Can You Prove The Big Bang Theory?

what if I told you that our understanding of The Big Bang Theory and the Very origins of our universe can be traced back to a map of pink and blue blobs the same blurry map that Stephen Hawking described as quote the most important discovery of the century if not all time well today we have the privilege of hearing from astrophysicist and Noble Laureate John Mather one of the great minds behind the cosmic background Explorer satellite which produced this very pink and blue blobs also widely considered to be the first strong evidence for the Big Bang or in the words of the noble committee the starting point for cosmology as a Precision science our map showed pink and blue blobs across the entire Sky it's very blurry but it was enough to say the early Universe was not the same everywhere there were hot and cold spots that matters to us because if the universe had been completely exactly uniform gravity wouldn't know what to do it would not have any way to pull material back together again to stop the expansion locally and make galaxies and stars and planets and people this video is also have a three-part series exploring the secrets of space many of which were still uncovering it's part of a longer conversation where I had the pleasure of sitting down with John at the Aspen ideas Festival so listen in as we hear how John went from a dairy farm to a failed thesis project to being the first NASA scientist to win a Nobel Prize we also covered the ongoing challenge of unifying gravity and quantum mechanics John's time as the lead project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope which by the way I'm sure you recognize imagery from and just how much of our universe we have left to understand as a reminder the content here is for informational purposes only should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any ACC fund for more details please see acc.com disclosures [Music] thank you tell us about when you started getting

involved I got stressed it down pretty young I think I was about six years old wow I've heard from my dad at bedtime story time that uh living things are made out of cells with chromosomes and this was before we even knew about the double helix so okay that got my attention uh my friends and neighbors were farmers my dad was studying dairy cows wow for his research for Rutgers University and so um that was where I got started yeah living out on the farm thinking about deep things like that the origin of everything um if you know about cells and chromosomes then immediately you understand Evolution and the huge changes that can happen through time I think it was about eight we went to see the Museum of Natural History in New York and the planetarium show and the giant meteorite sitting there as big as a small apartment just sitting there they say where does that come from where do we come from and where do we come from so you see the bones arranged and showing evolutionary order in the museum oh my golly what a fascinating story I want to know everything about this yes yes and we didn't know that much about space at that time maybe I'm getting a little too ahead of myself because I'm sure there's so many years between what you're described typing and when you won your Nobel Prize but that did seem like maybe the start of a new era of our understanding of space and so could you speak a little more to this satellite that you had developed with your partner and and what that really meant as maybe an inflection point so Back in 1970 I

was in graduate school at the University of California Berkeley looking for a thesis project because I was tired of studying in the library and maybe I better build something so the people had just discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation okay it is thought to be the remnant of the early Universe the hot big bang still fills the universe and so uh can a graduate student do something to go measure it better so the answer is yes we'll try something so okay well I've worked on a project which was an instrument to measure the Spectrum which is to say how bright is this radiation at each different wavelength and we built it and we sent it up uh attached to a high altitude balloon and it went up and it did not work oh man what do I do now so my thesis advisor said okay well you did good work uh you can write this up you can make a thesis out of it they've already published some other papers uh so I said okay I'll get a job I got a job for NASA five years before that we had just landed on the moon for the first time wow okay so okay 1974 I met NASA laboratory in New York City and um okay so NASA puts out this announcement of opportunity uh calling for new satellite missions for science because what are we going to do after the moon landings are done maybe do something else so okay so okay boss my thesis project failed we should try it in outer space so I had no idea how much nerve was required to to do this but we just did it we wrote a little thin proposal we said we have an idea so after a couple of years NASA said well we think it's a good idea wow and and I got a job at the big NASA laboratory in Greenbelt Maryland just outside Washington and they gave us some engineering time to work with people who knew how to build stuff in space and well in 1989 it went up and it worked and within weeks we had measured the Spectrum so my thesis project that had failed under as a lewd payload now worked beautifully in outer space that's incredible I showed a graph to the astronomy society and we got a standing ovation for a graph and so they knew what it meant they knew basically that Not only was the equipment working but the story of the hot big bang was basically right uh people don't remember now that there used to be alternate theories that said well maybe it wasn't so a couple of years after that first announcement we were able to say we made a map of this Cosmic heat and we our map showed pink and blue blobs across the entire sky and what they show is if you could see millimeter waves with your eyes you would see this big fuzzy map it's very blurry but it was enough to say the early Universe it was not the same everywhere there were hot and cold spots and that matters to us because if the universe had been completely exactly uniform um gravity wouldn't know what to do it would not have any way to pull material back together again to stop the expansion locally and make galaxies and stars and planets and people so we're here because of those spots and so that's pretty revolutionary it used to be people looked at this amazing universe and thought it requires um divine intervention because it's too dang complicated nobody could possibly see how it could work we confuse I don't know how it works yes I don't know how to do it with it can't be done or it's impossible when it comes back to how did we get here it used to be we couldn't understand how to calculate anything so we figured it must be impossible it must require divine intervention and now I think we have a different picture yeah let me divert into that a little bit because how is it that nature spontaneously produces complicated stuff yeah so there are reasons the real are fundamental deep reasons why nature produces complicated stuff so when you think of nature as just full of atoms and rent atoms are just little billiard balls and they have no shapes and no properties then of course how it would be extremely unusual for them to stick together and form what they do but quantum mechanics says no atoms are not little billiard balls they have uh shapes and they have they're like little covered with velcro of different flavors so atoms stick together in certain patterns that's how nature is so okay then also we move into about thermodynamics which tells us which kinds of reactions are favored by Nature so if energy is released when two atoms come together then it's likely to happen so now we say okay it's not completely without pattern the nature gives patterns because of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics so it's just built in that complicated things will occur given a chance yeah yeah so okay then what complicated things have occurred uh well there's another feature here which is that the university the universe spontaneously heats up um this is something they don't teach you in school uh in school they say well nature does not have two objects just sit there at the same temperature and one gets hot and one gets cold that's true in normal life but gravity is an exception to that gravity is the reason why the universe has heated itself up right gravity can stop the expansion of the material of the big bang and pull it back in to make stars then when it does that the Stars can light up and release nuclear energy and now we have a state of the universe where it's hot some places and called other places so energy flows from place to place and this is then the basis of the complexity that we now have yeah and that's partially what we got from you're saying this image because if this wasn't the case if you're saying gravity didn't exist and create these local changes then what would we see would we instead have seen just a clean image yeah if gravity could not have acted on those hot and cold spots those dents and lists regions then nothing would have happened which has been a completely featureless expanding Universe with no stars no galaxies no any things yeah all the same temperature completely boring as far as we're concerned we wouldn't be here we wouldn't be here but nature does have gravity nature does have the other three forces of physics and it does have quantum mechanics and and thermodynamics and so it is a universe in which complexity naturally appears yeah and

maybe you could just speak to kind of what a phase change again this was in our understanding because I think even Stephen Hawking said this maybe was one of the most important images to come through science why was this such an important Discovery Stephen Hawking looked at our map of the pink and blue blobs and he said it was the most important scientific discovery of the century of all time and I first thought oh Stephen you're just exaggerating but it's very nice and then I thought okay well in Truth uh if we could understand where those spots come from it would tell us perhaps about the unifake unification of the forces of nature right now we still have the great mystery of quantum mechanics doesn't seem to describe gravity but we we know it is the opinion that it ought to yeah and if it does then it means that even space and time are randomly fluctuating and weird and so that was it's like one of the great mysteries of Science and we think there ought to be something there yeah scientists have been working at least 50 maybe 100 years trying to figure out how grativity and quantum mechanics go should go together the other thing of course is where did we come from yeah and if it was spots there then we wouldn't be here so that's pretty cool and it even tells us through detailed analysis that there is something called Cosmic dark matter which we can't see and perhaps never will see so we've got all these wonderful Mysteries that are all embedded in this hot this map of pink and blue blobs yes and so it's totally fascinating and and draws in thousands and thousands of scientists since the Kobe satellite was flown two more satellites were built and flown and they confirmed our original measurements which is nice because that meant we could get a Nobel Prize for discovering the thing that turned out to be true congratulations what if it weren't true then of course you don't get a prize um but now we have much much more detail

to go on let's talk about that right so you were the senior project scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope and I feel like that was the most recent exposure that the everyday person had to the frontier yeah that that we're now approaching after the Hubble telescope was launched uh scientists said how wonderful it was yes and by the way we still can't tell how the galaxies grew and it was still one of the great mysteries of science because we thought we would understand we saw oh now we know about the big bang and the hot and cold spots and we should be able to simulate and calculate how galaxies would grow and then we measured with the Hubble telescope oh we got it wrong the predictions had been that galaxies would grow slowly so the Hubble would be able to see the first ones happening and of course how do you see that well you see Back In Time by looking at things that are far away so you've got your own time machine in your eyeballs every morning but you don't feel it so look back in time see what the universe like when it was young and see what were the Galaxy's doing and they were already pretty grown up as far as back in time as the Hubble could see so please build us another telescope to look farther back because we've got a big mystery here so we still have a big mystery because we built the web telescope it did what it was supposed to do it produced beautiful pictures and right away we could see that the Galaxy screw even faster than we thought yeah and so even though we had the information from Hubble and all the simulations and calculations we've and predictions we were still wrong so we're looking for something really deep and fundamental so don't don't know what it is so that's why astronomers are thrilled right now that they've got something to work on yeah it's going to take us a good long time could be decades before we really really deeply understand what were we wrong about and it's even possible that there's some new force of nature or some thing that happened early on that's just so different than we can't even imagine it yet all right that is all for today's video however if you've liked this video we have a lot more where that came from in fact we just released a full length episode with this guest on the a16z podcast so if you'd like to hear it go check it out in your favorite podcast app of choice or we'll link it in the description below thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next time [Music] foreign [Music]