So Much Universe, So Little Time. The current crisis in cosmology and how we got here.

[Music] you [Music] the universe is 13.8 billion years old right our modern conception of the universe does not give us many clues to help us live in it it's too big for one thing even as closest distances are too large for the human mind to process and top it off the meager speed of light means that we don't know how big it even is or if it is finite at all but we have one fact to hold on to one scrap affinity by which to set our perception to the universal scale it is existed for 13.8 billion years this number is held in such esteem that in 2005 when warbly singer Katie Melua dared to suggest in one of her whimsical Diddy's that it was quote a guess she got blasted by an irate astrophysicist for so disrespecting his craft except I'm old enough to remember when sage was 15 billion years and my parents assuming they paid the matter any heed whatsoever are old enough to remember when the Big Bang itself was a deeply controversial idea in fact the phrase Big Bang was coined four years before they were born as an insult by one of its detractors Sir Fred Hoyle so why exactly do we think the Big Bang happened at all and how do we determine what had happened to such a pleasingly precise degree turns out it all goes back to Hubble both the telescope and the man it was named after well I suppose you could go a little farther back and mention that most Potter ethically named of astronomers Vesto Melvin Slifer the man who in 1930 would oversee clyde tombaugh's discovery of Pluto in 1912 Slifer notice that the light from so-called spiral nebulae was shifting to the red meaning much as the sound of a siren deepens as the police car receipts from view so light shifts to ever longer wavelengths as their sources move farther and farther away this meant that the vast majority of these nebulae had to be moving away from Earth in August 1914 slifer presented his findings of the 17th meeting of the American Astronomical Society where they received the rapt attention of a young graduate student named Edwin Hubble Edwin Hubble is one of an exceptionally lucky few whose names will live forever even after their lives have been forgotten this is largely due to it being attached to the Hubble constant arguably the single most consequential value in all of astronomy as so often happens in science he was not the first to formulate it although he did only the first to get credit Hubble was by all accounts not a people person a Rhodes Scholar who graduated from Oxford in 1913 he had risen from rural Puritan roots in Missouri to pursue a career in both in law and in astronomy and succeeded at both a committed Anglophile he adopted a posh Oxford accent in conversation in 1919 he joined the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena California where he met his colleague and rival Harlow Shapley unlike Hubble Shapley was a gregarious outgoing man who relished social situations behavior Hubble considered obnoxious but their rivalry was more than personal thanks largely to discoveries made in the u.s. at the time mankind's knowledge of the universe was if you'll pardon the metaphor exploding and each man had very different views on what this flood of discoveries meant in 1918 through his work with globular clusters Shapley had shown that despite appearances earth was in fact not the center of the universe you'd think we would have figured that out by then but discoveries made in the centuries after Copernicus had somewhat reset the clock on that idea at the time most astronomers including Shapley believe that what we now call the Milky Way galaxy comprised the entire universe and previous studies particularly by William Herschel had suggested that Earth's star system occupied a privileged place near the center those strange spiral objects seen across the sky were merely nearby nebulae though Immanuel Kant in one of his typically vast leaps ahead of his time speculated that they may in fact be Island universes of their own as early as 1755 in 1918 Shapley plotted the locations of globular clusters to obtain a better draft of the Galactic map globular clusters are peculiar hyper dense balls of ancient red stars that typically appear in the outer halos of the Milky Way and other galaxies because they are bright and relatively evenly distributed they make decent boundary markers the only problem was determining their distances to do that Shapley turned to the work of a remarkable woman named Henrietta Swan Leavitt Henrietta Leavitt the profoundly deaf astronomer who for much of her life toiled and obscurity at the Harvard College Observatory in 1908 identified a remarkable property of Cepheid variable stars Cepheid variables are gigantic monstrously bright stars that are just beginning their journey of the old age and eventual death as Shapley himself discovered in 1914 as they enter middle age the stars begin to pulsate and Leavitt discovered that the longer the pulsations lasted the more intrinsically luminous a Cepheid was that made it one of the most sought-after tools in all of astronomy a standard candle a standard candle is an object in the universe for which it is possible to calculate its intrinsic brightness and thus its distance Leavitt never received much recognition for her profound discovery though Hubble often said she deserved another prize for it at the time astronomy wasn't considered a branch of physics though that would soon change when he became head of the Harvard College Observatory in 1921 Shapley made Leavitt head of photometry though sadly she died of stomach cancer that same year it was through observations of such variables within globular clusters that Shapleigh was able to show that the center of the galaxy was located in the constellation of Sagittarius at about 50,000 light-years from Earth as it happens he was correct in the location but because the star as he was observing we're not actually set variables but a dimmer form called RR Lyrae variables he overestimated the distances by a factor of two this and other reasons allowed his skeptical colleagues to pick apart his findings so attached were they to the idea of collective centrism in 1920 Shapley and Hubble's employer George Ellery Hale whose name lives on in the gigantic telescope he commissioned but didn't live to see completed arranged the symposium of the scale of the universe a discussion between Shapley and another astronomer named Herbert D Curtis at the National Academy of Sciences given that the very nature of the universe itself was at issue their confrontation has since been dubbed perhaps somewhat generously the great debate Curtis called into question Shapley's calculations read the sun's location in the galaxy but argued that so-called spiral nebulae or in fact other galaxies and that the universe was vastly larger than previously believed Shapley stood firm on his relocation of the earth but refused to accept the idea that the spiral nebulae were anything other than nearby clouds the galaxy alone was vast enough since both of them were wrong Albee 't for different reasons it's difficult to say if either of them actually one regardless in 1923 Hubble would render the entire debate moot by allocating a Cepheid variable in the Andromeda galaxy yes sepi uns are bright enough to be seen that other galaxies which fixed his distance at nearly a million light-years from Earth in a letter to Shapley he wrote with gloriously snide understatement quote you'll be interested to hear that I have found a Cepheid variable in the Andromeda nebula Shapley would later call it to quote the letter that destroyed my universe more so than he knew Hubble's distance calculation was too conservative the Andromeda galaxy is nearly three times farther away than he suppose that's the thing about the universe it doesn't really care whose preconceptions it shatters and it was about to kick couple in them hard thanks to his interactions with Vesto Slifer Hubble already knew that most galaxies were red shifting but in 1929 while applying his distance measurements to Slifer his data Hubble realized something Slifer did not the farther away the galaxies were the faster they were moving a relationship that appeared to be direct the simplest explanation was that all the observed galaxies were retreating from ours at a constant rate if say galaxy a moved a certain distance away from us and galaxy be moved the same distance away from galaxy a that from our perspective galaxy B would appear to be moving twice as fast as galaxy a the chances against this being a coincidence redefine the word astronomical if the motion was indeed real then it could not have been motion through space it had to be expansion of space the galaxies were not moving the universe itself was this idea would kill any vestiges of centrism in an expanding universe there is no center anymore than there is a center to the surface of the earth every point in space is its own center from which the universe expands away Hubble initially measure this constant speed which we now call the Hubble constant as 526 kilometers per second per megaparsec in other words for every mega parsec that is 3.26 million light years from Earth the galaxies appeared to be moving 526 kilometers per second faster if one were to whine the cosmic clock back at that incredible speed the universe would have been reduced to a compressed sea of plasma just 2 billion years ago this was someone awkward since radioactive dating methods had already revealed the earth to be at least 4 billion years old this discrepancy didn't bother Hubble because he considered the inferred velocities merely an illusion brought on by quote a hitherto you unrecognized principle of nature yes that was a cop-out but it was enough to ensure that the idea of the expanding universe was not accepted throughout much of the 1930s one of the few who did accept the idea of an expanding universe and indeed coined the phrase was it now mostly forgotten man who alone the darkest edge of Europe first pondered the Big Bang Alexander Friedmann is not a name widely spoken today partly because his life was all too brief he died in 1925 at the age of 37 after contracting typhoid fever from unwashed pair partly because he spent it trapped within one of the bloodiest two months in history the Russian Revolution and civil war but also because he managed to royally tick off Albert Einstein Einstein was a man of precise tastes he knew what he wanted and what he wanted was for the universe to make sense even as his new physics gutted and we made the classical physics of Newton he longed for a return to Newtonian simplicity and predictability he loathed the rising field of quantum mechanics with its built-in uncertainties and entangled outcomes and spent much of his later life on a fruitless quest to find the simplicity he was certain must lie beneath it in 1915 following a decade of work Einstein produced his theory of general relativity which finally combined his revelatory theory of special relativity proposed in 1905 with the dominant force in the universe gravity general relativity was nothing less than a reordering of the universe itself from first principle but it turned out the flying gravity to this new universe led it to collapse in on itself like a house of cards there seemed no way to resolve the issue so Einstein did what many in his situation have done he fudged it in 1917 he added what he called the cosmological constant basically a universe wide repelling force to his equations to maintain the universe's stability Einstein saw the universe as Newton did static the sort of universe you could put your feet up with a cup of tea in then Alexander Friedmann showed up in 1922 Friedman sent a letter to hide Stein which she not only suggested but calculated and what it out called the Friedmann equations a variation of general relativity that allowed for a dynamic universe while either collapsing or expanding he even pondered if such a universe could have begun as a singularity Einstein found Friedman's work quote suspicious and told him he'd made a mistake in his calculations but bad luck meant he didn't see Friedman's response and too late the following year once he did he recognized the Friedman's calculations were correct but claimed that they were a purely mathematical construct that did not reflect the true nature of reality but one of the outcomes of the freedom equations is the general relativity cannot predict the shape and motion of the universe only observation can and it was the observations of Edwin Hubble that finally convinced Einstein to accept the expanding universe and remove the cosmological constant from his calculations he would later describe the cosmological constant as the greatest blunder of his life unfortunately by the time he accepted his blunder Friedman's life had been over for six years but Freeman wasn't the only physicist to get mine Stein's goat another would independently develop the Big Bang Theory and this time it would stick it is a supreme irony but for all the cries from biblical literalists that the Big Bang is merely atheist theology one of the first men to independently proposed it was a Catholic priest froze to death dual career as both the professor physics and an ordained freeze jars with modern sensibilities professors of physics are Lisi is expected to keep their magisteria non-overlapping and yet despite Einstein complaining little method had formulated the big bang's solely to reconcile science with his faith laments himself remained passionately committed throughout his life to dividing observation from revelation he considered God beyond mathematical reasoning or empirical testing to him to see science in the Bible was his mad and seeing religious dogma in the binomial theorem Friedman had calculated the mathematics of what would become the Big Bang Theory but limit was the first to tie said calculations to Hubble's redshift observations knowing that the expanding universe was not a mere mathematical curiosity but reality from this he deduced that at one point the universe must have comprised a single dense point of matter what limits are called the trying evil atom seriously and we went with Big Bang since he believed that physics should only comprise the physical he rejected the idea of a primeval singularity favored by modern Big Bang theorists incidentally by my calculations and feel free to check them as I have notoriously bad at math a single mass of atomic density comprising all the matter in the observable universe including dark matter would have a radius of 1.7 billion kilometers or greater than the orbit of Saturn the math published his paper on the expanding universe in 1927 and received an immediate response from Einstein the idea was in his words abominable but climbeth had a way through Einsteins defenses in 1924 he has studied astrophysics under Sir Arthur Eddington Amanda's life like Einsteins could fill an entire video series on its own Eddington and Einstein had developed a rap hoarder in the First World War corresponding even as they were declared enemies Ellington had done much to promote Einsteins ideas in the UK in 1919 he provided the first-ever scientific evidence for general relativity showing via an eclipse the Sun's gravity bends light from surrounding stars Eddington took an immediate liking to e-myth and the fact that he was willing to go to bat for him and his ideas likely played a role in Einstein's eventual acceptance of the Big Bang but despite edingtons affection from the man through it would be some time before he accepted his ideas it took a gentle reminder from the master in 1930 responding to a London symposium in which the non-static universe was discussed for Eddington to somewhat shamefacedly pay his paper the proper attention the reason for the delay as with much to do with Eddington has never been entirely clear some of argue that the Dayton limit employed was too preliminary to excite edingtons interest or perhaps it was simply the Eddington like many scientists at the time distrusted the idea of creation he is quoted as finding it philosophically repugnant superficially this seems odd because Eddington was also a man of strong religious faith al biet Quaker rather than Catholic though ironically it may have been that very faith that's so soured him to the concept as a Quaker he believed that God's creation should be mysterious wonderful and that it was not Sciences role to liberalize it while the idea of an expanding universe was accepted by 1931 that of an initial creation was not most astrophysicists it seems dealt with the issue by simply ignoring it yon ort of Oort cloud fame had refined the Hubble constant to produce an age of the universe of 3.4 billion years but astrophysicists simply shrugged in 1936 Hubble said that quote further revision that is of the Hubble constant is expected to be a minor importance unquote in that he was wrong Hubble's initial estimates for his constant were grossly in error as the 20th century wore on more accurate values would be obtained ranging from 50 kilometers per second per megaparsec which would have made the universe about 19 billion years old to a hundred kilometers per second per megaparsec which would have made the universe about 9.5 billion years old but by then the idea of a finite age for the universe was falling on a favour creation had a competitor so fred hoyle is a man about whom I could rhapsodize for days as brilliant as he was bloody minded as creative as he was cantankerous he managed in his long life to produce both science and science fiction progress and controversy he was the first to show how the chemical elements between carbon and iron were forged in the cores of stars in what is probably his most famous prediction he argued that a resonance level for carbon-12 a highly unlikely process required for the fusion of helium into carbon must exist because he coil was made of carbon and if the process didn't exist he couldn't exist he was right this has been cited as an early use of the anthropic principle science fiction works included a for Andromeda and now mostly lost classic piece of 60s BBC sci-fi that gave a young Julie Christie her debut role but he is best known today for his rejection of the Big Bang a term he himself pejoratively coined on BBC Radio in 1949 a year prior he and two colleagues had formulated a rival theory the so called steady state theory in the steady state Theory the universe never began it has existed as it is now since forever of course this idea is somewhat conflicted with the observed expansion of the universe since if the universe had always been expanding then the galaxies we see should have passed beyond all knowledge by now to account for this Hoyle at all concluded the universe must renew itself periodically by spontaneously generating new matter which then forms itself into new galaxies Hoyle was fond of saying that such generation would only amount to one subatomic particle per cubic meter every 300,000 years that may not seem like much but there are a lot of cubic meters in the observable universe and adding them up leads to a galaxy's worth of material created every 40 seconds the 1950s saw the Big Bang fade into the background in 1961 limiter lamented how his theory had become quote old-fashioned cosmology unchanged since 1931 while in contrast Fred Hoyle was being held in a dogmatic veneration similar to Aristotle in the Middle Ages he may have overstated the case even by them holes were appearing in the idea of a steady state universe the discovery of quasars utterly alien objects only found in Giga parsec distances thus billions of years in the past showed that the universe had indeed changed over time another hint emerged after the Second World War when astronomers Ralph Alpher and Robert Herrmann realized the visible matter of the universe appeared to consist of fully 25% helium all the stars known in the universe combined could never have produced that much helium in their cores Herman and Alfa concluded that it must have been fused by the universe itself during the incredibly brief period after its birth when its heat and pressure were equivalent to that of the core of a star today so called primordial nucleosynthesis is part of the standard model of universe formation these hints aside what the Big Bang Theory had always lacked was direct evidence and in 1964 it would get its most solid evidence yet thanks to two guys at the phone company radio static and a pair of very unfortunate pigeons okay Arto Penzias and Robert Wilson were not just guys at the phone company they were fully accredited astrophysicists who would go on to win the 1978 Nobel Prize in said field from what they were about to discover but they did work for Bell Telephone specifically at Bell Labs and their job was trolling the sky for natural sources of radiation that might interfere with telecommunications so yeah they work to fix your phone just arguably in the coolest way imaginable their principal tool for this task was the Bell Labs horn antenna at Crawford Hill New Jersey which resembles something designed in 1910 to look like it was from the year 2000 they removed the effects of radio broadcasts military radar and even the heat of the earth itself by cooling the telescope liquid helium to near absolute zero whatever they tried and wherever they looked final drag of a his remains quite naturally since the source appeared to be everywhere the telescope pointed Wilson and Penzias pondered if it might be the telescope itself and so turned their suspicious gaze onto a pair of misting pigeons would happen to take a Bruce to the telescope horn could their leavings be responsible not wanting to cause the birds distress they caught them in a humane trap and delivered them to a pigeon fancier 50 miles away the pigeon fancier decided he didn't like the look of them and sent them free whereupon being pigeons they immediately returned to the telescope science can be a cruel mistress and Penzias and Wilson understood that when all options are exhausted sacrifices must be made but even with the pigeons disposed of the hiss remained with all conceivable sources for the static hiss accounted for Penzias and Wilson began searching for Less conceivable ones whatever this hiss was was a hundred times more intense than predicted it originated throughout the sky and was present day and night then Penzias heard from a colleague at MIT about a planned search for the radiation left over from the Big Bang the hypothesis was that as the light from the Big Bang expanded outward for billions of years it cooled from its initial temperature of millions or billions of degrees to only a few degrees above absolute zero this radiation would be detectable today as microwaves exactly in the frequency seen by Penzias and Wilson after we knew we'd still unpublished paper the duo decided to add their results to it thus ensuring maximum credit for everybody the hiss they had found now called the Cosmic Microwave Background was the song of the universe itself it is the wall behind which observation of the universe is impossible and the final reference frame for every movement within it from galaxies to planets to you it marks the point 300 to 70,000 years after the Big Bang when light decoupled from matter allowing it to flow 3 Li through space beyond it the universe was essentially one gigantic star if somehow he never managed to watch or listen to static about 1% of what you see in here is the distant echo of the universe's birth but it was the other 99% that proved the problem Earth's atmosphere is a Paik two light wavelengths of one to ten millimeters exactly the range of the microwave background if we were going to study it we would have to go to space and in November 1989 the first of a trio of space telescopes specifically designed to study the microwave background was launched nasa's cosmic background Explorer or Coby one of Kobe's initial discoveries was that the wavelength of the microwave background corresponding to a temperature of two point seven four kelvins that is less than three degrees above absolute zero for primordial nucleosynthesis to take place the microwave background must have once been hotter than 10 million degrees the temperature required for hydrogen to overcome the strong force and fuse into helium for the expanding universe to pull its wavelength to its current size he must have expanded by 3.7 million times since then he'll be single greatest discovery however was that the microwave background is almost completely uniform showing from one end of the sky to the other a variation of just 0.1 to 4% this uniformity was a clear indication that at one point in the past the radiation must have been spread over a very small area the only exception to this perfection Kobe observed was a pronounced blue shift in the direction of Leo and red shift in the opposite direction of Aquarius this was revealed to be due to the sun's movement through the Milky Way towards Leo and away from Aquarius at a frankly ridiculous speed of 371 km/s or 1.3 million kilometers per hour for the microwave background to be so nearly featureless today is virtually impossible any imperfections no matter how small would have been magnified over billions of years of expansion into gargantuan cosmic blemishes the seem to confirm a hypothesis first proposed 15 years earlier by a Cornell physicist named Alan Guth but begun by pondering why magnets have two poles instead of one an investigation which evolved into a model in which the universe a miniscule fraction of a second after its birth and for only a slightly less minuscule fraction of a second expanded by a factor of 10 to the 50 if the universe had begun with a diameter of a Planck length the smallest length known in our current laws of physics it would have expanded to a tenth of a Lightyear in 10 to the minus 30 few seconds a time so short that compared to it a second would be only slightly shorter than the age of the universe squared this event now called inflation as another component of the standard model of the formation of the universe it would explain Kobe's revelation of the microwave backgrounds perfection the blemishes had no time to form before they were cast to the far reaches of space-time no one knows how or why the needle universe performed this trick but in the years since the evidence for it has only increased Kobi was in many ways a triumph to bits team leaders would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics for its support of the Big Bang but it was a blunt tool its angular resolution was 14 times the apparent diameter of the moon to mine the trove of information contained in the cost of macro a background and to truly honor this fossil of the universe's formation a sharper eye was needed and in 2001 NASA launched the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe or w map with 33 times the resolution of Kobe it could be ended ship the fossil from the rock and here fellow seekers I am afraid is where things get complicated w map did more than simply follow on from Kobe it provided us with a second means to measure the age of the universe the miniscule shifts in temperature observed by W map roughly one part in 10,000 correspond to regions of matter density within the early universe those areas of higher density created gravitation which redshifted light into colder wavelengths areas of less density left the light alone leaving it warmer these density irregularities likely began as quantum fluctuations when the universe was still subatomic in size today we see them in the broad structure of the cosmic web the filaments rings bubbles and voids of galaxies that comprise our universe at the grandest scale all of which began as random quantum effects in the earliest universe the connection between the current shape of the cosmic web and those early fluctuations was first clinched by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in 2005 at the time of the cause of background photons had yet to be extracted for matter so the regions of denser matter also contained more photons which rage against their confinement energizing their encasing matter in two gigantic shockwaves basically sound waves which traveled through the dense primordial medium at over half the speed of light this speed in fact is crucial these shockwaves would ring across the early universe in pulsing oscillations because we know that the geography of the Cosmic Microwave Background was shaped by these oscillations by locating a single complete oscillation we can determine its size simply by multiplying the duration of said oscillation by the speed of sound at the time this gives us another cosmic yardstick in 2012 w map provided us with our most precise ever measurement for the age of the universe 13.7 72 billion years with an uncertainty either way of 0.05 9 billion years it is this w map measurement or one of its earlier less precise versions that she's most likely heard cited as the age of the universe but science is never that simple every result must be checked and the dream of securing the universe is aged through the old-school brute force meant that if ever brighter standard candles was still very much alive and in 1990 NASA provided its biggest hammer to the wall yet these days we are accustomed to seeing the Hubble Space Telescope as astronomies all-purpose multi-tool it is tracked storms on Neptune discovered moons of Pluto image stellar nurseries and distant nebulae and seen planets forming around brash yellow stars but its creators were under no illusion as to what they most wanted to do with it it was in the friggin name they wanted to finally nail down the Hubble constant prior to the launch of its eponymous Telescope the Hubble constant had not been refined beyond its factor of 2 error range of 50 to 100 kilometers per second per megaparsec in its first decade of operation the Hubble primarily employing Cepheid variables would determine the value for the constant of 72 plus or minus 8 a 10% margin of error but for many that was not enough one person or who it was definitely not enough was Adam riess and professor of astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University who has made securing Hubble's constant the focus of his working life for his PhD thesis paper riess explored the means to correct for variations in the brightness of type 1a supernovae type 1a supernovae are if anything an even more vital standard candle than Cepheid variables a type 1a supernova occurs when a white dwarf the small dense corpse of a star like our Sun exists in a binary with another star if the two stars get too close the gravity of the white dwarf will begin a siphon material from its counterpart gathering it to its surface until its mass exceeds 1.44 solar masses the so-called Chandrasekhar limit at that precise moment the white dwarf becomes too massive to support itself and implodes in a supernova because all type 1a supernovae exploded the same mass point they all have relatively the same brightness making them superb standard candles but unlike sophia's which to date have only been seen out to about 60 million light years type 1a supernovae are visible at megaparsec and even Giga parsec distances by accounting for such things as a trinsic variation obscuring dust and color and by comparing their results to newer better known sophia's same distance races team was able to refine the brightness of type 1a supernovae to a precision of about 6 percent but I mean he wasn't prepared but what these freshly scrubbed supernovae were about to show him in 1998 riess made the discovery the bellator win him a Nobel Prize he observed the distant supernovae were far dimmer than their rent shift said they should leap in essence they were moving too slowly to be that far away perhaps they weren't that far away perhaps they were just dim except there was no evidence of dust or other obscuring media that could cause such dimming of course looking that deeply into the universe is also looking into the past more supernovae somehow dimmer in the distant past it took ten years of pushing the Hubble telescope out to farther and farther distances before recent his team are certain there was nothing different about these distant supernovae they were dimmer because they were farther away this could mean only one thing the universe is not just expanding it was speeding up this result seemed insane the universe is the very definition of a closed system the amount of energy it possesses was sent at the Big Bang either it should continue expanding forever at the same rate or see its expansion slowed or overcome by the collective gravity of the objects within it this observation was akin to tapping a ball with your foot and seeing it shoot off at the speed of sound but it appeared to be real w maps observations also showed a similar rate of the universe's expansion for it to be real though energy must constantly be being pumped into every corner of the universe this dark energy would have to make it nearly 70% of all the matter and energy in the universe where could it be coming from the simplest explanation is that it is generated by space itself much like Einsteins cosmological constant perhaps the oddest element of dark energy though it's not that it is there but there is so little of it according to quantum mechanics particles in a vacuum are spontaneously created and destroyed in random fluctuations these events produce energy and the total amount of energy they should produce according to predictions is 10 to the 113 joules per meter cubed not only is that amount of energy about to reduce all matter in the universe to plasma but the mass it generated would cause the universe to curve into a sphere barely the size of the earth the actual amount of dark energy observed is about 1.5 times 10 to the minus 9 joules per meter cubed a difference of 10 to the 120 - this is known as the cosmological constant problem and it has been called the single worst prediction in the history of science incidentally is the dark energy value where say 10 to the minus 7 or 10 to the minus 6 the universe would have been pulled apart long before we could have evolved either this is empirical evidence for the existence of God or something has gone very wrong with our understanding of the universe this is not oddly enough the crisis in cosmology currently under discussion though if you feel like tackling it appending our concept of reality and perhaps getting some food saving free energy in the bargain please do so so what is the crisis well fellow seekers I'm happy to say that we have arrived at it at last after painstakingly coming through every possible variable 23 at all and checking and rechecking his results by 2016 recent manage to reduce the Hubble telescopes uncertainty for its constant from 10% to 2% giving a final value of 74 point zero 3 plus or minus 1 point for 2 kilometers per second per megaparsec this would make the universe a relatively spry 12 point 9 billion years old except as always there was a problem Risa's efforts extended outward to two billion light years and thus two billion years into the past life was already on earth when these early as supernovae exploded the Cosmic Microwave Background on the other hand presents an expansion rate for the earliest universe and it just so happened that in 2009 the European Space Agency launched plunk the third and reportedly lasts at least for now of the trio of Microwave Background probes with more than twice the angular resolution of W map plot provided the most detailed image of the background yet before quietly ceasing operations after four years and then in 2014 the first results came in and the bomb dropped plunks initial value for the Hubble constant was 67 point 4 plus or minus one point four there was no hiding in the error bars this time they didn't overlap not even close science is a patient discipline and waited for five years before panicking in that time the error bar only got shorter and currently stands at sixty six point nine plus or minus zero point six making the universe fourteen point two seven billion years old the universe is apparently older than itself these numbers have listed check after check estimates run as low as 1 in 7,000 that they could be due to error in 2019 a conference was convened at the Cali Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara California titled tensions between the early and late universe tensions is science for there's a problem but the solution is obvious it's a solution is not immediately obvious then it is a problem and if you're looking at a complete reevaluation of long settled ideas well then you have a crisis at the end of his starting lecture Reese stood up and proclaimed ok were in a crisis everybody it would appear that the speed of galaxies in the universe is youth does not match the speed of galaxies in the modern universe even factoring in dark energy obviously something has gone wrong somewhere but precisely what and where are still unknown is the culprit the microwave background perhaps it is not as reliable as we think perhaps there is new physics hiding it that we weren't aware of could it be a problem with the so called cosmic distance ladder the overlapping hierarchy of Sophia's and type 1a supernovae used to obtain Reese's teams result could it be the dark energy isn't constant after all that there is no cosmological constant or might it just be a systemic fault in their methods the last seems unlikely at least for the polite telescope which is widely regarded as the highest precision look at the microwave background that we could possibly get and various other telescopes have followed on for esa's work and he had to find any errors there is of course the ultimate possibility we could be looking at the thread that unravels our entire concept of reality for a hundred years the physics of the very large relativity and the physics of the very small quantum mechanics have been segregated each tested to the limits of our power but neither agreeing with the other the Big Bang of which the cost of microwave background is an afterimage is one point at which those two worlds literally collide what may emerge from this crisis of cosmology could be his worldly defining as Einstein's vision a century [Music]

Channel: ParallaxNick

Views: 315,800

Rating: 4.8329411 out of 5

Keywords: astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, Big Bang, hubble, hubble telescope, WMAP, planck, COBE, cosmic microwave background, CMB, Edwin Hubble

Id: 0sfvQ_fsil4

Length: 45min 10sec (2710 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/stovenn]

I wish videos like this came with a text version and author background which could be reviewed to see if the content and level was suitable before committing 45 minutes. For all I know this could be very rewarding and I have bookmarked it for future viewing but the chances that I actually do get round to watching it are pretty slim tbh.

[u/gingerblz]

This guy makes some of the most well written astronomy and cosmology videos on youtube, and imo, and they dont get nearly as much love as they deserve.

His backlog of videos is an absolute treasure trove.