able to demonstrate what was possible in terms of putting elements together" "to synthesise new and heavier elements in stars." "The steady state supporters argued that stars are born when gravity starts to pull clouds of hydrogen closer together." "They thought that as the pressure builds up some of the hydrogen atoms would fuse into atoms of helium." "As conditions inside the star became more intense helium atoms would in turn fuse into the larger elements like oxygen then carbon and so on-unitl iron was been formed." "Their calculations suggested that at this point the fusion would stop." "Small stars would then simply cool and gently fade away whilst large stars would suffer a more violent death." "A really massive star would collapse in on itself creating a searing hot explosion called a supernova." "This supernova triggers the fusion of all the elements heavier than iron and blows them for billions of miles across space." "They wander right across the universe as dust until they mingle with other dust clouds where gravity starts to form new stars, planets and eventually life." "The steady statetheorists proceeded to build up stage by stagea" "logical explanation of how these elements could originate successively by synthesis in the stars, but the problem was that they had to find the fundamental fuel to start the process itself and of course that fuel is hydrogen, and" "the million dollar question is where did the hydrogen come from." "Fred Hoyle thought that hydrogen would somehow be created continuously throughout space." "But that needed a new law of physics to make it possible." "And there was far more heliud being detected in space than could possibly have come from the fusion of hydrogen in stars." "The one obvious answer was that the Big Bang explosion would have made both hydrogen and helium." "That was the last thing that Hoyle wanted to contemplate." "He did not give up easily." "Fred Hoyle said that if there had been a Big Bang there should be a trace of that event, preserved for us in the universe, a kind of fossil radiation." "And this is exactly what the Big Bang theorists went out to look for." "If our universe started from a great explosion it would have been so intensely hot that, even today, some faint remnant of that heat should be travelling through out space." "As a research student working for a doctorate," "I realised how significant it would be if the radiation could still be detected, some 15 billion years later." "By now, it would have cooled to the lowest temperature possible, minus two hundred and seventy three degrees centigrade." "In 1964, Professor Bob Dicke, at Princeton University thought of a way for his students to detect the Big Bang?" "S radiation" "One afternoon he came in and he was, seemed particularly excited about something." "He started outlining this idea about proving that there's a Big Bang." "Well of course at that time Big Bang was very controversial..." "Not everybody believed it by a long shot." "The steady statetheory was very popular." "But one thing the Big Bang would predict if there were a Big Bang is there must have been some heat radiation in it." "Thought it was a long shot, a kind of a risk, such a radical idea, but it looked like it was possible to do an experiment and check it out." "And it wasn't going to take a lot of time and I didn't have anything else to do." "So I decided to pitch in and help on the experimental side." "David Wilkinson, then a 28 year old student, helped set up the equipmentto look for evidence of the Big Bang." "You have to imagine that we are embedded in this explosion." "So if you're thinking of an explosion say a bomb going off and you see this great fire ball, we're actually inside that fire ball." "So the radiation is coming from all directions, we're outside looking at it and having it go by us, we're embedded inside so we see the same thing looking all around." "To search for the Big Bang radiation, the team designed this directional horn antenna and hauled it onto the roof of Princeton University." "Back in 1965, as David Wilkinson and his colleagues were fine tuning their equipment events took an unexpected turn." "Bob Wilson had just started work at Bell Laboratories." "Trained as a radio astronomer, he had been head hunted by the company's research department." "They wondered if he might be able to find a new use for their special horn shaped antenna originally built to receive the first satellite radio transmissions." "When we were given control of the horn reflector we saw something which we hoped not to see." "That is there was more noise coming out of the horn than we expected." "We expected a little bit from the earth's atmosphere, an even smaller amount from the walls of the horn itself, and then we thought space would be at essentially zero, so that should be it." "Wherever they pointed the huge horn detector, there was a constant annoying hiss." "This radio noise didn't stop, even if the antenna was pointed at empty space." "We worried as we were living on a hill that overlooks NY city, not the typical place that a radio astronomer would go, so, but we have a very measuring instrument, so we turned our horn reflector down and looked at New York city" "and there was nothing unusual from there." "New York city doesn't radiate at those frequencies." "We eliminated sources of excess noise that we could think of, we still believed in physics." "What came out had to come from somewhere." "They wondered if the hiss wasn't coming from space at all." "They looked to see if there wasn't a problem with the horn itself." "he most obvious was that there was a pair of pigeons living in it and whenever we weren't using it, which was most of the time, they would climb up near the cab and roost there and of course they covered it with white pigeon droppings" "and we knew that could well have an effect." "So Bob Wilson and his team of highly qualified radio astronomers spent two weeks cleaning pigeon droppings from the horn." "Eventually the birds were trapped and sent by internal company mail to Whipeny, the furthest outpost of Bell Labs." "But these were homing pigeons." "Well a couple of days later the same pigeons back." "Later on our technician brought in a shot gun and" "But the pigeons were innocent." "The radio noise continued and the team spent the next year checking their equipment." "In the spring of 1965, in desperationthey phoned Princeton University for help." "The call was put through to Bob Dicke." "We were in Bob Dicke's office and er the telephone rang and we heard him say something about horn antenna." "So then we perked right up because it was pretty clear that he was talking to someone who had our equipment." "This turned up to be Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson from Bell Labs," "And Bob hung up the phone and I'll never forget exactly what he said." "His precise words were Well boys we've been scooped." "They gathered their data and drove over to Bell Labs toexperience this radio hiss for themselves." "When David Wilkinson saw their equipment and their meticulous records he knew that his team had been beaten to the discovery of the left over radiation from the Big Bang." "I personally was only giving it about a 50% chance of working anyway, and then when we found out yes indeed there was the radiation coming from space that might be coming from the Big Bang, ah that of course was very exciting." "This was a paradigm shift in in cosmology research and it would have been nice to be the first to see it." "The Discovery of the background radiation along with a number of other things that were coming up at the same time really drove the final nail in the coffin of the steady state theory." "I think it would be very hard to support the, or to understand the source of the background radiation in the steady state universe." "It seemed this was concrete proof of the Big Bang." "Lemaitre, whose primeval atom had started it all, apparently heard of the discovery just days before he died." "Much later in 1978" "Penzias and Wilson received the ultimate accolade in science." "It was 13 years or something before we received the Nobel prize for it." "The Nobel prize is given for discoveries." "It's not given for being the best physicist or the best scientist, it's given for discovering things that are useful to mankind." "I have a hard time putting myself in the same category as Einstein, but er I do realise that this was an important discovery and uh feel that I was very lucky to be in the right place when that happened and I have enjoyed the results from it." "The background radiation was discovered while I was finishing my doctorate." "Here at last was observational evidence that could confirm my work." "I had gone to Cambridge university because I had wanted to work with Hoyle on cosmology, and the expansion of the universe." "But luckily for me, I didn't get the supervisor I wanted." "When Stephen came to Cambridge he was hoping to work with Hoyle, but Hoyle was not taking new students at that time and I was the only other person in the department able to supervise students in cosmology which is what Stephen wanted to work on." "So I became his supervisor and we talked about various projects." "I had made a bad start at Cambridge." "I had just been diagnosed with ALS or motor neurone disease, and didn't know if I would live long enough to finish my doctorate." "And I was having difficulty finding a problem for my thesis." "To be awarded a PhD you have to write a thesis which contains an original contribution to knowledge and that's a very heavy requirement and it is very unnatural in a way because you are supposed to produce this particular substantial original contribution of knowledge" "in a given three year period..." "And so you're forced a bit artificially to produce this significant result in a given time scale." "In Stephen's particular case his first years were a bit slow because cosmology was fallow at that time and he couldn't find a really good problem and I couldn't find one for him." "Time was running out." "There was less than a year left when a suitable project was found." "It involved developing a theory to describe the starting conditions for the Big Bang." "The inspiration was the work on stars done by Roger Penrose." "Roger Penrose was by that time a good friend of mine and he was working on a problem which lead, to a remarkable discovery of his which I suppose was the most important contribution to relativity since the very early days of the theory, around 1916 or so." "The issue involved not the whole universe, that was Stephen's later contribution, but a star." "Roger Penrose proved that when the biggest stars collapse they end up crushed into a black hole." "Inside which has to be an infinitely dense point called a singularity." "Something as tiny and dense as the early universe must have been." "Stephen said to me," ""Look he said we can adapt Roger's argument to the whole universe. "" "In a certain sense the whole universe is like a big star, of course the universe is expanding, but if in your mind you reverse the sense of time then the universe is collapsing." "It's a bit like a collapsing star, a very large star, perhaps you can prove that in that collapse you again must achieve a singularity." "So going back to the ordinary direction of time it would mean that the Big Bang origin of the universe would have to be singular." "" Should I work on that?". "" "So I said that sounds like a very good problem Stephen, yes I think because that would be a very great discovery." "So he went away and in his last year he proved his first singularity theorem for the universe that on the basis of certain very reasonable assumptions the Big Bang had to be singular." "I was awarded my PhD for showing that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied that the universe must have begun with a Big Bang." "It couldn't have collapsed, bounced, and then expanded again." "From Lemaitre's atom to my work had taken only a few decades." "The case for the Big Bang was now almost complete." "But there was till one major problem." "To account for the formation of galaxies, the early universe couldn't have been completely uniform." "The radiation Penzias and Wilson had detected should somehow reflected this but it seemed to be the same in every direction." "For the Big Bang to be right the radiation coming in different directions had to be slightly different and this had not been observed." "In California, a cosmologist called George Smoot realised there was a huge challenge beckoning." "He began a lifelong quest to find hot and cold temperature variations in the early universe tiny imperfections that would mark the starting points of galaxies." "For the Big Bang to be right we had to look out and we had to see these imperfections that tell us how the universe formed and started expanding and also what were going to be seeds for the large structure that we see, that is the stars and the galaxies" "and the clusters of galaxies, all of these things had to be there." "When you start out you think, we should discover it pretty easily right away, we'll point our antenna up here and see what the temperature is and in this direction and see what the temperature is, compare and see if we can see the variations." "When you start to realise that those imperfections are going to be a part in a thousand a part in a hundred thousand it becomes a very great experimental challenge." "Using directional horns like the one built by the Princeton team" "George Smoot began a series of experiments." "His intent was to make a detailed map of the big bang radiation showing up the colds pots where galaxies formed" "It seemed essential to get his sensitive equipment." "out of the Earth's atmosphere" "They tried helium filled balloons, but these were very unreliable and kept getting lost." "U2 planes looked like they'd offer better control but the pilots couldn't stay up long enough." "From the beginning it was clear to me that if only we could get in space that was the right way to do it." "And what I really had to do was to wait for a opportunity, wait for a chance for NASA to say we are looking for new ideas for experiments for satellites that could go into space." "After years of waiting NASA gave George his opportunity with the first ever cosmological satellite." "Called COBE." "Finally in 1989 they scheduled us for a dawn launch and it was windy, you knew too much if you were on the team, you knew too much that it might go, it might not go, and there were problems" "One with the guidance on the stage test and all these things to be concerned about." "And then it became time for the launch and we had only a few minutes left on the window and it was OK." "You saw suddenly a second sun which was the fire out of the rocket coming out and I was going what's the matter, I don't hear any sound, and then I realised light goes faster than sound" "and then suddenly your chest is shaking it's like, your standing at the speakers of a rock concert just being vibrated like this and this thing lifts off majestically and goes up and it's just spectacular thing," "everything is crossed, and you're going please make it up, right." "The COBE satellite was a fantastic success." "The results were unprecedented." "At the end of that first day we made a map that covered half the sky and it was a good map but it was way less than we eventually ended up." "It took a whole years worth of data almost three million, three hundred million observations to be summed together before we got a map that started to show some interesting structure." "At last a picture of the universe as it was fifteen billion years ago." "The hot fireball has cooled down and structure is beginning to form." "The pink and blue patches represent "minute temperature differences; "" "the cooler blue areas are where matter is beginning to cluster to form galaxies." "COBE really puts the big bang on a firm footing, not only the big bang is right but now you have some idea about how structure is going to form, but also you can learn about how the universe itself was created." "COBE finally clinched the of how the universe formed." "The project is now at an end and the Smithsonian Institute is setting up a museum display to Bemorate its historic achievement." "COBE had traced the earliest structures ever seen in the universe." "If you're religious it's like you're seeing God or the handwriting of God when he wrote out how he was going to make the universe." "It's like getting the ten Bandments in front of you and being able to read, right except instead of the Bandments these are, here's how the universe is put together, right." "Just you know, read between the lines and... you'll know the recipe for making the universe." "In this technological cathedral they are building a successor to the COBE satellite." "Whatever it's destined to reveal it is unlikely to overturn the evidence in favour of the Big Bang offered by COBE." "Lemaitre's primeval atom and the discovery of the Big Bang provided the Church with a moment of creation." "But it also gave science it's most convincing explanation of the cosmos." "In 1975 I was awarded by the Pope for my part in proving the Big Bang Theory." "I went back to the Vatican in 1981, for a conference on cosmology this time under a different Pope." "He told us that it was fine to study the universe after the Big Bang, but that we should not inquire into the Big Bang itself, because that was the moment of creation and the work of God" "If science and religion were now at one" "Perhaps they were still no quite seeing eye to eye" "The world around us is full of variety." "Different materials, textures;" "how did they all arise?" "I helped to show that the universe had a simple beginning, as a single point in the big bang." "Tthe question is, how did everything we see get made from that?" "Science has found ways to find out how things began." "We cosmologists we try to recreate the history of the universe in a sense very much like an archaeologist" "We have some clues about the universe as it was a long time ago." "And based on those clues we try to trace back its history to as close to the beginning as possible." "We can push back the frontier of what we know of the universe to very very close to zero time equals zero." "At that time the universe was indeed simple." "A tiny point from which everything exploded in a giant burst of energy we call the Big Bang." "But that in itself does not explain the cosmic alchemy that created galaxies and stars, our planet and even ourselves." "The matter that makes up all this is tangible stuff, not the heat and power of an explosion." "And its infinite variety suggests the very opposite of a simple beginning." "But for the big bang to have made everything we know, every single piece of matter in the universe must have evolved from one primal source." "Centuries ago the first alchemists believed they could discover the way everything in the universe was made." "They called it transmutation." "To the alchemist the process of alchemy was almost as important as the goal." "some alchemists would say if I can see the secrets of creation in my work, if I can look into my vesse, and see the mysteries of the creation unfolding then that is the most significant thing." "Here in Owlpen Manor lived Thomas Daunt the 7th." "Mand he was the last of a long line of alchemists." "Alchemy is about the search to make gold." "Its about taking some primal substance and subjecting it to various operations which change the substance to eventually become the most perfect substance of all, gold." "The alchemists believed that energy could transform one kind of matter into another." "And that everything in the universe could be made from rearranging four fundamental elements." "Alchemists took on board the Greek idea of the elements which was that everything in the universe is composed of the four elements earth water fire and air." "Earth is seen as giving form to things giving substance." "Water is like a universal solvent, it flows it dissolves things." "Fire brings energy and light and heat." "It helps to create the vital inner fire that everything is said to have." "And air gives some space it gives some movement." "It is the medium of communication between things." "Alchemists followed the line that if you shift around that balance of elements, that if you change if you change those proportions then you'll change the actual identity of the substance you've got" "The alchemists believed that everything on earth or in heaven came from different combinations of these four basic elements." "This sense that everything might have a common origin would prove uncannily accurate." "But by the end of the 17th century the alchemists vision seemed too dependent on mysticism to be believed." "Thomas Daunt lived in the 18th century so he was practising very late for an alchemist really because the so called modern scientific view of the world had taken hold by then." "This age of reason wanted less magic and more experimental proof" "A new breed of scientists thought the alchemists practised a mysterious and dangerous form of witchcraft." "That's possibly why Daunt got himself a rather bad reputation locally." "He was thought of as magician." "After his death the little room where he worked was sealed up along with all his books and papers." "But local people got rather about this too in case it was going to have an even, an evil influence so they got summoned the parson to open the doors and burn the books." "When the parson burnt the books a flock of birds flew out." "The attitude of the new scientists coming along." "disagreed with the practices of alchemy but the vision of it that everything has come from one source, that there is a basic elemental form to life and that you can actually rearrange the structure of matter seems very pertinent to science today." "Mystic beliefs and a greed for gold are not a good basis for science." "The alchemists had little interest in how matter was created when the universe began." "But the idea of transmutation, allowing all varieties of matter to evolve from the primal source, was, perhaps accidentally, a step in the right direction." "The alchemists established techniques for breaking down and studying matter, which were passed on when alchemy gave way to the more rational study of chemistry." "In the mid 19thcentury, in the Siberian glass factory run by his mother, a Russian child marvelled at chemistry at work." "He was Dmitri Mendeleev." "Mendeleev wrote in his diary that first impressions of chemistry has got just at this glass factory having seen these combinations how the glass is formed and how the addition of quite different salts changed the colour of the glass." "The industrial revolution and processes like the mass production of glass -." "created a practical need to understand more precisely what things were made of." "The new chemistssoon left behind the Greek vision of only four elements earth, air, fire, and water" "In their experiments they reduced complex chemicals to parts which seemed fundamental." "These simpler parts have been called elements so that there were absolutely no possibility to divide them further." "In Mendeleev's time, chemists believed there were 65 elements including gases liquids and solids." "They thought each element had unique properties which would be present in every one of their atoms." "An atom from the Greek word for uncutable, was as small as you could go in dividing up any element." "The atom was thought to be fundamental." "But before Mendeleev got to grips with these ideas, the glass factory caught fire." "Mendeleev has got his first acquaintance with chemistry at the glass factory." "But well suddenly the factory was burned." "So the only hope of his mother was to give education to her youngest son." "That's why she took him on a very long journey to St Petersburg from the middle of Siberia" "The young Mendeleev and his mother travelled 1400 miles across Russia to enrol him at Saint Petersburg University." "In a few years he became one of Russia's most prominent chemists." "By then, scientists felt that one element differed from another because of differences in the nature of their atoms." "They'd seen that a large amount of one element could weigh the same amount as a small amount of another;" "so their atoms had to have different weights." "Mendeleev wondered whether the weight of each element's atom might have an even deeper significance." "So what was important that Mendeleev has associated the changes in properties of elements." "This changes from metallic character to non-metallic character just with the changes in atomic weight." "So this was his revolution." "Mendeleev was convinced there was an underlying order to all the elements on the earth." "One night in 1869, he shut himself into his cottage by the Black Sea determined to discover the secret pattern of matter." "Mendeleev was very fond of patience games and that's why he has used pieces of paper as cards." "He tried to move them on the table to find an initial arrangement." "This idea to order them with the increase of their atomic weight has come to his mind only early in the morning." "As he shuffled the cards he became convinced he could create a logical order." "Hydrogen had the lightest atoms and so came first." "As he worked his way through to, uranium, the heaviest known element, he grouped together any elements with similar chemical properties." "With elements in the same group, the difference between one atomic weight and the next was almost the same every time." "Where the pattern was broken, Mendeleev predicted that in time an element would be discovered to fill in the gap." "In Russia, Mendeleev's arrangement of elements was called the Mendeleev table." "We know it as the Periodic table." "The periodic table suggested for the first time a fundamental pattern for the different elements." "Although no one realised it then," "Mendeleev was pointing towards a common origin for all matter in the universe." "His work was the basis for all future developments." "Let us say he put so many questions that a lot of scientists has tried to answer and by this manner he of course stimulated the development of idea of evolution of elements" "the origin of matter." "Mendeleev urged others to study uranium." "But he could not have imagined its cosmic significance." "It would lead us to the inner secrets of the atom and a possible primal source of everthing in the universe." "The stage was set for he birth of particle physics and the pioneering work on radiation of a young scientist Marie Curie" "I am the daughter of Irene and Frederik Joliot Curie and the grand daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie" "In 1897, Marie Sklodowska was a Polish student studying in Paris, when she met and married the well known physicist Pierre Curie." "At the time she was trying to find a subject for her doctoral thesis." "Just months before, a French scientist..." "Henri Becquerel had made an extraordinary discovery." "Bequerel placed some uranium on top of a photographic plate." "The plate was wrapped in thick paper, no light could get in." "The uranium and the plate were put in a draw" "3days later Bequerel developed the plate and examined it." "He found that it had been mysteriously effected." "He concluded that the uranium must be emitting some invisible rays, and that these had fogged thephotographic plate..." "Unlike the alchemists 19th century scientists had always believed that an element could never be altered or changed." "But Bequerel's discovery seemed to contradict this basic assumption." "The uranium was not reacting with any other chemical yet on its own it was releasing a new and invisible kind of energy." "With Bequerel's discovery," "Marie Curie had found a subject for her thesis." "She decided to try and find a way to measure the power of the rays from uranium." "Bequerel had already shown that they could conduct an electric current through air but the strength of the current was less than a single amp" "It's something ten to minus eleven smaller." "Try to understand what is ten to minus eleven smaller." "Divide by ten and ten and ten and see that it is really the kind of thing you cannot measure with ordinary apparatus at all so you have to build a special one." "So she did." "At one end of this piece of equipment" "Marie Curie allowed the rays from a sample of uranium to carry as big an electrical current as it could from one metal plate to the other." "At the other end she put stress on a special kind of crystal, using weights, to generate a current whose strength she could measure." "The bigger the weight she used, the stronger the current would be." "If the pointer settled on zero" "Marie Curie knew that the current from the uranium matched the currents she had produced with the weights." "She succeeded in calculating the energy from the uranium." "At a million millionth of an amp it was extraordinary achievement." "The Curies then wanted to see if anything else would give off rays with a similar power to uranium." "They decided to test pitchblende, the crude material from which uranium had been extracted." "Unrefined it was expected to give off a much smaller charge than pure uranium." "What they found amazed them" "And what happens was that the current was much higher." "At least four times higher than with uranium, with the corresponding amount of uranium." "And that was incredible because none of the impurities or elements participating in pitchblende have shown any sign of having the same property." "The Curies separated out the chemicals in the pitchblende, and eventually found that the much larger current coming from it was caused by two new elements." "The Curies called the first polonium, after Marie's home country Poland." "They called the second element radium" "Before the discovery the Curies have discussed about the possible physical properties of the new elements." "And Pierre Curie have told I wish it have a beautiful colour." "So what they found that with enough amount of radium, it emit light, more beautiful than just being a beautiful colour." "So sometimes they come back just to see the radium lighting and just look at it in the evening." "It was not the best thing to do." "Radium was so highly radioactive that it was extremly dangerous" "Marie Curie eventually died from leuchimia almost certainly as a result of her exposure to radiation." "But while the Curie's had managed to measure the radiation that these elements gave off they were no closer to understanding what the radiation actually was..." "That was left to a young New Zealand scientist Ernest Rutherford" "In 1899 Rutherford set out to understand what was happening when rays came out of radium helped by his partner, Frederick Soddy" "They set up a physical experiment in which they tried to measure the rate at which this emanation would defuse from one point to another" "If the emanation was radium in vapour form it would have a similar atomic weight to radium." "but it turned out to be vastly different." "The emanation could not possibly be radium in vapour form in the way that say mercury gives off a vapour." "Therefore it had to be something different, and the only rational conclusion was that one element, radium, was somehow producing another element which was not radium vapour but was a completely different element with a different atomic weight." "Rutherford and Soddy had discovered the alchemist's dream of transmutation happening spontaneously." "One element was naturally being transformed into another, releasing energy in the process." "If one element could naturally arise from another perhaps all the variety of matter in the universe could evolve from a single source." "But why should energy be released in the process?" "The answer was surprisingly close to hand." "In 1905, in his Special Theory of Relativity, a German scientist published an extraordinary equation." "He was Albert Einstein;" "and the equation was E = mc2." "One of the major questions in cosmology and astrophysics is how the chemical elements came to bein the universe." "It was not immediately clear how E = mc2 would help." "Its predictions seemed somewhat bizarre, apparently suggesting that matter, like heat and light, is just another manifestation of energy." "So energy is never lost or infact gained its just transformed from." "One form into another" "You cant actually prove that mass can completely be converted into energy using special relativity but Einstein made that conceptual leap and conjectured that was in fact true." "According to Einstein's equation, matter was a bit like a battery;" "a form of stored energy." "But could this ever be proved;" "and if so, would it help explain the origin of everything in the universe?" "Rutherford resolved to probe more deeply into the heart of the atom." "We need to discover the inner workings of the atom, if we are to understand how matter was made at the beginning of the universe." "I would have taken a theoretical approach to the problem" "But Rutherford was an out and out experimentalist." "He simply collectedsome old tubes and wires, and built a machine to break the atom apart." "60 years later, Rutherford has an American disciple" "In the true tradition of particle physics" "I hung out at junkyards to collect metal and odd bit of electronics that were just thrown away by everyone else but were very important to me." "In Memphis, Tennessee, 20 year old Fred Neill goes hunting for scrap to help him re-stage Rutherford's experiments." "He used radium which was a newly discovered element and he used metal cans, glass tubes, huge amounts of wire and all sorts of eclectic bits that he collected from various places." "Most scrapyards purchase cars and crush them up." "This scrapyard specifically purchases from the US military." "all of their surplus." "They have electronic bits from world war 2, planes, anything." "They have everything from bolts to battleships literally" "How much do you want for this old thing?" "One of Rutherford's key experiments involved examining the particles he knew were part of the emanation from radium." "Rutherford knew that these particles were coming off of the radium with an certain amount of speed." "So he aimed the particles that were coming off of the radium at a piece of gold foil" "And he found that some of the particles were bouncing off of the gold foil" "Rutherford was quoted saying this was some what like shooting a 15 inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and having it bounce back and hit you." "Well this meant that there was some kind of immense force inside the atom." "Discovering this force helped Rutherford complete his theoretical picture of the atom." "He then determined to overcome this force, break up the atom, and study its parts." "Fred Neill carefully followed Rutherford's approach, and built his own atom smasher;" "starting with a safe way to produce particles, rather than relying on the dangerous radiation from radium." "My machine just like Rutherford's used electrical simulation of the emanations from the radium by heating up a piece of metal electrically." "Now in order to make these move I use electrostatic electricity." "Now Coulomb showed that particles that have a charge are attracted to other opposite charge." "So what I do is I build up a huge amount of charge just like a battery." "You hook up one end of the tube to a battery and you hook up the other end of the tube to the opposite pole and you can make the particles move." "And they hit a target right here." "But in order to do that they cant be hampered by anything on their journey to the end of the target." "So to pull everything out hat might slow the particles down" "I have to take all of the air out with this vacuum pump." "Like so... .." "Now what you see is particles interacting with the air." "Which means I haven't pulled out enough air out." "So after some amount of time I've pulled out all of the air and the particles begin to move straight to the target without any interaction." "There is now nothing inside except the particles Fred Neill is firing, and whatever particles they break out of the target." "You can detect them using a tube just like this..." "I am only picking up particles from the target because there is nothing else there." "There's only the particles coming from the synthesised radium emanations and from the bits of the target." "But Fred Neill's Geiger counter was recording particles with a quarter of the mass of the particles he is putting in." "Like Rutherford before him he is splitting the atom." "The Greek philosophers had said that the atom was this indivisible object that was the building block of all things." "Rutherford found that it most certainly is not." "The atom has building blocks of its own." "He found that there is a huge amount of energy held in electric charges that was somehow bound together in the centre and that there was just this myriad of particles that had never been known before." "That the atom was made up of huge numbers of bizarre odd things that had never been seen." "Scientists soon found that if they accelerated particles faster, then they could break up the atom still further" " Into smaller and smaller parts." "The evidence from particle accelerators revealed a new world of sub atomic physics." "It was now that the full significance of Einstein's famous equation," "E=mc squared, began to be realised..." "Matter and energy were interchangeable." "The more energy is released from particle collisions, the more the mass of the particles is reduced" "Proof, it seemed, that Einstein was right... .." "But a theoretician called Paul Dirac had seen something else in the maths." "Paul Dirac held the." "Lucasian chair of mathematics in Cambridge which was held by Newton and is held by Stephen Hawking." "Dirac made a prediction which was hard to believe." "For Einstein's theory to be right he argued, energy wouldn't just produce matter." "It also had to produce a perfect mirror-image opposite;" "anti-matter." "And just as there were particles which combine to form matter, there would be mirror image anti-particles forming anti-matter." "This anti-matter would have some extraordinary qualities." "The special qualities that anti matter has is that it can completely annihilate with matter to form energy." "It is only when matter interacts with antimatter that all the mass can completely annihilate and you can be left with only pure energy." "To begin with, anti-matter was just a mathematical theory." "It seemed to contradict common sense." "We live after all in a world of matter." "One way of thinking about matter and anti matter is to think that you have two worlds which are mirror images of each other." "The question is what is this antimatter it sounds very science-fiction like, it sounds very fanciful;" "and it turns out that there is a boring aspect to antimatter, an exciting one to anti-matter." "So starting with the boring one, anti-matter is like matter, is basically the same thing." "Anti-matter it goes down with gravity just like matter does." "The difference between matter and anti-matter is the electric charge." "So if you have a little particle of matter such as an electron its anti matter particle it's going to be a positron which will have a positive charge, and so to each particle of matter there's going to be a particle of anti matter with opposite electric charge." "The most exiting part is that when matter and anti-matter come together they disappear." "They become something new they become something they weren't before and what they became is just pure energy." "One of the beautiful consequences of this whole process of matter and anti matter disintegrating into energy is that you could also out of energy create matter and anti matter." "So the process is perfectly reversible you can go both ways." "So in theory at least energy could produce matter and anti-matter." "But then wouldn't they instantly meet and annihilate back into energy?" "It seemed there could be whole anti worlds and anti people, made of anti -matter." "If you meet your anti partner, don't kiss or shake hands." "You would both disappear in a tremendous flash of light" "Could the reverse process, of energy turning into matter and anti matter, have happened in the big bang?" "Was that where all the matter in the universe came from?" "Dirac's theory had to be confirmed." "Anti matter had to be found somewhere, if only for an instant, before it was annihilated by matter." "Shortly after Dirac's proposal of anti-matter, scientists began to observe strange new rays coming from space;" "Cosmic rays." "Perhaps these rays would somehow reveal the elusive anti-matter." "They went to mountain tops to be as high up as possible and they could get cosmic rays before they interacted with the atmosphere." "Cosmic rays come from anywhere we know in the galaxy." "And there are certain places they think they are coming from but we are not sure how much of the universe they are coming from." "To see the mirror image difference between matter and anti-matter, scientists used a cloud chamber, a kind of trap which could reveal particles by their movement." "All you need for a cloud chamber is something you can see through" "And then you need alcohol that evaporates easily." "You put it on dry ice which makes it really cold in the bottom so it becomes super saturated, so its ready to form a cloud." "Whenever some particle goes through there and that makes a little trail of droplets." "This is the same that happens in an aeroplane in the sky, you see the water vapour trail after the exhaust of the aeroplane." "They are very temporary trails that are formed by cosmic rays or even radioactive particles because the droplets form and they fall down due to gravity and so it just sort of wisp past there." "Supposedly on top of very high mountains you see one cosmic ray per square centimetre every second." "Near sea level you see far fewer than that-maybe a few a minute." "In 1932, an American physicist, Carl, Anderson set a cloud chamber between magnets to deflect the path of a particle." "If it bent one way, it would be positively charged;" "the other way meant a negative charge." "And that in turn meant knowing whether the particle was coming from above or below." "He put a plate across the chamber to slow the energetic particle down." "if you see a track going through you dont know where and why it came from so they put this plate in the middle and they could tell by the curviture that it was more tightly curved it lost energy so the magnetic field affected it more when it had less energy" "Anderson eventually saw what Dirac had predicted" "With the slower half of the track above the lead bar this particle had to be coming from below whichmade it the mirror image of a known particle." "It had to be its anti particle partner." "Anti-matter existed." "When Anderson saw the first tracks this was really exciting and just sort of blew people's minds because they had not ever seen antimatter before." "there was no evidence for it this was the first particle seen that was not found in an atom." "So even though Dirac had predicted there must some kind of a particle that was the opposite to the electron nobody had believed or though it was possible until they actually had tracks." "Today modern particle accelerators can create anti-matter and matter to produce extraordinary images of creation" "You may think that this is some sort of beautiful art and it is in a sense an art but it is made by physicists." "What you have is a big snapshot that captures in one moment all of these dense particles being created and destroyed inside particle accelerators so it may look like Jackson Pollock but it is in fact a computer enhanced picture of a particle collisions within a detector." "Each one of these particles in a sense tells a story or possible story of how the universe was a long time ago." "These pictures show the collision of countless particles of matter and anti-matter." "Hidden in the detail is the answer to how matter was formed out of the pure energy of the big bang." "So here you have a detail of what people would see in a detector in which you have the debris of a little bang creating matter and anti matter out of energy and this is a photon a little bundle of energy" "that doesn't leave a track because it doesn't have an electric charge... ." "So it moves up here and it collides with a particle and out of the strength of this collision you have these two spirals coming out." "One of them being a particle which is matter, and the other one being its anti-matter cousin-its anti-particle." "And out of this collision you have two tracks, this one that you can see and then you have another one which is an invisible one which is another photon, a bundle of energy." "You can see precisely that this bundle of energy will eventually create matter and anti-matter and this happens at this point quite suddenly, when this photon." "Gives birth in a sense to an electron and a positron" "And that is a manifestation of matter being created out of energy" "It is in effect a miniature big bang, energy forming matter and antimatter" "Well if matter and anti-matter are essentially the same with opposite electric charges, where is the anti" " Matter?" "How come the universe is made of matter." "The laws that control how particles and anti-particles interact, and they show that the universe is not perfectly symmetric between matter and anti-matter." "The fact that we are here at all depends on an extraordinary accident of nature" "If the universe was symmetric between matter and antimatter the universe would just be a big sea of energy." "So the fact that the universe is not perfectly symmetric is the ultimate reason for us to be here." "We now know enough to piece together the story of how our universe evolved." "We have clues about how the universe behaved in the beginning." "The universe that we know existed then, was very rich with a lot of energy, of potentiality for that energy to be translated into particles and anti-particles." "Then what we have is a picture of the universe of many particles." "The elementary particles that are the building blocks of matter, which are colliding with each other at a frantic rate and they don't really bind." "All you have is a dance of particles with tremendous energies colliding each other and hence creating more particles and more energy out of particles in this creation and destruction dance." "As the universe cools the particles stop colliding so strongly and so energetically and they have more time to look at each other and perhaps bind and do something." "So at about one second of life the universe started to make nuclei." "that is protons and neutrons started to bind." "At about 300,000 years or so atoms formed which means that the nuclei bind with the electrons to form the atoms." "Most of them, over all a majority, hydrogen." "From those hydrogen atoms, they because of gravity form clouds, those clouds, they start condensing." "And they get denser and hotter, and as that happens those clouds start forming galaxies and stars within theses galaxies which are basically 99% of hydrogen" "And those stars are going to have solar systems attached, that is they are going to have planetsorbiting around them and maybe your going to have a planet which is close enough so that it is hot but not too far enough so its not too cold" "so that life as we understand it here on earth could develop" "And then we could come back here and tell the story of the life of the universe from scratch to the end." "From a white hot Big Bang to planets and people, is a long and extraordinary journey." "From energy to particles, from particles to atoms, and from atoms to everything we see... it is a remarkable story" "It may be difficult to believe that all the matter in the universe, came from just energy." "But that is the way, the universe seems to be." "Stephen Hawkins's Universe" "The further we probe into the universe the more remarkable are the discoveries we make." "Much of my work has been concerned with the mysteries of black holes." "Many people dismiss black holes as just an artefact of a theory which wouldn't exist in the real world." "But then observes began to find things in the sky which were just as peculiar." "Black holes." "The journey which would lead to black holes, started in the 1950s with the new science of radio astronomy." "Radio signals from space might have many explanations, some more vivid than others." "My name's Seth Shostak, I'm an astronomer at the SETI Institute in lovely Mountain View (California)." "SETI stands for search for extra terrestrial intelligence." "We aren't looking for extraterrestrial life, we're looking for intelligent life that means they can hold up their side of the conversation." "After the second World War, radio astronomy really got going and in the... late fifties they started building large telescopes like the one sitting here." "Could this technology actually be used to send messages as it were, between the stars?" "In 1.959 and 1.960 the first experiments were made using this technology to try and eavesdrop on any civilizations that might be nearby." "But while they were looking for aliens it was sensible to consider other possibilities too." "suddenly you're getting these clear radio views so you knew that in that direction there's a very strong source of radio waves." "You would tell your friend the optical astronomer and they would go use... a big telescope like the Palomar and they would point it in that direction." "Thanks to the optical telescopes, astronomers looked long and hard at the areas emitting radio signals." "They observed unusual events but nothing they couldn't already explain." "Astronomers detected unusual objects for example, a galaxy that had a blob within, in some cases, it was found to emit radio waves, whereas a normal looking galaxy did not." "Or a cloud of gas that had all shorts of little striations in it and looked as it might be exploding." "Those were the objects that seemed to emit radio waves, whereas normal clouds did not." "But There were more surprises." "When they pointed their telescopes at one particularly strong radio signal they expected to see some cosmological catastrophe." "But what they saw astounded them." "In the early 1960s they took photographs of certain positions in the sky from which radio waves seemed to be coming and they just ...saw nothing unusual, just the usual smattering stars." "There was no obvious exploding star, no turbulent cloud of gas, nothing seemingly unusual." "Just normal stars and this perplexed the astronomers." "One such star named 3C273 was one of billions in... an insignificant corner of the universe." "3C273 in the constellation Virgo looked just like a star, yet we know that ordinary stars don't emit radio waves and so this was highly unusual." "Astronomers analysed the light given by 3C273 using a technique called spectroscopy." "By splitting the light from the star into a colour spectrum they discovered something about the star." "They saw black lines in the spectrum, missing light caused by gases in the atmosphere of the star absorbing light at particular frequencies." "And if these lines are shifted from their normal position the star is moving, if the lines shift towards the red end its moving away." "34 years earlier Edward Hubble had used spectroscopy to discovered that the universe is expanding." "Distant galaxies are moving away from us." "The spectrum of 3C273 was about to tell us even more." "The spectrum of 3C273 didn't fit any patterns of normal gases that had been observed in normal stars, and so this really befuddled astronomers." "Not only was the object emitting radio waves profusely, but it had this really strange spectrum that couldn't be matched with any known gas." "3C273 looks like any other star, but it's spectrum seemed to contradict this idea." "Astronomers couldn't imagine what was going on, but a young postgraduate student was convinced that spectroscopy couldn't lie" "Martin Schmidt noticed that two of the wiggles had the same spacing between the colours as hydrogen does but both of the lines were shifted way over towards redder parts of the spectrum than normal hydrogen gas is" "and as he believe that that identification was correct then the conclusion was that the shift is a full sixteen percent." "Yet a shift like that meant that this object was moving away from us enormously fast and it had to be one or two billion light years away." "So, no way could it be a normal star or even a strange object that looks like stellar or quasi-stellar simply because it's so... ." "...so far away, and yet it's enormously bright." "This really caught people by surprise even some Scientifics had a hard time believing that anything so bright could be so far." "Astronomers called these objects quasi-stellar radio sources They were clearly radio sources," "They were discovered with radio telescopes and they looked star like, and hence the, the stellar aspect of the term so quasi stellar radio sources got contracted to quasars." "Martin Schmidt concluded that it must be intrinsically an extremely powerful source, an exceedingly bright object, because to appear as bright as it does in the sky yet be so far away, it has to put out a tremendous amount of energy." "Much more than our sun, in fact one hundred to one thousand times more than our entire milky way." "And that was the real kicker." "When the quasars were discovered I was just beginning my... postgraduate research." "My works lead me to study things even more mysterious, black holes." "I was dealing with Einstein's theory of relativity, and this seemed a promising place to look for an explanation of the quasars" "Astronomers and astrophysicists wanted to know how these strange objects could behave that way." "How they could produce so much energy and yet be so small so they turned to the relativists to ask if they had any models, objects that could look and behave like this." "And the relativists said, well, there is this issue of gravitational collapse and maybe this is what you are looking for." "Everyone agreed that Einstein's theory described gravity as the dominant force of the universe..." "But what would happen under extreme conditions?" "Could gravity ever compress vast quantities of matter, such as when a star dies, into the tiniest of spaces?" "In 1.939 two papers appeared, One was by Einstein himself, and one was by Robert Oppenheimer and his co-worker Snyder." "They discussed what would happen when a large amount of matter was concentrated in a small region." "Einstein's paper didn't foresee any problems, but Oppenheimer and Snyder were frightened." "Their calculations point to something which couldn't possibly exist." "Using the rules of general relativity, they predicted that a massive object would undergo catastrophic gravitational collapse and would reach a critical radius at which it seemingly cuts itself off from the rest of the universe." "But if an object cuts itself off from the universe, could its behaviour still be described by the laws of physics?" "Did Einstein's theory unwittingly predict its own collapse?" "Einstein was convinced that you could never get to this critical radius, that this critical radius was an impossibility in nature." "His argument with Oppenheimer was never settled." "The second World War meant physicists like Oppenheimer were needed... to develop the atomic bomb." "Many felt that his ideas were so extreme, they weren't worth fighting for anyway." "But a physicist called John Wheeler had no doubts." "Stick up for something, and I think that's a wonderful way of saying what science is all about, stick up for something!" "I'm Daniel Holz and I'm a graduate student from the University of Chicago" "I'm going to see John Wheeler who is my adviser here at Princeton." "John Wheeler who still teaches at Princeton University worked with Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb." "Now, he is 85 and one of the great figures of twentieth century science." "He loves to just sink his teeth into problems." "Part of his approach is find the biggest, most confusing thing you can, and then go at it full steam and try to make sense of it." "In 1963, quasars were the most confusing thing around with the exception perhaps of Oppenheimer's theory that might explain them." "Wheeler wanted to embrace these extreme ideas about gravitational collapse, but to support them would mean challenging Einstein's beliefs." "When Wheeler came to Princeton in the 40s, Einstein was one of its leading academics and world famous." "But science was already beginning to move on." "He was kind enough to invite me to bring my graduate students around to his house one day for tea." "Joe Callaway, said, Professor, when you're not longer living, what will happen to this house?" "Einstein's face was a study:" "deep wrinkles, a wonderful smile and laugh, and his beautiful voice with a bit of an accent but clear English, said:" "this house will never become a place of pilgrimage where people come to look at the bones of the saint." "And so it is." "For all his genius it wasn't Einstein who now inspired Wheeler." "Wheeler was captivated by the idea that quasars might be explained by Oppenheimer's theory of gravitationally collapsed objects and he invented a vivid phrase to describe them." "After I'd used that phrase "gravitationally completely collapsed objects" several times, I realised that it was just too long winded and I switched to "Black hole"" "It was a name which perfectly describes what should happen." "The key feature of a black hole is that's black." "No light escapes from this region so what happens is you have this object that's getting dense, a star that's collapsing and it gets compressed ...and as it does, objects closer to the star have a harder time getting away." "In some sense, the gravitational pull is stronger and stronger." "If you sep on extrapolating that, the object gets more dense and you reach the point were even light can't escape and if we were standing far away from this star, the light can't get from the surface of the star to us and at that point, where that's reached the star becomes a black hole." " Our Russian friends had a different word and at French thought it sounded obscene but finally they accepted it." " A lot of people decide that the whole idea was patently ludicrous and that they couldn't exit." "Einstein was one of them." "He did not see black holes as real physical objects." "The idea was that something in nature would prevent them from forming." "As you tried to put all this mass in one place, some mysterious force would come out and prevent you from getting that much mass that you would actually end up collapsing into a black hole." "I think that black holes should exit, but many physicists thought that was taking general relativity too far." "But not Wheeler, he was impressed by the quasars" "If something so bizarre could find a place in the cosmos, then the universe was strange enough for black holes to exist as well." "Wheeler always being at the forefront saw that these black holes were a windfall for explaining all sorts of astrophysical observations ...and would become very important in our understanding of the world." "He was urging everybody to join in exploring this vista that open up this new landscape of science." "He asked himself, what can we do with this black holes?" "What are the implications?" "How will these affects the way we look at our universe?" "Many of us were beginning to think there might be large numbers of black holes in the universe." "But that depended on what happened in the giant explosions that occur at the end of the life of massive stars." "In the Californian desert there is a well-fortified concrete bunker." "Even today no one can enter without being scrutinised by armed guards." "These are the Lawrence Livermore laboratories." "Much of this classified technology now lies idle and is wrapped up in storage." "I came here in 1.956, we were one of two national laboratories ...in charged of developing nuclear weapons for the United States." "In order to idle the high energy calculations needed to develop nuclear weapons, the Defense Department had built a powerful new tool:" "the computer." "The Livermor and Los Alamos laboratories had a monopoly on computers, and the computers were designed for us," "So for a period of 20 years the development of computers depended on these labs." "This way we could calculate things that we couldn't do before." "As a young government scientist Dick White used the computers to test the impact of a nuclear bomb But by the early 1960s much of the work on the bomb was done." "White and his colleagues aimed the computer at the black hole." "Many theorists still didn't share the conviction that black holes could be created out of collapsing stars." "They simply believed that the collapse couldn't go that far." "Their theory was that the core of the star, the iron core would collapse." "This collapse would cause thermo-nuclear ...reactions that would blow up the star." "We set out believing in this model, sure enough it collapsed we had no doubt it was going to do that but it didn't follow their script." "What it did was to instead just continue on collapsing and never came to rest as the pressure built up." "The computers predicted a large dying star would continue collapsing to form a black hole." "It seemed Wheeler had been right to support Oppenheimer's ideas." "We didn't expect the computers calculations." "That was an extraordinary time for me." "There was a lot of excitement about this results." "Relativists were quite excited because in a way it said things that they had said for years, very super massive condensed stars with big gravitational fields may indeed exist." "This is the plot of the velocity of the in-falling material in the star that has collapsed beginning to form a black hole At this point where the most rapidly in falling material is the velocity about 90% the velocity of light." "Computer calculations show that at least some explosions of stars would form black holes." "But, if nothing can get out of a black hole," "How can we detect one?" "We came to the state where we said, well maybe we ought to look around ...for these things and see if we can actually se them out there." "Working out how to see the invisible wasn't so easy but long before a way to look for black holes emerged, vivid imaginations were feeding off scientific fact." "There it is." "A black hole it's pulling the star apart." "Coleen nodded, a rare event and we're just in time for it." "The hole swallows stars but first it likes to chew them up." "He could barely make himself look as the view swung inwards towards eye-hurting brilliance." "The disc revolved about a white hot ball with blistering energy." "Gregory Benford is a best selling science fiction writer His stories are all the more plausible because he's also a plasma physicist." "I began to realise that there was at least a case now emerging." "There might be a black hole at the centre of our galaxy." "Not just a couple of times the mass of the sun but a thousand or a million times." "And that thrilled me." "There is gotta be some great special effects in a place like that." "But, What would it do?" "What would it be like if you fell into a black hole?" "What would it fell like to be stretched out as a noodle ...by the tidal force as you fall into one?" "Could you live near one?" "How would you make a living?" "Once science fiction had brought the threat of black holes to our doorstep, its menace captured the imagination." "The black hole could grow to unbelievable proportions." "Once it stars swallowing matter nothing can escape it Not even stars or whole galaxies." "It becomes massive and able to eat some more matter." "It becomes the eater of all things because nothing survives it." "If this happens at the centre of the galaxy where the stars are more concentrated, there is more dust and gas That's where the black hole is made and that's where the feeding trough is." "They star to eat the surroundings." "Black holes were an area in which real scientific calculations was way ahead of science fiction." "That only caught later." "One question many science fiction writers speculate on was..." "What would happen inside a black hole?" "Computer calculations couldn't be trusted for this because they would be inaccurate in the extreme conditions." "The answer was supplied by the mathematician Roger Penrose who had been encourage by Dennis Sciama to work on general relativity." "Roger and his father Lionel, wrote a paper which I guess Escher made famous later." "It was called lmpossible Objects and it said that you could design an object on a piece of paper Escher made such designs which can't be realised in the real world." "real." "There is a picture when the steps go round in a circuit but they're always going down as you keep going round." "You end up where you began and yet you've been going down all the way." "You can draw something which suggest that but you couldn't construct in the real world." "Rogger Penrose had the kind of mind that would conceive relationships of that sort." "There was a debate as to whether in the collapse of the stars it would achieve infinite density in the central region." "I f the theory says it reaches infinite densities, then in a sense the theory has broken down and there would be a contradiction the theory wouldn't be self-consistent." "If our best theory of gravitation is not even self-consistent then we have a crisis in physics." "The theory of relativity contains in itself the seeds of its own decay." "This point of infinite density was called a singularity" "Most scientists thought that somehow in the real world a singularity could never form." "But Penrose had no such hang-ups and he showed in 1965 that at star ...in its end stages under natural conditions would end up in this self-contradictory state of infinite density." "The theorists' nightmares were true." "If black holes existed, they destroyed twentieth-century physics at the singularity." "But Sciama kept encouraging his students to look deeper into the singularity." "I was awarded my doctorate for showing that the questions Penrose was raising about black holes would apply equally well to the early universe." "Both the big bang and the black holes would take singularities places where space and time come to an end and the laws of physics break down." "The incredible power associated with the holes made it seem even more likely that they might be the key to understanding the energetic quasars" "If this was the case it was vital to prove that the black holes existed But what were the telltales signs to look for?" "In Russia as in the EEUU, the scientists that had worked on nuclear weapons were now tackling the physics of black holes Yakov Zeldovich made it his task to find a way to detect them" "Zeldovich apparently never forgot anything." "Everything went into ...understanding how to see a black hole, I'm sure that working on the H" " Bomb helped him in astrophysics because after all most of astrophysics is forms of controlled H-bomb." "...How would you see a black hole anyway?" "...You can't see it directly." "You know the lion by its paw print but that's less dangerous than approaching a lion." "So he said suppose you've got two stars moving around like this and one of them is a black hole ...and it has a powerful gravitational influence and it can actually suck the gas off the surface of this other star." "First it gets torn apart by tidal forces as it tries to orbit the black hole ...then these shred it, smears it around and the parts bump into each other, the begin to grind upon each other, the density is high and they heat up." "They heat up, they give off emission ...electromagnetic waves, X-rays." "Zeldovich suggested that by looking for burst of X-rays, astronomers ...could find stars with appeared to orbiting nothing-evidence ...of a black hole." "Observational evidence was beginning to come but it was still uncertain I didn't want to see all my work go to waste, so I made a bet with Kit Thorme, a student of John Wheeler." "It was more an insurance policy for Steve, rather than what he really believed because he bet with Thorme claiming that ...black holes didn't exist in nature but they did in theory, and he bet one year of Penhouse against for years of Private Eye, on the grounds that if black holes do exist, he has to pay Thorme an amount, but if they don't exist and all his work on black holes is wasted, at least he gets copies of a nice magazine." "A new generation of astronomers, including Alex Filippenko were inspired to look for stars which appeared to be trapped in orbit around a black hole." "You choose the ones that are the most likely candidates, and those by Zeldovich's hypothesis were the X-ray-emitting stars." "So we found ...an object which had burst out into the X-ray world in 1988 and we wanted ...to wait until it quieted down because along with the X-ray outburst you get an outburst of light, radio light, everything." "For quiet a while the matter which is being dumped into the black hole glows so much that it completely dominates the light from the star that oscillates back and forth." "So you have to wait for a while until this things fades" "Until the black hole stops stealing material from the companion star." "So we waited." "Seven years after they first observed it, the heat and the light ...from the disk matter surrounding the object started to fade." "Filippenko and his colleagues got themselves ready." "We wanted to find as direct evidence as we can that a dark star is pulling on a companion star so the way to do that is to measure the motion of the companion star and so you can never directly take a photograph, it just appeared black the best you can really do is measure it's influence on material around it." "We can then look for minute shifts in the colour of the light coming from this star and if these shifts are found and they go back and forth periodically that's an indication that something is tugging on the star." "With a telescope finally locked on the star, Filippenko begins to analyse the light it emits." "There's the star we think is orbiting a black hole let's get a spectrum of it." "As he star moves round some unseen object the light from the star shifts from the red end of the spectrum towards the blue end and back." "From the speed of this shift Filippenko can calculate the size of the object." "We are trying to prove that an extreme form of nature exist a form of nature predicted by Einstein's general theory ...of relativity, but which is not necessarily something that nature coses to adopt." "Black holes, you know they are in science fiction, and it's a wonderful topic." "The more evidence that builds up, the more scientists are convinced that black holes do exist." "Many theorists came up with many explanations for individual objects." "But when you find a whole collection of objects which show the same phenomenon that can be explain quiet naturally under the black hole hypotheses and quiet unnaturally using other hypotheses that leaves you with an unfulfilled feeling." "You're thinking of a new theory for every object and it just doesn't feel right ...but when you have a whole class of objects which are behaving the same way and are well explained with one simple theory, that gives you some confidence that what we're really seeing is a black hole." "The evidence for black holes was so good that that I no longer felt the need for insurance." "I have concede my bet and Thorme started to receive Penhouse magazine, greatly to disgust his liberated wife." "Once it was clear that black holes had to exist astronomers began to work out what exactly their connections might be with quarars, and the way the universe evolved." "Quarars appear to be denizens of the early universe, they just don't exist nowadays." "Yet if they are powered by material falling into a black hole long ago ...their remains exist here today in the centre of normal looking galaxies." "...their remains exist here today in the centre of normal looking galaxies." "So that with the passage of time the quasars centre gradually ...used up all the gas and other material in its vicinity, it stopped" "eating this material, and hence it faded with time because ...the quasar glows only while it's swallowing material." "Astronomers have found evidence of stars moving around ...very rapidly, in the central region of what appears to be a..." "materials seem to be going around so quickly, in such a small space that no theorist has dreamed up anything else other than a black hole that could be hidden inside the central region of this galaxy." "The disc revolved around a white hut ball sizzling with blistering energy." "Why is everything so hut?" "Friction." "All that stuff orbiting tighter and tighter around the hole it rubs up against other stuff, gas, dust and it heats up." "There is so much of it, whole stars are being ground down into ...gas and dust, they churn against each other, they heat up the entire disc becomes lit up." "It's brightest at the centre where the velocities are highest because the velocity gets higher ...the closer you get to the black hole." "This big shining disc not a compact disc, is visible at immense distances because it shines particularly out, in the directions perpendicular to the disc of the galaxy across the whole universe." "That's what we believe quasars are." "The discs and their surroundings also get heated up shinning out from the far past, because the quasars we see are dead now." "They don't last a long time." "They burn up their energy so quickly." "So we're looking millions and millions of years into the past and seeing galaxies Bring their inheritance prolificantely they send us this momentary signal and then they turn into cinders ...eventually they go out." "The centre of our galaxy was never in that league, it was never a billion stellar masses it was maybe a million but once it shone more brightly ...than it does now." "It would have been dangerous to live right next to it then." "We may understand now how black holes and quasars are related ...but There is plenty of mystery left." "I have found that things can get out of black holes." "On a microscopic scale, there is always a bit of uncertainly in the ...speed of a particle." "This means that particles can travel faster than light and can escape from a black hole." "Other people call this Hawking radiation but I don't feel I can use this term." "Many physicists believe that this radiation will be completely determined by what fell into the black hole." "But I think the radiation will be random and will not carry any information about what fell in." "I have another bet with Thorme but this time we are on the same side, we bet against John Briscil, that information is lost in black holes." "The loser will buy the winner an encyclopaedia from which information can easily be retrieved." "Scientists have learned from the discovery of black holes that it is unwise to resist unlikely ideas" "Seth Shostak from SETI sees implications of his own work." "In many ways the black hole story is somewhat analogous to what we're doing because black holes were found on blackboards ...before they were found in the sky." "That's not the normal way in astronomy." "Normally you go to the telescope and you find something you hadn't expected and then you try to explain it." "But black holes were found by theoreticians years before anybody had any hope of finding them with a telescope." "Same thing with seti, we expect that the galaxy is rife with ...technological civilisations, that's what we expect, and it's based ...on reasonable assumption." "Now we use the radio telescope to go out ...and see." "Can we actually hear ET?" "There is a crucial difference between the search for black holes and the search for ET." "So far, in 36 years of listening we haven't heard a single peep from the cosmos." "That's a fact, that's the bottom line." "But with the bizarre predictions of black holes physics do ...throw up new possibilities for SETI" "We don't broadcast in SETI and the reason is because the distances are quite large, the nearest civilization is a ...a hundred light years away." "If you send an inquiry it takes a 100 years to get there and if they reply it takes another 100 years." "That's two hundred years, at that point you've lost interest." "There may not be a problem with time." "When the laws of physics break down, deep inside a black hole, extraordinary ...posibilites exist." "Theorists talk seriously of time travel ...and worm holes, a kind of tunnels in space and time through which we might escape our universe and arrive in another." "Black hole physics gets down to the real nitty gritty in the edges of what we know about physics and that's what attracts me because it's chance to make that breakthrough towards the unknown." "There suggestions that this speed limit on communications and and transport." "You can't go faster than the speed of light." "But the physics of black holes suggest that there may be other ways to send information using the physics of black holes or black holes themselves." "That might imply there's some practical way to take advantage of that." "And if there are civilizations in the galaxy, remember we are the new kids on the block." "The earth has been here four or five years but the galaxy has been here at least twice that long." "So there may be some civilizations that are very much more advanced than we are they might be taking advantage of that and it may be that we're sitting around with our radio receivers hoping to get signals and all the really interesting traffic is being communicated in a way that we're not yet aware of." "Everybody will pay lip service to the fact that bizarre predictions or being able to drop into a black hole and go to another universe." "But they say it with caution because they've learn the lesson that what is today's unthinkable is tomorrow's convention." "Black holes are a remarkable prediction of Einstein's theory, that seems to be born out by our observations." "But the theory may allow even more extraordinary possibilities ...like rapid intergalactic transit or time travel." "If it does, why haven't we been visited by aliens from the future?" "Some people will claim we have been visited and that's what UFO's are." "But I think such contacts would be much more obvious and probably very nasty." "The universe of Stephen Hawking." "Personally I'm sure that the Universe began with a hot big bang but will it go on for ever?" "And if not How will it end?" "I am much less certain about that." "The expansion of the universe Stretched everything out." "But gravity tries to pull it all back Together Again." "Our destiny depends on which Force will win." "And the influence of gravity depends On what the universe is made of and just how much of it there is." "It won't be easy to find out if most of it is dark matter." "Stuff we can't even see." "On the dark side." "As a child in India, Priva Natarajan dreamed of becoming a poet Twenty years later, In Cambridge she's a astrophysicist, Trying to build a perfect model of the universe." "There is this impression that Everything the scientists do is very" "Circumscribed." "We are bringing the Ways in which we perform a model the ingredients that we put, and the way in which we choose to mix them has a lot to do with our Feelings and our sense and intuition of how things ought to be." "It's almost like writing poetry You pick a particular poetic form." "You could pick the sonnet or the Japanese haiku, each of these forms ...has a set of rules so you Operate within a set of rules." "This is very similar to the laws of Physics, that you operate within in a model, There is a lot of freedom There is a lot of choices you can make." "Priva's life was changed when she Was awarded a top science scholarship at Cambridge." "Her area of cosmology is profoundly creative." "Priva's subject is the Fate of galaxies in our universe." "We see the stars than shine in the Galaxy, we also have evidence that there is some gas since we can See the light that's scattered off." "Galaxies contain a lot more than Just that." "Priya's imagination was fired when She came across research done ...in the 1950s by a young American Scientist Vera Rubin." "What Vera Rubin did in her work was Map the speeds of stars at different distances From the center of a huge spiral galaxy." "Vera Rubin noticed something which Made nonsense of what she'd been taught." "Stars spinning around the Center of galaxies were supposed to ...behave just like the planets That orbit the sun." "But they don't." "With our solar system, you have the sun in the center and you have sort of the planets orbiting around, the outer planets move much slower than the planets on the inside." "People expected to find something similar in the galaxy." "If you measure the speed of the stars away from, the center towards the edge you expect it to fall off." "And what Vera found instead when she actually measured that for a ...spiral galaxy, was that the speed stayed the same as she sort of mapped the speed of the stars from the inside out, they stayed the same." "Vera Rubin saw that the galaxy center could not be the exerting ...gravity on the stars." "For all the stars in a galaxy to move at the same speed as each other, There had to be a force at work all around them." "But nothing which could produce such a force could be seen." "Vera suggested that every galaxy must be surrounded by matter that we can't see, but the scientific establishment at the time wasn't ready what she called dark matter." "Her announcement of dark matter associated with every galaxy was received with skepticism because of the far-reaching ...implications it had and also the inferred percentage of dark matter." "She inferred that almost 90% of the mass in a spiral galaxy had to be dark." "The movement of stars in a galaxy must be controlled by stuff we can't see." "Around every galaxy there needs to a halo of dark matter invisible looking trapping the stars in a strange place with the gravity it exerts." "The stars aren't stranded in the vastness of space." "It's just that we can't see at least 90% of what's out there." "It could be as much as 90%." "For a cosmologist like myself it's crucial to know how much dark matter there is in order to know what will become of the universe." "The total mass of the universe is what decides the fate of our destiny." "Whether we continue expanding or we turn around Back on ourselves." "So the ultimate fate depends on..." "How web we have made an inventory of the mass in the universe." "And therefore if such a large fraction is indeed dark, that has very important consequences." "Scientists now doubt that Vera Rubin was right." "Dark matter determines the future of the universe." "To know our ultimate fate, we need to be sure that dark matter exists and how much of it there is." "Searching for the invisible is not for the faint-hearted." "When Chris Stubbs first said he Wanted to look for dark matter his colleagues said he was crazy." "That wasn't the way to a safe job." "There is a lot of science to do and it's important to choose what you spend your time doing, and my taste for a long time has run towards fundamental problems that may be very difficult to address experimentally but have a very large impact on our understanding of the universe" "Chris staked his career on finding something that couldn't be seen." "But nobody knew exactly what dark matter was, they had to decide how to target their search." "We're carrying out an experiment to look for a particular kind of matter which we call machos that stands for massive compact halo object." "the idea is that our galaxy has a big halo of dark matter around it that's made out of astronomical objects that for one reason don't shine like the stars that we see." "These astronomical objects, the decomposing corpses of dead stars, ...are thought to litter the universe." "They could be as big as the earth or 10 times bigger than the sun." "These machos might explain what Vera Rubin had seen." "If so, they'd be found in the outskirts of the galaxy." "That's the right place to search." "But finding them would be like looking for a black bat on a dark night." "The one thing that he knew was that his subjects were fairly heavy and if they were heavy they would have a gravitational effect on light passing nearby." "The macho-hunters turned to Einstein's general theory of relativity to tell them how gravity affects light." "Einstein's general theory of relativity tells us that light passing close to an object like the sun or a lamp of dark it distorts the image and it makes it appear brighter." "According to Einstein's theory if the huge mass of a macho passed between us and a distant group of stars we would see the stars would progressively brighten and then fade back to normal." "Chris Stubbs's team analyzed thousands of images of stars to prove their point." "Two years after we started the experiment we were looking through the data trying to understand how to analyze it and much to our surprise, found exactly what we thought we were looking for." "We saw a star get brighter and then fainter Again with exactly the signature that's predicted by the general relativity." " OK, this looks like a definite, it fits it pretty well." "Our experiment has detected a previously unknown component of this galaxy." "It's a stunning result." "The first dark matter had been detected." "It really is out There." "But did these machos solve the riddle posed by Vera Rubin?" "Could There be enough of them around each galaxy to exert the gravitational effects she had observed?" "The simplest point of view is that the machos are ordinary matter made up of the same material that exists in stars it just didn't happen to end up in stars." "And we think we know exactly how much ordinary matter There is in the universe, and it just isn't enough to solve the dark matter problem of the universe." "We need to find some more kinds of dark matter." "Machos were big, so why not try something tiny?" "One candidate was a well-known particle, the neutrino." "This is produce in atomic bomb explosions so it would also have been produced in the big bang explosion." "If it ha a tiny mass of its own it could be the dark matter." "Or it could be one of the so-called exotic particles whose existence was predicted by theory, ...but which were very hard to detect in reality." "Perhaps they are actually out There, silently shaping the evolution of the universe." "Carlos Frenk, professor of Astronomy at Durham University is fascinated by how things grow and change." "I think There is a great parallel between the evolution of the largest system, the universe and the evolution of the biological system, like a person or like my son." "I wonder what are the factors that are going to influence the development of my son, whether he will be a physicist or a scientist or a musician or something else." "I don't understand what are the forces that are going to drive him in one or other direction." "The universe is simpler because we have a much greater mastery over the laws that govern the evolution of the universe." "Carlos is confident he can describe how the baby universe grew into the universe we know today." "He believes that the dark matter exerted a powerful influence." "Carlos' fascination with how things evolve has found its outlet in physics." "He doesn't know yet whether it will be the same for his son." "Carlos' dream is to grow a perfect model of the universe in his computer from its violent birth to the..." "And that will only happen if he programs in exactly the right ...characteristics of the dark matter." "he starts every attempt just a second after the big bang." "Prior to that time the universe was made up of a cosmic soup of elemental particles and radiation." "Nothing else could exist in the midst of this tremendous heat but after about a hundred seconds the universe had cooled down to a ten million degrees but this temperature is now low enough that the first thermonuclear fusion reactions can take place." "Carlos believes that at this critical moment, a mysterious group of particles broke free from the pack." "Instead of forming the galaxies and the stars they began to cluster Together to become the dark matter." "These clusters of dark matter had a gravitational pull on the ordinary matter." "As the lumps of dark matter grew bigger and bigger in the expanding universe they pulled in more and more ordinary matter which condensed to become stars." "Eventually one billion years after the big bang the first galaxies began to form." "In the early 1980s, Carlos was ready to build a model of the universe." "The idea that was around at the time was that the dark matter could consist of small elementary particles called neutrinos." "Carlos wondered if the neutrinos from the big bang could be the ...dark matter." "That was the very trendy ideal it was the first concrete proposal we had for what the dark matter could be this way very significant and some people would say it was the signal of the beginning of the revolution in the way in which we study the universe because for the first time the neutrino hypothesis provided a concrete starting point that we could explore in an unambiguous ...fashion using the tools of evolutionary cosmology." "Neutrinos travel across the universe at virtually the speed of light." "Every second about 100 neutrinos pass straight through your body." "The universe is thick with them." "Nothing seems to be able to stop the neutrino." "When they meet a solid object like the earth they simply float through it, and this makes them extremely hard to catch." "But it's very important that we find whether the neutrinos has mass without mass they wouldn't exert gravity and so couldn't be the dark matter." "In northern France, Yves Declais wants to catch neutrinos and see if they do have any mass." "When you prepare your bait, when you prepare your detector and the trap is ready, you have to install it at the right place." "So you go and you think you will be able to detect a neutrino you will be able to get out some fish and after that just have t wait but you have to work and you will see what will be the results." "How many neutrinos did you get?" "how many fish did you get?" "Neutrinos are produced in nuclear reactions." "Yves Declais has set up his project in a decommissioned bunker beside a nuclear power station." "In this experiment we want to see if the nature of the neutrino change between the source of the neutrino and the detector one kilometer away." "And if the nature of the neutrino, change during this path of 1 km we can demonstrate that this is related to the existence of a mass," "For the neutrino." "It's a little bit complicated to compute but it's a very simple system." "Once they had set up their equipment the scientists must wait." "Apart from routine checks there's nothing to do until their highly sensitive detector begins to pick up passing neutrinos." "All the data from the detector is fed down ground lines to the chateau where Yves and the team live." "they wan t to establish if they detect less neutrinos now then when they set up the same equipment much nearer to the reactor." "If the numbers aren't the same they will know that the neutrino has mass." "It may take years to find out, but it will be a result with huge implications." "This is very important for particle physics and also for cosmology and astrophysics." "the neutrino is one of the best candidates for the dark matter for the missing matter of the universe, if it has a mass." "Even if the mass is very tiny because the universe is completely filled by a lot of neutrinos coming, from the whole universe from the first traces of the universe." "Meanwhile, Carlos Frenk was hammering away at a theoretical" "Approach." "He assumed that the neutrinos had mass and see what kind of a universe would allow his computer to build." "So we programmed our computer to follow the evolution of the universe in which the dark matter was made up of massive neutrinos and the aim was to produce in the computer a synthetic universe that we could then compare with the real thing." "So we programmed our computer up in this fashion and let it churn away over Christmas and when we came back, we saw the first maps being generated by the computer." "We have a recognizable universe, a credible universe, something that is made galaxies clusters, that is competitive with the real" "Universe." "It was a great sense of elation at the thought that we might have solved what was already clearly the main unsolved problem in cosmology, one of those feelings that you have once in your lifetime and you think you are stumbled upon something major." "That was our first impression." "But his first impressions were deceptive." "Carlos was so elated to have grown a computer universe that at first he didn't notice the truth." "On a closer inspection his modeled universe didn't quite look like the real thing." "But Carlos wasn't tempted to give up his computer modeling." "He was still convinced that studying the universe would prove easier than pursuing some other branch of science." "It is paradoxical that we can Understand the universe better than we can understand a tiny part." "My son is an insignificant little speck in this gigantic universe and yet I can understand the universe better than I can understand my son." "I regard myself as a very lucky physicist, rather than a biologist or a psychologist." "They have a much tougher time than we do because we deal with systems that are intrinsically simple, while they deal with much more complex and in some ways magical world of humans, who are essentially unpredictable." "Particle physicists urged Carlos to consider a hypothetical particle ...one of the so called exotic particles." "Why should he try only known particles?" "Any more than his son should practice only one skill." "The neutrino had been so lively or hot to build a realistic universe." "They urged Carlos to try something more sluggish something we could call "cold dark matter"" "Our next sep was to change our starting assumption" "And take the dark matter to be composed of cold dark matter." "We were very skeptical when we started this new project We got fed up with particles physicists trying to tell us astronomers what the universe was made of." "They were supposed to be working on something else and our approach was at first very, ...cynical so we tried to get rid of them." "We'd ruled out the neutrinos now let's go and rule out cold dark matter as well so they can go and do their thing own thing with accelerators and we can sep on doing our own thing trying to understand how galaxies form." "What happen with these cold dark cold matter turned out to be far richer and far more interesting than we ever had any" "Right to expect." "Carlos has blended neutrinos and cold dark matter in ...his latest computer model but can he be sure clod dark matter?" "The burden of Prof. Is on the experimentalists that have to detect these particles and until that happens we can't be certain that this is a correct theory." "If they do succeed this really will be an outstanding achievement and if I say the dark matter turns out to be an exotic elementary particle, this really will go down in history as one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever." "The evidence suggests that most of T he universe is made up of something no-one has ever seen." "bits nature, cold dark matter has ...to be hard to detect." "finding a way to do so is one of the most difficult tasks in physics today." "Here in the North Yorkshire Moors a small team of British scientists is tipped to win the race." "They are led by Neil Spooner." "It's very astounding that at the end of the twentieth century we don't know what the universe is made of." "maybe even 90% and that puts one" "In, as a human being into some perspective that the earth is not the center of the solar system and maybe we aren't even the only life now and we're not even made of particular common matter in the sense that we're not the typical matter that is around because most of it's dark matter which we don't know what it is." "Like neutrinos, cold dark matter is very difficult to distinguish from the rain of other cosmic particles that bombards the surface of the earth any detector would have to be protected, deep underground." "It just happens that my father is a mining engineer so I asked him what was the deepest mine in Britain, naively, thinking it would be a coal mine, which would be useless for us because it would be quite difficult to work in a coal because of the safety aspect of it." "But he looked it up and the answer was Bowlby which is a salt mine, which is ideal for us." "Bowlby mine is not only the deepest in Britain, but the deepest in Europe." "The lift travels at 19 Km." "An hour for 5 long minutes, taking them a mile underground." "...At this depth the air is..." " ...10 degrees hotter than it is at the surface, and very dry." "Their intricate scientific equipment must be built to withstand these hostile conditions." "Trying to work deep underground in the salt mine it's a technological fight because we're dealing with fairly intricate electronics and we're trying to be clean and trying that in a mine is sort of very difficult." "The Yorkshire miners seem to enjoy working next to a group of fundamental particles physicists." "So they all say, have you found it Yet?" "Not yet but we're working on it, or something else." "It might seem odd to the miners that if dark matter makes up 99% of ...the universe it should be so hard to find." "But the particles that Neil Spooner Is looking for aren't known as ...weakly interactive massive particles for nothing." "These so called wimps try to avoid contact at all costs." "These particles are neutral, they're not charged." "Their interaction is like a sort of billiard-ball effect." "if they interact, which mainly they don't but when they do, they just will strike an atom which will recoil." "What we're looking for is this little recoils of atoms." "We're talking about very small distances, thousands of a millimeter or something and move on and as this atoms recoils it gives off some energy." "in our case, light, and you try and detect this light." "To shield their detector from radioactive rays from the rock they suspend in 200 tons of distilled water." "We're over a kilometer underground so we've got rid of the cosmic rays and we're in the water so we can screen off the stuff sitting here waiting for a wimp." "Our detector was a simple crystal which gives off little bursts of light when struck by a particle and when we have to really amplify this light because it's very, very low level." "We use this device called a photomultiplier to convert light into electrons and these are then multiplied and you get for every one that comes in you get about a million coming out and that provides a nice big signal which you can then measure and record." "In the last year or two we have made significant progress." "We've improved our detector such that we're now about fifty times more sensitive than anyone else was previously." "But we still need to get probably another 100 times better." "If we do that, then we should see them or we should not see them." "If we see them, then maybe we've discovered what dark matter is or what most of the dark matter is." "If we don't see them, that's also pretty exciting because it's got to be something and if it's not wimps maybe it's not machos and maybe neutrinos don't have mass we don't know, it's got to be something, so that would deepen the mystery." "Even when the dark matter is discovered, because it's there to be discovered and it will be discovered, I'm sure of that." "As sure as a scientist, but when it's discovered, I think the whole jigsaw of our universe will fall into place." "We will understand not only why Our universe looks the way it does why There are galaxies, how they Came to be, why there are planets why There are stars, but we will Also understand what the ultimate fate of our universe will be." "There are two possibilities." "If There is only a small amount of dark matter, the universe will continue to expand for ever, getting colder and colder and more and more empty." "On the other hand if There is a lot of dark matter, gravity will slow down the expansion of the universe and stop it eventually." "Then the universe will begin to contract and will end up in a big crunch, like the big bang in reverse." "From What we know now, it could go either way." "If a place a bet, I think I know which fate I'd back." "But how would I collect after the big crunch?" "Whichever way the universe goes its evolution is being affected by dark matter right now." "but before we have even discovered what it's made of, some astronomers have begun mapping its effects." "A map of the universe you have to do it in three dimensions and human beings are very good at making two-dimensional maps the challenge is getting that third dimension, being able to close your eyes and see in three-D what's around you." "It's a challenge but it's on." "When we first started this mapping business, it was very primitive." "People knew that there were clusters and so on." "It was a little like Stanley going to Africa, he knew where the Congo river was and the Nile, but not much about anything else." "Sandra Faber's enthusiasm for her subject is legendary." "Thanks to numerous collaborations she has done as much as anyone to further dark matter research." "her mapping techniques were to reveal far more than the patterns already establish with... conventional two-dimensional maps." "What we are going to see here is three slices of the universe." "The earth is down here in this diagram and now we see the first slice being displayed like this." "each little black dot is a galaxy." "This image was taken from the southern hemisphere and now we see, finally, the third slice is coming up here." "What's interesting about these maps is that the galaxies aren't uniformly distributed in space." "They tend to pile up along these walls." ""Some people have called them "soap" "bubbles" and the insides of these..."" ""...spaces are called "voids"." they're relatively empty of galaxies and of course this structure expands as the universe." "...large structure?" "...large structure?" "Sandra's hunch was that this structure was created by an unseen web of dark matter." "so she set out to prove it using the most advanced telescopes in the world." "Observing is almost mystical." "It's the act that really puts me in contact with the rest of the universe." "Sitting there and accepting these photons I imaging projecting..." "Myself back along that same path." "I know it sounds ridiculous being in communication and communion with where they came from." "I often think if somebody's looking back at me, I wonder if their telescope is bigger than mine." "Even through telescopes of this size, galaxies appear as tiny specks many millions of light years away." "But to prove her theory, Sandra Faber needed to achieve measurements of unbelievable precision." "The slightest variation in air temperature can invalidate a night's observations." "before each run the telescope is cooled with liquid nitrogen." "Once everything is ready they retreat to the warmth of the control room from where they can aim their telescope." "This is our next observation." "What was this galaxy?" "Yes, this was NGC 5813 15 years ago when Sandra and her colleagues created a new mapping technique." "They hoped this would reveal the effects of dark matter across the whole universe." "They were completely astonished by the picture that they finally pieced together." "We realized that if we plotted all of these motions of galaxies with an enormous region of space including us, was moving roughly in parallel like a big river of galaxies at breakneck speed of 600 km per second." "and that was a new thought for us." "We're surprised, we said, hat have we discovered?" "This is really remarkable." "Then we began to look at our survey in more detail, and we saw that in fact, off in the distance, towards which ...this great river was following was a very large structure..." ""...which one of us named "the great" "attractor" and it turn out to be a..."" "...very big supercluster of galaxies, and our motion towards that is due to its gravity." "It's pulling all of us in and it's something like 50 to 100 billion years from now." "Our galaxy will be one of several thousand on orbit in the great supercluster called the great attractor." "The force of the dark matter around the great attractor is pulling us across intergalactic space at 600 km per second An unseen web of dark matter is controlling the universe, It's dragging all the galaxies together into clusters and superclusters and leaving behind huge voids in space." "The way the dark matter clusters will affect exactly how galaxies form and how superclusters, voids walls and so on form dark matter is key, it is controlling the motion of everything else, it's making the galaxies form, it's making the large scale structures of form." "It's in charge." "We can still only guess about where dark matter is taking us lf Sandra Faber were pushed she thinks she knows how she'd place her bet." "Currently it looks as though there's not enough matter in the universe, to retard the expansion." "If we had to bet right now we'd probably bet that the universe will expand for ever." "It's a fascinating idea, if the universe expands for ever what will happen to it as it cools off?" "Stars are gradually consuming all the gas in galaxies." "Over time it will all be used up, those stars will burn and use up their fuel and die become cold, dead remnants, white white dwarves, maybe some black holes in there." "Galaxies are ever merging to make yet larger structures but will become ever dimmer as the stars in them die out and ultimately even the very stuff of which stars are made the protons, neutrons, and so on will decay and it may be that the ultimate state of the universe is to have no matter at all, a sea of elementary particles, dead protons, nothing else." "The alternative of a big crunch is not much better." "A few years ago when I was giving a lecture, I was asked not to mention the end of the universe in case it depressed a stock market" "But I can reassure worried investors either way, the universe is good for many billions of years more." "The end may be coming, but not just yet." "Stephen Hawking' universe" "In the last 100 years, our our understanding of the universe has advanced far more than in previous centuries." "We have discovered that the universe and time itself had a beginning 15.000 million years ago." "There was a cosmic explosion ...of energy called the big bang" "The energy produced all of the matter in the universe from stars and galaxies to our own planet and even ourselves." "Yet one question still needs an answer: how did the big bang begin?" "We need to know the laws that held at the moment of creation when the universe sprang into existence." "Do these laws still exists?" "are they over and above the laws that tell us how the universe evolve?" "Is There a theory of everything that governs the universe at all times and determines ...how it begins and develops?" "An answer to everything." "Atlantic City is a giant playground but for many the fading attractions of old Atlantic City are less fascinating than the uncertainties of its modern casinos..." "Sydney Coleman knows it's the same with physics." "Physics stars out by trying to explain the short of phenomena that ...occur in everyday life, balls bouncing and planets grounding ...around the sun, and all that stuff." "That's the sort of stuff that you encounter in everyday life." "And your tacit assumptions about those things and how they behave are deeply embedded in the language of everyday speech that's how the language of everyday speech developed." "But physics has now probed beyond the familiar." "Theorists like Coleman spend their days making long imaginary journeys into strange worlds far removed from everyday life." "As physics develop and want to find out more and more, they try to" "Understand physics which reveal itself only under extreme conditions" "On the inside of an atom, in a high energy accelerator, in a quasar... during the beginning of the universe now it would be really remarkable if the concepts of everyday speech continued to be valid when we extend the universe of study so enormously." "It's only natural that, as we get farther from everyday experience, the theories we have to describe all this new stuff, in addition to everyday experience, should look less and less intuitive." "why should your intuitions have developed to be God inside a quasars?" "Your ancestors did not spend any time inside quasars." "Things seen to get from our viewpoint, our earth-bound viewpoint, stranger and stranger." "One thing we now accept is that The universe is expanding." "But if it is getting bigger with Time, then it must once have been ...very small." "When you trace the evolution of The universe backwards in time you ...inevitably find yourself being pushed towards the physics of the" "Very small." "This small world has its own strange language." "And it's at this scale, millions of times smaller than a single atom that the universe must have begun" "The study of these subatomic particles is called quantum mechanics." "Two foundation stones on which we've built the current modern picture of the universe and the matter in it are quantum mechanics ...and general relativity." "Einstein was instrumental in both of those theories, he was a founder of ...quantum theory and the sole inventor of general relativity and the picture that they give us of the universe is a very God one, in the sense we can make a lot of predictions and" "...explain a lot of phenomena but the picture is really only partial in many ways, and one of the problems is that the two theories, in fact, don't fit together." "Einstein's theory of general relativity describes the large-scale ...universe we see today." "Quantum mechanics describes the behaviour ...of things smaller than atoms." "As small as the universe was when it ...first formed." "A complete description of the universe has to embrace everything from the tiniest particle to the largest galaxy." "The two theories have to match up." "Einstein believed that he could find a way to make them fit because ...the methods that he had applied to problems in physics before had worked, he'd been successful in unifying things." "His instinct was ...that There should be a theory which described the two theories." "At the time, Einstein was the only one thinking that the theories could ...be unified." "Isolated by the scientific community worked on." "He spent decades on this work." "He worked alone." "I think that no-one ...else shared his view, that this was the way to go, in unification." "So he was very solitary, and he was working by himself up until ...the day he died." "When Einstein died in 1.955, half finished notes describing a theory of unification were discovered by his bed." "He failed to achieve his dream." "But Einstein was ahead of his time." "Forty years later, the importance ...of his lone quest has become recognised." "Now, theorists everywhere are searching for a single equation to describe the workings of the entire universe." "What they want is a theory of everything." "At the beginning, the universe is a central point." "The next instant, it is enormous." "To understand this properly, we need a theory of everything." "Which is still just beyond our grasp." "We already have some ideas why the expansion of the early universe ...was precisely what it was." "There are already a number of mathematical equations which begin to describe how the universe must have grown." "They have been built up from the evidence we've now glimpsed of what conditions in the early universe must have been like." "It's only by constantly matching theory and observation that a clearer picture can emerge." "Giant particle accelerators, such as SLAC, in California smash atoms into each other." "These explosive collisions create energies, temperatures, and pressures which can be measured" "The same measurable conditions must have existed in the early universe." "In the 70s, scientists began to tackle the unbelievable mathematical balance necessary for our universe to exist what was always needed," "And nobody had pointed out was that you had to assume that the expansion rate of the early universe was tuned almost exactly right, almost exactly the right expansion rate so that the universe would be just on the verge of eternal expansion versus eventual collapse." "When we talk about the universe at ...a time of one second after the Big bang, this had to be done to an ...accuracy of about 15 decimal places." "If the universe expanded one ...part faster than we thought it had, it would fly apart without galaxies ever having a change to form." "If one second after the big bang were expanding with one number less in the fifteenth decimal ...place, then the universe would collapse before galaxies had had a ...chance to form." "To make the universe work, The universe had to be perched just on this borderline." "Guth was puzzled that our universe should be the product of such a magical equilibrium, slowly growing in perfectly balanced ...expansion for the last 15.000 million years." "Alan Guth had managed to grapple with mathematics of extraordinary responding to the simple intuitive questions of a child." "When I was still a kid, I asked myself:" "How would it happen that in different parts of the universe expansion started simultaneously?" "Who gave the signal?" "How can I understand it?" "And then I thought that maybe when I will grow older I will open the books which are written by clever professors and I will find out the answers." "When I grew older, I found that people did not know that the" "Question exists." "Unknown to Guth a Russian called Andrei Linde was ...also tackling the problem of expansion in the early universe." "During the last 15 years we've learned the question can be answer." "Linde now lives in California but in the 70s, he and Guth were ...working on opposite sides of the world on the same idea." "This theory was called "inflation"" "Would you give me a glass of water?" "Sure." "Inflation suggested a way for the right kind of expansion." "If somehow energy could be trapped in a vacuum, it would naturally expand like a number of bubbles being released at once." "Perhaps these bubbles could join up together and rapidly expand as one vast bubble producing all the symmetry needed for our universe to grow smoothly and quickly expanding evenly in all directions." "Linde in Moscow and Guth in California had the same inspiration." "They needed to do detailed calculations to see if the idea worked out." "In 1.979, on a December evening, Guth opened a notebook and started to write." "I had not yet calculated everything through that night, enough to convince myself that it was a fascinating idea and that it would probably work." "The next morning I raced back to SLAC By the end of the morning, I convinced myself that It did fit... together." "Andrei Linde had also started his own calculations..." "But as he worked through the detail it seem as though inflation theory ...couldn't actually work in practice." "In California, Guth encountered the same problem." "I did discovered that there was a serious problem in the way that the inflation ended." "It happened just like water boils, a bubble would form here and there and they would grow and collide and..." "Form a morass of matter with non-uniformities in it." "The result was nothing like our universe looks like." "This was a serious problem that clearly required modification." "Thank you." " You're welcome, sir." "Guth went ahead and published his theory, even with its flaws inflation caused a sensation." "But Linde was worried when he read the article." "He felt he had to find a solution to the imperfections to give inflation respectability." "I don't know if you know it or not but I had an ulcer which was induced ...by the work because when I heard about all these ideas and I was literally thinking in these terms that God couldn't be so stupid to lose this opportunity to make the world in such a economical way" "And when I found the solution the ulcer was gone." "Well, sometimes physics help" "Linde's new idea was simple what if just one bubble of energy inflated all by itself into ...our universe?" "It was about 11 at night and I was very happy, I went to my wife and" "Awake her and told her:" "I think I know how the universe could have emerged." "I first announced it..." "New inflationist scenario in the meeting of quantum gravity in Moscow which occurred in October of 1.981" "Many very good physicists were there and the star of the meeting was Stephen Hawking." "I gave a seminar with Andrei translating." "When I said There was a difficulty with Guth's idea of bubbles in collision Andrei said that the whole universe could be a single bubble." "I objected because the bubble would have been bigger than the universe at the time" "In the middle of his talk he told that There was a very interesting idea of Linde, this was just my talk the previous day and I was all about translating it and then he says: but this model doesn't work and let me explain why and he started talking and I'm... translating it and for half an hour in the face of all the institute I" "...was explaining them why new inflation just simply cannot work." "In front of Russian peers, Linde's new theory had been demolished but he was determined to continue the debate." "And then I asked him, would you like to understand the details of..." "This, and he told me, sure, and we disappeared for two hours, all the ...institute was trying to catch Stephen everywhere and the famous physicist disappeared, the whole institute was in panic." "Linde and Guth hag given us an important idea." "Inflation accounts so neatly for the way the universe has to expand." "I'm sure it must be ...part of the final picture." "But inflation by itself does not explain the start of the universe" "We still need a theory of everything for that." "But in applying the theory to the beginning of the universe would be ...difficult because my own work has shown that the equations would break down at the big bang." "You can take Einstein's equations and run them backwards in time, ...not for a real universe, which is awful complicated, full of lumps, ...but for a simplified model of the universe, where matter is," "...distributed smoothly through the universe." "When you apply the equations to a model like this you found There was a point where everything came together, where gravitational fields became infinitely strong, energy densities Infinitely high technically we call it a singularity." "The universe at its birth needed to have some fluctuations in density and velocity to enable particles to be formed." "But the maths of the singularity won't predict any such fluctuations." "In fact they won't predict anything at all." "What happens at a point of singularity becomes a matter of pure speculation." "Physicists like to solve equations, they like to say, if this is the way things are now this is the way they'll be a year from now." "Once you hit a singularity, you can't do that, the equations blow up and you don't know what to do with them." "This is disturbing, people don't like singularities." "The best bet for solving the problem looked like being quantum mechanics." "Quantum mechanics is the strangest thing human minds have ever thought up." "I think if 1.000 philosophers were to work for 1.000 ...years trying to think of Something of maximum strangeness they wouldn't have thought up anything as strange as quantum mechanics." "At the Herat of quantum mechanics is the idea of chance." "It's called the uncertainly principle." "If a subatomic particle isn't moving it's too small to detect." "But There are ways to trace the path of a moving particle." "You can never find out with precision where anything so small is ...but you can have a very God idea of its probable position." "This probability, the principle of uncertainty, does seem to work." "Strange as it is, it's apparently the way the universe works that enables us to make predictions about all shorts of processes involving atoms or elementary particles colliding that are verified by experiment to amazing degrees of accuracy." "These laws of uncertainty only seem to make sense of the... universe at its moment of creation." "they can't be applied to the big universe we now experience, a universe described with incredible ...accuracy by Einstein's theory of general relativity." "A lot of people have been trying to combine quantum mechanics with gravity." "A quantum mechanical replacement or Einstein's general relativity." "I wanted to solve the problem of the singularity." "After all, I was responsible for raising it in the first place." "Maybe one could choose a path around it." "Hawking saw that the uncertainly that came when you tried to and can be used to get away from the singularity problem which he himself had done so much to raise." "So Hawking in collaboration with James Hartle published a paper where They were able to solve a very, very simplified model of the universe." "Hartle and I shoed how a universe like our own could be born without ...the troublesome singularity." "It involved the use of what is called imaginary time." "This may sound like science fiction ...but it is a well defined scientific concept that science fiction borrowed." "The idea was that in imaginary time, the universe has no boundary ...no beginning or end, it just curls round on itself like the surface of the earth." "It was a complete quantum mechanical description of everything that could ...be said about this simplified model of the universe and it had no singularities." "It's possible that quantum mechanics is the answer to the problem of the singularity." "I have to make it clear that the no-boundary universe is just a..." "Proposal, but it has some interesting implications." "The universe has no beginning and no end." "We don't have to explain its creation." "The universe simply exists, but the" "Consequences of the no-boundary proposal can't be worked out fully ...without a complete quantum theory of gravity that will unite general ...relativity and quantum mechanics." "We are back to search for a theory of everything." "in 1.985 a new theory emerged which raised hopes that the search ...might son be over." "You're tuned to WBAl, 99.5 FM on your dial, coming up next Explorations with Dr. Michio Kaku" " This is Exploration." "This is Michio Kaku, Profesor o Theoretical Physics ...and this is a program devoted to science and the fantastic discoveries of the universe." "Superstring theory, the theory that ...will perhaps give us an explanation for the entire universe." "Some people say the instant of the big bang the universe was a dot." "The new idea is that it's like a bowl of noodles where we have thousands and millions of little strings, vibrating at the instant of ...time, that exploded creating the enormous diversity of matter and energy that we see around us." "Superstring theory is so bizarre, so strange that we were not destined to see this theory in the twentieth century." "Many of us believe that it's really XXI century physics that fell accidentally into the XXI century it was discovered by accident." "A mathematician was reading up on topology when by chance he noticed ...an equation which described the behavior of a particle." "Then he found another describing gravity." "Could this branch of math contain within it the theory of everything?" "So we have two great theories of physics, the theory of the very big ...Einstein's theory of relativity and the theory of the very small the quantum theory." "These two don't like each other, one is smooth ...like marble and the other is coarse and grainy like wood." "And to get them to meet together has been the object of the last 50 years of intense investigation." "today we think we have it, we think ...we have the superstring theory which is perhaps the most fantastic, the most marvelous ever proposed in the history of science" "After years trying to connect two incompatible theories, now there was ...a radical new candidate based ...on tiny magical strings." "Strings are extremely tiny like a hundred billion times smaller than ...a proton, so let me explain." "Take an atom and expand it to the size of the solar system." "I f the atom were the size of our solar system, then a string is much smaller than that a string is the size of an atom." "That is how incredibly tiny this all ...is." "We also think that once upon a time the universe was the size of a string." "When the strings move, they vibrate, they force the space around ...it to curl up, to bend, exactly as Einstein had predicted." "Now the question tat scientist had grappled with since Einstein seemed as if it was about to be answered." "With the string theory, it look like there was no difference between the worlds of the big and the small." "Physicists have been puzzled by the fact that we have matter like atoms ...and we have forces like gravity that attract atoms." "We now realize that this dichotomy between force and matter is really ...not a dichotomy at all." "These are nothing but vibrations of the same string." "One string that vibrates could be a quark, another string could be an electron, but yet another string ...could be the light, a proton, or Einstein's theory of gravity." "But the full potential of string theory is still unknown." "It seems to offer answers but the equations also create new questions ...that at the moment we can't answer." "These equations are web defined they're web known but some people think that perhaps we humans aren't smart enough to solve them." "Think of a duck or a monkey, why should a duck or a monkey understand calculus, or electric fields or black holes?" "And why is it that we have the power to understand the big bang and the black holes?" "Then the question is, are we smart ...enough to understand the theory of everything?" "At the present time." "No." "At the end of the 80s, I and a number of other physicists were... beginning to wonder if string theory was the theory of the universe." "One problem was that There were five different string theories." "Four too many." "The American cosmologist Lee Smolin took a step back from physics." "He wondered if we were looking for the wrong thing." "Why should the answer to the universe be contained in a mathematical equation?" "The hope behind this theory was that there would be a simple and unique ...law that would explain how the universe is and also the history of the universe." "But this has not happened" "So I was thinking about this at the same time I was reading about..." "Biology." "That led me to wonder whether the answers to the questions ...in elementary particle physics did not rest in a single unique... theory but maybe would be a result of historical accident and maybe There could be a process by which through a series of developments in the early history of the universe somehow the universe chose what its parameters were." "The wonderful thing about the biological world is that it's so different ways." "One couldn't possibly explain it." "This is what people thought before Darwin." "What Darwin discovered is that there is a rational way to understand how such enormous variety and complexity can come to be in the natural world without being put There in the first place." "The basic idea is that you have some population which reproduce itself and when it does there are some changes in the characteristics ...that lead to differences in how well the creatures survive." "Could Darwin's idea of natural selection somehow be applied to our universe?" "If one studies astronomy on scales much larger than the earth for example, the disk of a spiral galaxy, one discovers it's a biology on a much simpler level." "It turns out that the new possibility which Darwin gave us is ...that a system can have all the beauty and variety and that it can organize itself over time." "What twentieth-century science is leading, in my view, is the culmination of this view of the universe as something which does create itself and assemble itself" "In Russia, Andrei Linde was also thinking about evolution, but his thinking stayed rooted in physics as he tried to perfect the inflation ...theory." "It wasn't proving easy." "Russian politics were affecting his health and his work." "1.985 was the first year of perestroika." "Gorbachev just came to power and they started reconstructing everything which is ...translation of the perestroika." "The reconstruction, and as a first ...sep, they forbidden us to send our papers abroad, so I have a feeling that I am living with my mouth shut, I can't tell what I'm... doing and this was very depressing so it became so much depressing..." "That actually I became ill." "I was lying in bed for about a month and a half and all of a sudden there ...was a call from the Academy of Sciences and they told me that I must go to Italy to give some popular lectures on astronomy and I told them that I was ill and I couldn't go." "After years of depression Linde was free to say what he liked." "But he only had 24 hours to think of a new idea." "After this year with the mouth shut they are suggesting me that if I do ...something then tomorrow it will be sent There by diplomatic mail without any approvement, without any of the bureaucratic work." "They said it would be in Italy the next day." "On the other hand I had to think of something immediately and I was really sick." "I just couldn't think." "I put my head between my hands and I asked to myself, what can I ...invent in 30 minutes?" "I will write it today to send it tomorrow to..." "Italy." "What can I do in 30 minutes?" "and within 30 minutes I've got a theory of Self reproducing universe." "In Linde's new theory, inflation doesn't take place in a bubble." "Instead of one universe growing his equation predict that there have ...to be many." "All will be different and all will ...have their own big bang." "In time they will seed other universes so the process goes on forever." "it's a purely theoretical proposal ...built from the earlier imperfect ideas of inflation." "Out of depression had come inspiration." "Since that time I didn't have such a depression which in a certain ...sense may be unfortunate." "Smolin and Linde's evolutionary theories have failed to catch on." "Most cosmologies still want to find a single explanation of a single universe." "It was this ambition to explain a single universe which kept hopes for string theory alive even when it seemed to be going nowhere." "In the last few years we've been lost." "Mathematics has proven too..." "Difficult to solve superstring theory." "The theory is smarter than" "Us." "The creative engine behind this theory is Ed Witten at Princeton." "Scientific American once said that Ed Witten is the smartest man on earth, and if anyone is smart enough to solve the theory it's probably going to be Ed Witten." "It seemed pretty clear that if there was a chance to go way beyond familiar understanding of physics string theory was the most ambitious ...prospect." "It was also clear that it was a very long-term proposition." "Witten turned away from more concrete aspects of physics to tackle the highly theoretical math of string theory." "I wasn't originally interested in math, I preferred physics and I remembered very web having some reticence for some time about making the 100% commitment of really deciding that was going to be my life." "However bizarre its claims string theory has to survive a basic test can it describe the world we know?" "Stringtheory as it had developed by the mid 80s, was characterized by the fact that there were five theories we knew about, and that raised the curious question that was always a little bit embarrassing." "If one of those theories describes our universe, then who lives in... other four universes?" "We've come to understand that those five theories we've been studying are all limiting cases of one big picture." "To make an analogy with the blind man and the elephants there is a guy who discovered the tail and ...there's the guy who discovered the ear and in the past we thought there're five things, now we know there's one elephant..." "Witten remains convinced that string theory can make sense, but it's lonely work." "He lives in a strange abstract world where many dimensions ...exist rather than the four we experience on earth." "Even other physicists used to working in abstract spaces find it difficult to share his convictions." "A lot of people even professional physicists don't grasp the scope and richness of the structure involved." "People tend to be too impatient for ...quick results." "I think that there are a lot of reasons to think that a ...structure which is so rich and so physical and which has been the source of many beautiful discoveries must be on the right track." "Like Einstein before him, Witten's instincts drive him on." "But a solution is painfully elusive." "When you're doing a calculation it's usually on some very specific ...detail, it's a tiny part of the big picture and you're hoping that the ...piece with shed light on the big picture." "Sometimes it... does but usually it doesn't." "Oftentimes you come home and you know exactly the amount you knew at the beginning of the day but sometimes you know a little more." "I think that this investigation is the richest thing that physicists can tackle and how far we'll get in our lifetimes, there's no way to know and we might get the answers we dream of getting, we might fall" "a little short." "But I think we can accomplish more in the future and getting as far as we can is the best we can do." "Twenty years ago I said there was a 50% chance we would have a..." "That's still my estimate today but the 20 years starts now." "It's very hard to build a fully consistent quantum theory of gravity" "The string theorists think they have one, they may well not be right... they haven't yet pushed their theory far enough so you can compare the consequences of stringtheory to experiment, and that's what you ultimately need." "But perhaps for the first time, an experimental group could be closer to hand." "Neil Turok is getting ready to journey into the unknown." "Like any explorer he needs to know where he's going." "But our current map of the early universe isn't good enough." "Imagine you were trying... to navigate across a continent and you had a map which only showed ...features greater than 100 miles across, it wouldn't be much use in... finding your way along a particular route, but if you had a map that had" "...a resolution of a mile, then that becomes much more useful." "In the vast clean rooms of the European Space Agency, Turok... is involved with a project to make the map of all maps with a satellite called the Planck Explorer" "What we'll do is look out, map the whole sky at a very high resolution." "Basically this is equivalent to making a map of the earth where you show all the rivers and the mountains and the valleys... and this map will contain a vast amount of information, it will give us the best picture we have of the universe." "The Planck Explorer will look billions of years back in time to... when the first signs of the structure of the universe are... visible." "Turok's map is not the universe of very early times, we're not sure when the radiation from the big bang was emitted from the plasma in the early universe but when we look out and we see the sky, we're looking directly at different patches of hot plasma and There are going to be different temperature and so this will be a map of the" "...temperature variations on the sky" "The hope is that son we may be able to see the heat of the early universe in enough detail to answer our questions about how it was formed." "It could offer observational evidence which may clarify how everything began." "I think scientists are usually excessively confident about the... theories because there has been an absence of data, and that's allowed ...them to be confident about the theories." "The current theories are all based on very Clever ideas and very imaginative ideas." "But what's really good about them is they do give you a web-defined framework within which you can make predictions." "Turok has turned the math of theories like superstring and inflation into pictures which illustrate the subtle temperature variations that must exist in the early universe." "Each theory predicts a different picture." "The Planck Explorer will see if any of them could be right." "We're in the wonderful situation now where over the next 5 or 10 yeas ...the theory is going to be beaten to death in terms of making... predictions that will all be settled and say exactly what they expect to" "find in the sky and this satellite will fly and will map the sky to a very high precision and we'll see what happens." "It's a very exciting time to be involved, it's a unique opportunity ...in science where within ten years we're going to have the data that will prove or disprove any theory of how structure formed the universe" "And we've got ten years so we'll see if anyone gets it right." "It could be that in a few years we will have a complete theory that's confirmed by experiment, it would be a remarkable achievement perhaps the ultimate triumph of science." "But knowing how the universe works is not enough to tell us why it exists." "To find the answer to that question would be to know the mind of God."