Universe: Beyond the Millennium - Creation

at some time in the future a space probe will plunge into a tunnel in space and time one day our universe will cool and die our only escape may be to risk a flight into a different universe perhaps the greatest question facing the human race is to discover where we came from and to find out what is our ultimate fate every culture every age has asked that question and tried to answer it it's one of the greatest adventures of the human mind to find out where we came from where we are and of course in the end where we're going astronomy provides the basic information that each person needs to understand where he or she came from and where the human race is going now at the dawn of the new millennium we are on the threshold of understanding how our universe began and how it will end cosmologists around the world are trying to unlock the origin and destiny of everything we see around us one of this elite group is Bob Cashner he's on a journey to cero to Lolo in Chile to measure if there's enough gravity to hold the universe together we've known for a long time that the universe is expanding and coasting along since the Big Bang one of the questions has been how much gravity has been slowing down the expansion of the universe just like when you drive a car up a hill you can slow down if you don't apply power because gravity is pulling back on you we think that the expanding universe would be slowed down by the gravity by all the stuff that's in the universe one of the interesting things is that we've been able to do some work to try to measure that and we found a surprising result not the one that we expected to find but one that really turns the whole problem on its head Kirchner's team may have discovered answers that seal the fate of our universe they've discovered that it's not just expanding it's speeding up cosmologists now realize that to understand what the future may hold they first have to unravel what happened at the beginning of the universe at the start of time itself in our daily lives time is constant and dependable it's almost impossible for us to imagine but before the creation of the universe there was no time we can trace back cosmic history to a stage when everything was very dense very compressed very hot but the further we go back conditions were so extreme that we can't really rely on any of our common-sense intuitions we can say the time in the sense we understand it didn't really exist before that so when did the clock start ticking 12 billion years ago there was absolutely nothing no matter no space no time we may never know how or why it happened but a seething mass of energy smaller than an atom grew from nothing you're inside the Big Bang the birth of our universe a violent fireball of unimaginable eat for england's astronomer royal martin rees understanding the Big Bang is the key to the universe something that was literally originally only the size of a single atom or smaller expanded to be large enough to encompass everything in our present universe only the my new 'test fraction of a second had passed but all of this was puny compared to what was about tap propelled by a new surge of internal energy the universe suddenly entered an incredible period of inflation it expanded a hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion times to the size of a grapefruit Einstein's famous equation e equals MC squared told us that energy and mass were interchangeable it gave us the knowledge to build weapons of mass destruction and the knowledge to understand how our universe was born when a nuclear bomb explodes a tiny amount of matter is completely annihilated and converted into energy but in the Big Bang the exact opposite happened pure energy was converted into matter approaching the millionth of a second old the universe was brimming with energy so intense that it was spontaneously converted into lumps of matter and its archrival antimatter a titanic battle ensued some atomic particles annihilated each other blow-for-blow particle four particle when matter and antimatter meet they mutually destruct this is the most powerful release of energy known if our universe started off with equal amounts of matter and antimatter all the atoms word annihilated with anti-atoms and we'd end up with universe consisting just of heat and radiation but nothing from which we and the stars could have been made but somewhere in this tiny blazing Inferno the process was slightly imperfect there was more matter than antimatter at the end of the battle matter had won and the universe was far from empty every time a particle of antimatter had been annihilated the energy was converted into radiation and that radiation is right before our very eyes don't adjust your set hidden and the interference on a badly tuned TV set is the energy signal left from the first second of the universe the discovery of the Big Bang was one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time even though it was an accident this is the horn antenna the bell research labs in New Jersey it's unusual funnel shape was designed to collect faint radio waves from early communication satellites it was being used for an entirely different experiment when it detected something truly remarkable a discovery that would win two American scientists the Nobel Prize I visit the horn antenna I'm always reminded of the days back in the 60s when Arno and I were using it seriously it's amazing to think about just doing your experiment and discovering the beginning of the universe but there it is in 1964 Bob Wilson and his colleague Arno Penzias were using the horn antenna to search for natural radio emissions from our own galaxy but as soon as they switched their giant ear peas on it started humming it was picking up wheat but constant background interference Wilson and Penzias had no idea where the signal was coming from at first they suspected nearby New York but when they ruled that out their suspicions turned on the local bird population there were a pair of pigeons living in the antenna once a week we come up and disturb them they'd fly away but the next day when we were gone they come back so the inside of the horn was covered with white pigeon droppings we got up in the horn reflector the broom and swept it all out with the pigeons evicted the two scientists were disappointed to find the interference was still there we looked in various directions sometimes we looked at specific objects other times we looked at random parts of the sky and every time we did that we saw the same level the same amount of excess noise was the same in all directions they began to realize that it could have a more dramatic origin what Wilson and Penzias had stumbled across was a background of microwave radiation a faint afterglow of the battle that defeated antimatter 12 billion years before the microwave background comes from the initial very dense and hot state stage of the universe and as the universe expands the radiation expands with it and just like anything else that expands it tends to cool off it came from the early stages of the universe and it's just out there if you go outside it'll hit you on the head you won't notice it because it's so weak it's at such a low level that it's almost undetectable every television set on earth can detect the radiation from the Big Bang antimatter had been defeated and the universe was still only a second oak over the next three minutes the explosions created the kind of matter we would recognize today hydrogen and helium it was still too early for the universe to shine in the Dark Ages that followed the Big Bang these elements would combine together and provide the building blocks of the first generation of stars and galaxies the atoms created 12 billion years ago are still with us today every time you take a sip of water you're swallowing hydrogen atoms that were created at the very beginning of the universe most of the atoms in our bodies were created in the first moments of the Big Bang we tend to often dissociate ourselves from the universe we tend to think of asking questions about it versus us but of course that's not really true we're a part of the universe and when we ask about the origin and evolution of the universe itself we're really asking questions about the origin and evolution of our cells since the Big Bang the universe has continued to grow and expand to understand just how big it has grown we need to take an imaginary spaceship ride from the earth to the edge of the visible universe our nearest neighbor is the moon just a quarter of a million miles away at the center of our solar system 93 million miles away is our Sun after crossing the center of our solar system we continued our flight beyond the orbit of the earth the next planet out is Mars beyond the orbit of Mars is the asteroid belt a billion miles away is the giant outer planets Saturn almost a thousand times the size of Earth as we leave the solar system we would pass one of our earliest interplanetary explorers Voyager 1 launched in 1977 and traveling at a mere 40,000 miles per hour Proxima Centauri and Alpha Centauri a and B our nearest stars are 25 million million miles away our solar system sits in the quiet suburbs of a spiral galaxy the Milky Way a star city containing over a hundred billion stars every star we can see in the night sky lies within our own galaxy this is deep space out beyond the Milky Way ten million million million miles from Earth is the next spiral galaxy Andromeda even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach here Andromeda and the Milky Way formed part of a small cluster of galaxies called the local group but stretching out way beyond the local group are much greater clusters of galaxies if it were possible to travel fast enough for long enough and reach the edge of the known universe this is what we would see uneven clusters of galaxies a pattern that was predetermined in the very first second of the Big Bang this is as far as our spaceship can take us we are now fifty billion trillion miles from Earth this is where science ends and speculation begins astronomers may never see what lies beyond here this is where the secrets of the universe are hidden for centuries astronomers have been trying to locate our exact position by looking further and further across the vast expanses of deep space for 400 years since Galileo first pointed his telescope at the sky astronomers have not only been looking across the far reaches of space but back in time because the light from distant objects takes so long to reach us every telescope is a time machine even traveling at an unbelievable 186,000 miles per second light takes a long time to cross space light reflected off the surface of the Moon is already over a second old by the time it reaches us on earth look up at certain and you're seeing it as it was one and a half hours ago and we see Andromeda as it was when the first humans walked the earth its light has been traveling across space for over two million years here at the Lick Observatory Sandra Faber spent her early career unraveling the mysteries of the most distant galaxies the biggest telescopes on earth now are taking us back billions of years into the past 90% of the way back to the beginning of the universe view light from the furthest visible galaxies and you're seeing them as they were over 11 billion years ago a galaxy is really like a city of stars just as there are billions of people on earth or millions of people in a city there are hundreds of billions of stars in a typical galaxy the universe contains over a hundred billion galaxies like giant hurricanes in space their resident stars spin around a giant central core to see into the heart of the most distant galaxies would require a very special telescope in 1990 the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope promised astronomers a view of the early universe they had only dared dream of high above the Earth's atmosphere this billion-dollar looking glass would have a totally clear view of the most distant galaxies but the dream turned into a nightmare soon after it was launched they discovered that the mirror was miss shapen it saw everything out of focus one of the repairman sent up to fix the stricken telescope was astronaut Jeff Hoffman it was unbelievably embarrassing for NASA and and for the astronomical community I mean I had astronomer friends who that summer when they were on holiday and people asked well you know what do you do for a living they didn't even want to say I'm an astronomer because the first thing everybody would say oh the Hubble telescope ah you know it was a big joke first the crew of the rescue mission had to capture the crippled telescope hello yeah then execute a repair mission unprecedented in the history of spaceflight spread over five days of spacewalks they repaired the faulty optics the replacement parts fitted perfectly the problems came when Hofmann attempted to close the huge access doors lo and behold they did not close and I worked I went up to the top of the doors I went to the bottom of the doors but what we figured out was that we could use an extra tool which had a little strap and wrap that around some bolts to gradually winch the door closed we ended up spending over eight hours outside which is the second longest spacewalk that's ever been done at one point in the mission they even had to dump a damaged solar panel overboard with all the repairs completed the cosmological community held its collective breath to see if the most expensive telescope ever built would finally deliver what its designers originally promised this is what Hubble saw the images they received were beyond anyone's wildest imagination three from the distortion of the Earth's atmosphere images captured by the Space Telescope left even the most hardened of cosmologists in all Hubble captured the final moments of a star's life when it explodes and blows off layers of gas and dust it also captured in two stellar nurseries of newly born stars each one is varied and unique as a human fingerprint and dark pillars of cosmic dust more than a million million miles long ready to spawn a new generation of stars and planets but Hubble's true moment of glory was still to come the mission controllers pointed the telescope at a distant empty patch of deep space and waited over a period of 10 days in 1995 emerging across the coldness of space the Hubble Deep Field image revealed a tapestry of distant galaxies this was the farthest back in space and time we had ever seen to point the telescope for hundreds of hours and let this light that has traveled for 10 billion years slowly dribble in and accumulate when you see so far back and see so many galaxies and imagine that sky is filled with them billions of galaxies that's like ten galaxies for every person on earth something like 50 to 100 billion galaxies and each one of them containing 50 to 100 billion stars say that's an enormous number of places where there might be planets and life and very interesting things going on in the universe powerful computers have turned the real galaxies of the Deep Field image into a remarkable 3d journey to the edge of the universe in the foreground armature galaxies like our own further back in time our younger energetic galaxies but beyond here the structures begin to thin out this is as far as we can see this is the edge of the visible universe over 90% of the way back to the beginning of everything faint galaxies that will form just a billion years after the Big Bang beyond these galaxies we can see nothing we're entering the universe's Dark Ages sometime few hundred million years after the Big Bang this dark age must have ended when the first stars were born and so the universe lit up for the first time perhaps half a billion years after the Big Bang and it's been lit by stars ever since the universe is so vast some astronomers have decided to make a map of exactly where we are just as Galileo tried to make sense of our place in the heavens here at Apache point New Mexico a group of astronomers are trying to locate our position by constructing the biggest map that anyone is ever seeking built specifically to map over a million galaxies this is the home of the Sloan Sky Survey over a period of five years astronomer Jim Gunn and his colleagues are about to start mapping our exact position in the universe we're in a galaxy which is not a particularly remarkable galaxy but this 3d picture that we will make of the nearby universe tells us how we fit into this this vast scheme of things that is the universe and I think will give us a much better idea of our place by systematically scanning the entire night sky from a site high above the desert floor the results will be plotted not as a two-dimensional route map but a fully interactive three-dimensional guide to the universe if you think about that from a kind of cinematic point of view one could take this map very easily put this map on a computer and enable you to rotate the map to fly through space if you like to look at our galaxy from outside to look at the other galaxies around us from the other side and take not only from any angle you want but from any place in this map and look out and see what it's like to be somewhere else in the universe and what we are which is of course what you see in science fiction films all the time but you will actually be able to do it with the galaxies that are there Jim gun survey is an ambitious project and it's only just beginning this is how the final map may look it's a computer simulation of superclusters of galaxies massed together in giant blocks you are here this would be the position of our planet our solar system and our own Milky Way but on this scale it would be impossible to see us or even any of our neighboring galaxies this is a map of everything we can see everything in the universe all the visible stars and galaxies were born in the same furnace the Big Bang a ball of intense heat still cooling as it continues to expand cosmologists are not only confident that they have unearthed the universe's past but that they can also predict its future space like the surface of hot blown glass cools as it expands just as flecks of color embedded in the glass move further apart the more it stretches so do the galaxies space is expanding in all directions at once modern cosmologists are now trying to measure if this expansion will continue forever how will the universe end the key to the future of the universe was discovered long before modern astronomers built their giant telescopes back in the 1660s when Sir Isaac Newton had an encounter with a falling Apple and discovered gravity Newton formulated laws of physics which form the basis of modern science he realized that the same force that takes an apple and pulls it down from a tree towards the earth pulls the moon towards the earth and in fact pulls the earth towards the Sun and pulls the Sun towards the center of our galaxy but in fact gravity is the weakest force in nature if you wanted to show someone how weak gravity is just take a friend to the top of a tall building and push them off and they'll they may take 12 stories for them to fall and gravity to accelerate them all the way down to the ground but electricity and magnetism in a in a fraction of a second and a fraction of an inch will stop them because the reason you don't go through things is not that the atoms in your body hit the atoms in the table but rather it's the electric fields between those atoms that stop you so electricity and magnetism stops you in a fraction of a second even though it takes gravity all that time to accelerate gravity may be the weakest force but it's the force that holds the planets and the stars together after Newton perhaps the greatest scientists and mathematician of all time was Albert Einstein Einstein had been an unremarkable student when his first job was as a clerk in the local Patent Office his general theory of relativity announced in 1915 explained for the very first time how everything within the universe interacts space matter even time his calculations told him that the stars and galaxies should exert a gravitational pull on each other and should eventually collapse together in a catastrophic fireball but they hadn't collapsed so to make his equations work he invented a special repulsive force but it was a makeshift solution and deep down in Stein nude then a decade later along came a man with the solution to Einstein's puzzle here at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California Edwin Hubble took the first steps towards forecasting the fate of our entire universe Hubble was a world war one veteran and a brilliant lawyer when he turned his renowned skills to astronomy he came up with a remarkable discovery that would change the way we view the universe forever he made the astronomical discovery of the century that the universe was expanding 75 years on measuring the precise speed of that expansion is the job of astronomer Wendy Freedman what Hubble found was that almost all galaxies appeared to be moving away from us and this led to the idea that the universe is expanding here was evidence for the first time that the universe was actually in motion that galaxies are moving apart what that means is that you can essentially extrapolate backwards in time it's like running a film in Reverse if galaxies are expanding now then it's some time in the past they must have been closer and closer together what that implies is that sometime early in the history of the universe galaxies would have been much closer together the matter in the universe would have been much denser and much hotter and this gave rise to the idea of a big bang universe Hubble's revelation stood the astronomical community's understanding of the cosmos on its head he'd used the same technique that police forces around the world used today to catch speeding motorists Hubble use the astronomical equivalent of a police radar instead of using radar signals Hubble measured the light that came from distant galaxies he knew that their color would be slightly altered if they were traveling towards or away from us if an object is moving away from us then the light from that object will be shifted toward the red part of the spectrum if an object is coming towards us the light will be shifted toward the blue part of the spectrum by determining just how much the color had been changed Hubble could work out how fast the galaxy was traveling it's an effect known as the Doppler shift and it applies to both light and radar Hubble found that all the light from all the galaxies was shifted towards the red part of the spectrum they were traveling away from us at an incredible speed there have been dramatic improvements in the technology since Hubble's day and we now have the advantage for the first time of being able to get outside of the Earth's atmosphere that is we can go to space use the Hubble Space Telescope named after Edwin Hubble to measure distances to galaxies modern astronomers have calculated that we along with all the contents of our own galaxy are traveling away from the nearest cluster of galaxies at a million miles an hour by the end of this program the whole universe will have expanded a billion miles in all directions cosmologists need to find out if there's enough matter in the universe for gravity to stop it expanding and flying apart there isn't enough matter normal matter who count for all the matter we can weigh in the universe we can actually weigh the galaxies the same way we weigh the Sun and the earth using Newton's laws we watch the Sun go around the galaxies and we use gravity determine how heavy the galaxy really is and when we do that we find there's a lot more out there than meets the eye wondering if there is enough matter in the universe to stop it expanding is a prime concern professor Stephen Hawking born 300 years after Newton Hawking now holds Newton's old job at Cambridge University porking already knows that the visible galaxies do not produce enough gravity he now suspects that the universe is full of invisible dark matter if the universe continues to expand forever everything will burn out indicate the amount of matter we observe in stars and gas clouds is only about 10% of what is required to stop the expansion of the universe and cause it to collapse again however there might be other dark matter that we can't see but which can still affect the expansion of the universe Dark Matter is everywhere the reason we can't see it is because of its size particles of dark matter are so tiny they can pass through anything Neil Spooner and a dedicated band of astrophysicists are attempting to trap dark matter particles called wimps weakly interacting massive particles a mile underground at bull be mine in England it just makes up so much matter so much of the universe it's at least 90% probably 99% if it wasn't for this material our galaxies would just fly apart we believe that that matter is composed of elementary particles that arose in the Big Bang and there around us all the time and they're passing through us all the time Neil Spooner and his team feel sure that any particles that could penetrate through 5,000 feet of solid rock would be dark matter the team are attempting to record collisions between particles of dark matter and the atoms in a light emitting crystal but it's a long vigil that requires an unusual level of patience occasionally like about once a day they might get one interaction other words the Pascal comes in stripes and atom it recoils and it produces a little burst of light ordinary visible light which we can detect with our instruments and then amplify and record into our computers it will take years but if their equipment successfully detects Dark Matter Spooner's team will have discovered the invisible 90% of our universe but this may not be enough there may still be too little gravity to stop the universe expanding for eternity it could be that the universe will basically expand forever and simply dissipate and eventually we'll end up with a like a soup of rather boring atoms and dark matter diffused around and it'll be a sort of slow death and on into infinity and that'll be it for some the challenge of predicting the fate of our universe is compulsive their passion for cosmology often turns into a lifelong obsession there are a lot of people engaged in trying to find out what the universe is and I think it's mostly the same kind of curiosity that kids have when they're six years old or eight years old seems to get beaten out of them in school but we're sort of the ones that I know the schools didn't affect or something like that look we're still asking those same questions and still trying to get answers to them here at cero tolola cosmologists have made a startling new discovery Bob Kirchner believes that Dark Matter may not be holding the universe together at all they're forecasting how the universe will end by observing one of the most violent cosmic events stars that explode in distant galaxies with unbelievable ferocity when they reach the end of their life supernova from the brightness of these explosions Kirchner and his team can tell if a galaxy is near or far away they measure the distance super novae as markers to help them work out how fast the universe is expanding this is a very sensitive system that we're using it has an electronic detector and of course it's connected to a gigantic telescope it lets you see objects which are about 100 million times fainter than you can see with your dark adapted eye like Edwin Hubble they're using the light from distant galaxies to get an accurate fix on the universe's rate of expansion they thought they would be measuring how much the gravitational pull from dark matter was slowing the expansion rate down but what they have found has stung your cosmological community well maybe for the other galaxies rather than slowing down the universe is speeding up the galaxies are moving apart faster than ever before dark matter is not powerful enough if it looks to me like there's still something there the locations of their ride scientists now believe that the universe will not collapse in a catastrophic fireball nor will it coast on serenely instead its contents will speed apart faster and faster until lost in the vast blackness of space so if the picture that is coming from the supernova is really right the universe will expand forever in fact faster and faster on into the future now this is really not anything to worry about the even though it is a kind of a bleak future of an empty cold dark universe what kuschner may have discovered is a remnant of the original Big Bang the inflation that started in the very first second of the universe is taking off again what makes cosmology at the end of the 20th century so exciting is that in fact we understand that the largest things in the universe are really determined by the smallest things in the universe that there's this connection because the very early Big Bang the fundamental forces govern governing the microscopic structure matter really determined the structures we see today on scales of largest galaxies and superclusters the shape of our universe everything we see around us was determined when the universe was smaller than an atom and only a fraction of a second our universe is cooling and dying in a billion years from now our first unmanned spacecraft like Voyager 1 will leave the Milky Way and drift unhindered through the universe as the universe reaches middle-age even the longest-lived stars will start to burn out our son has about 5 billion years of life left but very few stars will still be shining 10 billion years from now the dead stars will still orbit around the center of the galaxy but their collisions will gradually cause most of them to fall into a giant black hole at the center suppose we look ahead to when universe is a hundred billion years old then it will be a rather dull and dark place because all but the faintest and most slow burning stars would have died so the universe will not only disperse but all the galaxies will get fainter as the universe expands with age gravity will lose its precarious grip if you could be there to witness it you would see absolutely nothing is there anything the human race could do to flee from such a dark fate could we escape into another dimension into another universe the best ideas that people have come up with to suggest that maybe our Big Bang was not the only one and that the inflation which led to our universe may have happened elsewhere maybe an infinite number of times in some grand eternal cosmos if other universes do exist could we ever find a way of travelling into one it's incredibly interesting that there's a lot more we don't know about the universe then than we do in spite of all we've learned up to date and therefore some of the wild ideas from science fiction including things like even wormholes might or might not be possible we just don't know at this point wormholes are another prediction of Einstein's theories here space is so twisted that it forms a tunnel from one universe to another even if these hypothetical holes in space in time do exist entering a neighboring universe could be unwise travel into one where the laws of physics are even slightly different from home and you'd cease to exist at all even though we have very small brains and we lead very brief lives and so on the fact is we're able to understand where we are and because we can use instruments like the big telescopes the physics that we learn on the surface of the earth and the idea is that people have had over the last few centuries to build up a coherent picture and I think we should be proud of that we've done pretty well I feel it's been a great privilege and a huge amount of luck to be present to witness and important science like cosmology hit its peak in some way creatures like us and there probably are many are the consciousness or the intelligence of the universe it's almost as if the universe invented a way to know itself after centuries of gazing at the heavens scientists now know that everything in our universe was born twelve billion years ago before the Big Bang there was nothing this violent explosion gave birth to everything we can see countless galaxies stars and planets even life itself Oh

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Keywords: universe, beyond, millennium, creation, documentary, astronomical, phenomena, research, theories, cosmology, astronomy, history, interstellar, transcendence, john, hurt, actor, wormhole, tunnel, time, dawn, beginning, end, god, allah, islam, sun, dark, anti, matter, particle, energy, physics, christianity, christ, space, travel, understand, probe, future, greatest, adventure, galaxy, stars, human, mind, cgi, imagery, big, bang, theory, steady, state, hubble, telescope, obsolete, old, classic, information, study, question, answer, ultimate, radiation

Id: WNzdy9c4vuU

Length: 50min 56sec (3056 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2013