Original subtitles

Every story has a beginning,

even the story of the Universe.

Some 13.7 billion years ago,

a mysterious event forced the Universe into motion,

in a Big Bang.

The ultimate creation of every atom, every star

and every galaxy.

But this is our story,

how for thousands years we've pieced together a vision of the Universe,

made sense of it through science

and discovered our place within it.

This is our story of everything,

from shaman to scientist,

beyond the Big Bang.

MURDY Presenteert uit "2007" "THE UNIVERSE 1" "14: BEYOND THE BIG BANG "

For thousands of years we've gathered our observations of the heavens

into books that would more than fill a library.

We built a vast body of knowledge about our Universe.

How it all began,

how it will end.

It's a work in progress.

The script is still being written,

the ink is still wet on the page.

Where do we begin?

Let's begin

at the beginning.

Let's begin

with the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is a theory of cosmic evolution.

It tells us how the Universe evolved, how it changed

from a split second after whatever

brought it into existence.

And we still do not know what that is

until today.

When you look out at the Universe

and look at the other distant galaxies, you see that they all fleeing away from us

that they all moving outward,

at huge velocities.

You extract like that all the way back.

You see that one time, maybe

13 or 14 billions years ago,

everything that there was must have been compressed into one inconceivably dense point.

We know we don't have the whole story

but we never had the whole story in the history of physics.

We have had series of better and better approximations

revealing, startingly more and more beautiful and interesting truths.

The Big Bang is our theory for the beginning of the Universe.

But for a long time,

people either didn't think about the origin of the Universe

or they assumed the Universe had always existed

and was everlasting.

Even scientists were reluctant

at first to embrace the Big Bang.

It was meant to be a derisive term

However, the Big Bang is really a contradiction

because it was not big

and there was no bang.

It wasn't big because we think that the Universe

started from a singularity of some sort

And there was no bang because there was no air to carry the vibrations.

So a Big Bang is in some sense a misnomer but the name stuck.

And so has the theory.

Right now the Big Bang theory is a solid part of science as we understand it.

Anybody who do not accept it will be

regarded by most of the people in the community as a crackpot.

But acceptance and understanding are two different things.

The Big Bang theory doesn't yet provide

all the answers science seeks,

to explain how our Universe was born.

What cosmologists are refering to when they talk about the Big Bang theory,

is really only a description of the aftermath of the Bang.

The conventional Big Bang theory says nothing about

what banged, why it banged

or what happened before it banged.

Right now, at this very second

we're in the aftermath of the Big Bang.

Everything we see, and hear,

and taste, and smell, and touch is the aftermath.

The Big Bang is really our evolving, expanding Universe.

For us, mostly stuck on our rocky little planet

the view of the Universe begins with Earth.

This is Earth.

Silicon and oxygen based with a metallic core.

The surface is mostly water.

It teems with life and rotates once every 24 hours

while orbiting a star called the Sun

every 365 days.

This is the Sun. Mostly hydrogen and helium.

It's surface temperature is nearly 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit

For energy

our Sun converts 700 million tons of hydrogen

into 695 million tons of helium every second.

The Sun is part of a solar system,

formed around 4.5 billion years ago,

that includes Earth and 7 other orbiting planets.

From Mercury to Neptune.

And it isn't a stationary system.

Our solar system is spinning,

flying through space at 134 miles per second.

Turning in circles.

As part of a vast collection of stars and star systems.

There are maybe 200 billion stars

in this collection called "The Milky Way" galaxy.

An estimated 6 billions of those stars

with planetary systems like ours.

Our solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way,

on one of its outer arms.

The Milky Way is one of more than 125 billion galaxies,

that make up the visable Universe.

This is the Universe.

It's really, really big.

And it's getting bigger.

It's expanding.

If the Universe is expanding, then it used to be smaller.

Much smaller.

In fact, if we went back in time, we could watch it shrink.

Back far enough,

and the Universe would be smaller than a galaxy.

Back, and the Universe is smaller than our solar system.

Further back and everything that exists fits inside a stadium,

a coffee cup,

an atom.

13.7 billion years ago

the Universe was smaller than the smallest part of an atom.

Unbelievably small.

Then something happened.

In a flash, everything suddenly expanded.

This was how it all began

the first moment of existence,

what we now call...

The Big Bang.

And that's what we know to be true, not because theorists have invented it

but because what all observations tells us.

We can predict the abundance of light elements

they agree over 10 orders of magnitude over what we see.

So that fundamental picture that the Universe is expanding,

emerged out of a hot,

dense Universe, to find that time in the past

is the the Big Bang picture.

The theory of the Big Bang isn't the sort of thing you figure out over night.

It takes years.

Centuries of collected wisdom.

Mankind has been thinking about this for a long time.

Even before we realized it, we were thinking about it.

Every time we looked up at the stars, we were thinking about it.

How do we know what we now know?

How did we figure it all out?

That's the heart of our story.

The story of how our concept of the Universe evolved.

We stockpiled the discoveries of the most

brilliants members of our species,

allowing us, however strain and whatever struggle it involves

to slowly ascend the ladder of knowledge.

Maybe compensating for the fact, that anyone of us

is just too stupid to figure it all out.

So, where do we begin?

Today, professional astronomers and physicists on campuses like

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

and Cambridge University in England

wage debate about the Big Bang theory.

But the conversation began a long time ago.

Before anyone ever heard about the Big Bang.

Before anyone knew what the heavens really were.

Way before science existed

or was even a contemplation in the mind of anybody

people were asking questions about origin.

When early man looked at the sky

He saw it dominated by the warming, lifegiving Sun

At night, he saw the Moon and stars.

This was the Universe... harsh, hostile and chaotic.

With a drifting Sun that shifted across the sky

as the seasons went from warm to cold.

Primitive people needed to understand their world

in order to survive it.

People had absolutely no control over nature.

The balance of the expected and unexpected made people

make nature into gods

in order to establish some kind of relationship with them.

Without telescopes or modern observatories

primitive people relied on simple structures

to help them understand the skies.

At places like Stonehenge, in England

or Chichen Itza, in Mexico

they attemped to connect with the heavens

the perceived home of the Gods.

This were simple instruments of observation

and tools of analysis

that helped to make sense of the dancing Universe

We are here in the Eastern part of Germany some 100 km south of Berlin

in a little village, called Gosek.

One of the oldest monuments, concerning Sun, Moon and stars

was found here.

This is the solar observatory of Gosek.

It was build 7000 years ago,

and was used by the early farmers to tell the time of the year.

Constructed 2000 years before Stonehenge and reconstructed here

this is Europe's oldest known calendar.

During the winter and summer solstices

the shortest and longest days of the year

the setting Sun lines up with gates in the palisades.

Knowing these dates

helped this people understand the life-giving Sun.

The night sky is a clock.

It is a gigantic clock staring you in the face and it allowed the ancients

to calculate when to plant, when to harvest.

In other words, they very livelihood depended upon their understanding

the motion of the Sun and the heavens.

This idea of astronomy predicting the behavior of the natural world

based on the motion of the heavens,

gets mixed up with the dogma of the astrology

the belief that the motion of heavens predetermines our fate.

That a meteor signals military victory.

A new star, the birth of a king.

Back then astronomy was predicting the motion of the stars.

Astrology was predicting how those stars affected us.

And it's real hard in the ancient mind to separate those two.

If you understand the clockwork of the heavens you understand how our fate is going to be.

Astrologers divided the sky into regions as early as the 6th century B.C.

They saw shapes in the stars

and named the regions after these shapes.

Aries

Taurus

and Gemini

among others.

But as astrologers gazed at story sky to divine their fate.

They also watched and learned how the heavens moved.

From superstitious models came the baby steps

of scientific observation.

I see science as

a journey that our species has been on for

roughly 2500 years to try to come to grips

in as deep way as possible with the Universe,

the laws of the Universe, the structure of the Universe what make things up

how do they evolve and what are the forces they govern change.

But sometimes, simple observations

can lead to fundamental wrong conclusions.

When we look out at the Universe

the first sense you get is we are the center of the Universe,

that Universe is revolving around us,

Stars go cross the night sky, the Sun goes cross during the day,

and the sense was that the Earth was fixed and that the heavens rotated about us.

But that perception is completely wrong.

Earth isn't fixed, it's not the center of anything.

The whole history of cosmology

it is the relentless retreat of Earth from center stage.

Nevertheless, the gathering of knowledge moved forward.

Using the mathematics

The ancient Greeks provided more detailed information

about our dominant celestial neighbors the Sun and the Moon.

Even back then, 2000 years ago, they knew that the Earth curved.

and by looking at the shadows, they calculated the size of the Earth

to within about 10% accuracy.

They actually calculated the distance from the Earth to the Moon

and the rough dimension of the distance from the Earth to the Sun

so in other words, the ancients were no fools.

The ancient Greeks also recognized two types of stars.

Most were fixed and small and moved together.

A few were larger and moved haphazardly or so it seemed.

These were the planets

And predicting thier motion become a century's long goal.

With just their naked eyes to scan the skies.

The Greeks saw only five planets

naming each after their Gods.

Today we are more familiar with the Roman designations:

Mercury, Venus

Mars, Saturn, Jupiter.

Ancient astronomy assumed a concept of the Universe

proposed by the 4 century B.C. Greek philosopher Aristotle

who imagined the Earth at center of the Universe,

with a sun, moon, stars, and planets

all revolving elegantly around it

in perfect crystalline spheres.

Aristotle's Universe was finite, it was a big sphere

actually was like an onion, it was an onion with many centric spheres

First century astronomy Tolomeo

improved on Aristotle

by accurately tracing the path of the planets.

Which didn't move haphazardly after all

Using complex circular motions called epicycles

Tolomeo could predict their proscribed paths and changing velocities.

In other words Tolomeo's system reliably predicted

the future behavior of the planets.

Another step in man's journey

to understand and control the Universe.

The Tolomeo's system was extremely complex

it had all these planets going in loops

and worked beautifully but was just wrong.

The idea that you can predict something

doesn't mean you understand fundamental principles behind it.

Tolomeo's system did not accurately reveal the Universe

but it did try.

He essentially showed that the positions of the planets

could be calculated for any time past or future

It was a tour de force of mathematical understanding.

Interestingly

the astronomy seemed to stand still for centuries after that.

In fact after the collaps of Rome in 476 A.D.

astronomy actually lost ground.

Europe fragmented into smaller powers

and a lot of the wisdom of the Greek's was lost.

A thousand years later, a new theory would confront accepted beliefs

about how the heaven worked

and would move mankind one step closer to a theory of the Big Bang

During the 15th century A.D.

An idea called heliocentrism,

claimed the Sun, not the Earth, was at the center of the Universe.

This horrified Christian clergy

who felt contradicted the word of God.

If God created the Earth and man in his own image

then Earth and it's devotee inhabitants

must be the center of everything.

Ironically, the champion of a sun centered Universe

was a devotee Church deacon from Frombork, Poland.

named Nicolas Copernicus.

He was a cathedral administrator.

Working to help collect the rents, helping people who were sick.

But in between he was working on astronomy.

Copernicus was troubled by Tolomeo's complex heavenly mechanics.

But he found an elegant solution.

When he moved the Earth from center of the Solar System

And replaced it with the Sun at the heart of it all.

When Copernicus put the planets going around the Sun

he discovered that the planet Mercury, which goes around in about 3 months

automatically fell closest to the Sun.

And Saturn, the slowest planet, which goes around in about 30 years,

automatically fell at the outside edge.

Copernicus wrote: In no other way

do we find such a sure harmonious connection

between the size of the orbit and its period.

That seemed almost magical.

Copernicus also insisted that the Earth was rotating

that it spun completely around on an axis every 24 hours.

The heavens didn't move, we did.

Stars chasing across the sky each night,

were mearly an illusion created by the rotating Earth.

Likely, afraid of Church reprisals.

Copernicus withheld publishing his theory

until he was on his deathbed in 1543.

But his book "Concerning the revolutions of the celestial orbs"

paved the way for Johannes Kepler,

born in 1571

the champion of observational science.

Kepler was the real hero here, because he was the one that really come out, and trumpeted to the world

that the Sun has to be the center.

Kepler had at his disposal a trove of astronomical data,

collected through years of staring at the sky

When he checked his observations and did calculations, and realized

that not only was the sun center of the solar system

but the perfect circles were a figment also.

Maybe it's uglier philosophically, but it really match the data.

Kepler improved on the Copernican system

by hypothesizing that the planets traveled

not in perfect circles,

but in ellipses around the sun.

Kepler's data also pointed to a strange phenomenon

he struggled but failed to understand.

As planets approached the Sun, they speed up.

Further away, they slow down.

Together, the sun centered Universe

and the variable speed of the planets,

best explained what we see here on Earth.

Suddenly and for the first time, the sun centered picture,

gives better predictions than the Earth centered picture.

And then you have not only something that's driven by data,

but does what scientists supposed to do

which is to make predictions, which are good.

But as one cosmic riddle appeared solved, another remained.

Kepler saw that the Sun influenced the speed of the planets

as they traveled through space. But how?

Before anyone addressed this mystery,

dogma and science collided

in a conflict that revibrates to this very day.

At the turn of the 17th century, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei

would take the theories of Copernicus and Kepler

that the Sun was at the center of the solar system

and prove them right beyond any shadow of a doubt.

He did this with a new technology,

that would change the course of history.

The telescope, in a some sense, is the most blasphemous

the most seditious, the most revolutionary and the most

splendorous instrument of science.

All of science received the greatest of gift

in this tool that brought distant objects close.

Once the idea got out,

that you can take two lenses, line them up in such a way

put them in a tube and make a spyglass out of it.

That would spread like wild fire around world as it did.

and so the issue now is not who's got the telescope,

but you now know what to do with it.

Are you looking in people's windows

or are you looking up and out to the Universe.

Galileo improved on the design in 1609

by grinding his own lenses, and creating one that

could magnify an unprecedented 30 times.

And with that telescope for some reason, he decided to look at sky,

instead of the incoming ships of republic of Venice

and what he saw completely changed the scope of astronomy.

Galileo was treated to the clearest and most detailed

view of heavens that any person had ever known.

Through his telescope, Galileo saw thousands more stars,

a moon poked with craters,

satellites circling Jupiter,

Saturn with giant ears.

Greatest of all, Galileo plainly saw

that Venus went through phases like our moon.

Clear evidence that Venus orbits the Sun.

Proof of a sun centered solar system.

It showed for the first time that Copernicus was really right

the Earth wasn't the center of the solar system, the Sun was.

So Galileo with his telescope

pushed the Earth away from center of the Universe, and said: "We are not the center of everything.

We are one planet among others.

And there could be a much larger Universe than we know.

What Copernicus had assumed for aesthetic reasons,

what Kepler deduced measurements and mathematics,

Galileo proved,

Galileo saw,

Galileo revealed.

The ancients had seen everything that could possible seen through naked eye.

It's really took a new instrument to get beyond that.

The telescope that was where the breaking point was

between ancients and the moderns.

Centuries of Church dogma

claiming Earth was the center of the Universe,

was now plainly wrong.

With the Catholic Church still reeling

from the schism of protestant reformation

Galileo's discovery seemed to undermine scripture.

Dangerous for a Church that felt under siege,

dangerous for a scientist proposing it.

Nevertheless, Galileo, a devotee Catholic

published his observations in the book called "The Story Messenger" in 1610.

Surprisingly

the Church welcomed Galileo's findings, at first.

Had Galileo been a little more careful

in his approach, he may have gotten away with it.

One famous quotation from cardinal Baronius, a predecessor, was

"The Bible tell us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."

Ultimately, Galileo's downfall was not his inability

to sway the Church to his way of thinking

but rather his attempt at interpreting scripture

all by himself, independent of the Church.

Galileo credits the famous Saint Augustin,

who said that: "If you find an interpretation of scriptures

which seam to be contradicted to established knowledge

then you should reconsider that interpretation of scriptures".

But the Church, concerned with perceived

threats to its own power,

could not concede biblical interpretation to Galileo.

In 1633, after Galileo published a new book

"Champion in the suncentered system".

The Pope summoned him to stand trial for heresy.

He was forced to give up all his copernican ideas,

which apparently he did kneeling in front of the tribunal.

Despite his confession, Galileo quietly held fast to his beliefs

throughout his final years under house arrest

at his villa outside Florence.

Galileo is the first modern scientist, in the sense that

he actively enganged in observations with the telescope

he actively proposed theories consistent with the telescope

and he dared, he dared to challenge the Orthodoxy of the moment.

Shortly before his death in 1642

Galileo inadvertently stumbled over a clue to Kepler puzzle

about the Sun's strange influence on planetary motion.

It was a clue that would help point future generations

toward a theory of the Big Bang.

Galileo's last published work

dealt with the properties of falling bodies

Which he noted, "always accelerated with the same rate

no matter what their mass".

But it would take another genius

to connect these two puzzle pieces together

in a theory of gravity.

Isaac Newton, born in 1643,

explained the mechanism by which the planets moved.

And not just how planets moved, but how everything moved. From planets...

to apples.

Newton was a towering intellect. It is astonishing what he did.

His moment in the history of science is a sharp break

in which the power of mathematics

it really brought to bear on aspects of the physicial Universe.

He is what set us down this path of using mathematics

to describe Universe, showing the maths for some reason

is the language of the cosmos.

Kepler observed through these data, the tracked effects the Sun

it acted like a giant magnet.

Might the planets also be like magnets?

Galileo had theorized about the rate of acceleration of falling bodies.

And he realized that regardless of their mass,

falling objects always fall at same rate.

But years later, Newton had something to add to Kepler and Galileo.

The great inside Newton had was

bring Galileo and Kepler together and to realize that

the things that make projectiles move and fall on earth

is the same thing that makes the planets go around the Sun in the skies.

In a sense, the planets are falling toward the Sun,

just as Galileo's falling bodies fell towards the Earth.

The crux of it all is gravity

the strange action at a distance that holds everything together.

Newton didn't just observe gravity, he drew it up as a provable equation

showing that gravity was the energy

the catcher that capture matter, objects like the Earth and the planets

from flying head long into interstellar space.

Gravity, the attractive force that affects all matter in the Universe.

Gives the Universe order.

And gravity is described by the science of physics.

Newton created physics.

He was the person who first saw the fundamental laws,

underneath all of these observations.

The Newton's laws explained almost everything.

Newton postulated the laws of motion, the Universal rules of gravity.

He begins a new area in science.

Using observations and mathematics

to describe the laws of nature.

He could, in fact, show that the rate which an apple is falling to the earth

was directly related to the way the Moon was falling

around the Earth.

Because he understood that the same laws

that lead to the motion of the planets around the Sun

lead to the motion of the Moon around the Earth.

Newton's great book, The Principia

it revealed the tides, the velocity of orbiting planets

even the shape of the Earth

could be explained through the pull of the gravity

because everything with mass

exerts a pulling force on everything else with mass.

The Moon pulls the oceans,

the Earth pulls the Moon,

the Sun pulls the Earth, and the closer

these objects are to each other, the stronger gravity pulls.

Newton's principia is such an engulfing work of genius

that it almost makes up for one disconcerting fact.

Although Newton formulated the laws that govern gravity

He never explained or even understood why it works.

And gravity, when you think about it, is bizarre.

Understanding how the Earth knew where the Sun was?

To go around it, what happen if the Sun suddenly moved?

What did the Earth do?

This action on a distance is something which he gave up on,

saying "- I'm just not going worry about that question,

because the laws work".

Although physicists still stuggle to define gravity,

Newton had gone far in revealing it.

Two hundred years later

Albert Einstein would rival Newton's genius.

Not only creating new laws of physics

but re-inventing the Universe.

Albert Einstein, born in Germany in 1879,

maybe the most famous scientist to ever lived,

because what he did here, in Bern, Switzerland, in 1905.

Failing to secure a teaching position after his years as a student,

Einstein took a job at this Patents office.

And then he begin to think.

In fact, he thought up a revolution in space and time.

Without Einstein, we might still be strugglling to understand

how the Universe really works.

I think if we were asked who was the greatest scientist of 20th century.

Most of us would say: Einstein

and I think it is a partly because of the fact that it is a natural fascination

with space and time, the mysteries there of.

But also I think it's partly because

he fitted the archetype public perception of a scientist.

Einstein didn't mean to lead us to the origin of the Universe.

He didn't like even think about it

The idea of the beginning suggested a dynamic, finite Universe.

And Einstein preferred a static, infinite one.

Philosophically, he belived that the Universe was eternal,

and that a Universe had to have a beginning and a ending,

was anesthetic, was not pretty.

The idea that the Universe was infinite and eternal was an old one.

embraced by scientists like Einstein.

Because it was easier to think the Universe as always existing,

rather then its having been created.

Created? How? By what?

Unfortunately for Einstein,

his new understanding of forces like gravity

would ultimately suggest the Universe was not eternal.

Einstein's ideas were so bizarre

it's almost easier to think of them as applying to some other crazy carnival world.

But strange as it may seem

our world is Einstein's world.

Gather around, gather around! Don't push! Don't shove! Make sure you a get good view.

The show is about to start, you don't want to miss a thing.

Hurry, hurry, hurry Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up to Einstein World.

Where things are always what they appear to be

but not always what you would expect.

First up, the wonderous Einstein in himself.

Born missing the region of the brain that influences the speech

He did not speak until the age of three.

However, his parietal lobe, responsible for mathematical thought

and space relationships, too large,

making his entire brain 15 % wider.

Notice the enlarged brain...

Einstein was the master of what we call the thought experiment.

Thinking through an experiment that you can't literally carry out,

but based upon your insights from thinking about it.

Sometimes resulting in a revolution at how we think about the Universe.

In 1905, Einstein published his theory of special relativity

which explored the link between space and time.

and Einstein's theory isn't really a separate thing "there is space, and then there is time".

But just one thing, "space-time" that we all live in.

He thought of this new space-time as fabric,

weaving together space and time.

In 1915, Einstein developed his theory about general relativity

which modified special relativity,

to include gravity and it's effects on this fabric of space-time.

Welcome to the bouncy trampoline of gravity!

We have taken our fabric space-time,

stretched it up,

and placed heavy weight on it.

See how it warps the fabric of space-time!

When we rolled the ball across the fabric

it magically seems to be drawn

or attracted to the massive weight at the center.

The general theory of relativity was a new theory of the gravity

one that told us that gravity worked

because space and time are curved in the presence of the matter

and could respond dynamically,

space itself could expand, and contract in the presence of the matter.

An crazy but true idea.

Mass is a term used to describe the energy and matter

that objects contain.

The larger the mass of an object,

the greater it's distortin of the space-time fabric,

the stronger the effects of gravity.

Gravity is not really a force,

it's a fabric.

It's a shape of space and time.

And we just move on the curves of shapes.

And the act of doing so, takes what would otherwise be a straight line to you

and bends it into what you now describe as orbits,

as trajectories, as pathways through the cosmos.

Einstein said not even light

can escape the effects of gravity.

As crazy as this sounds,

proof conveniently arrived in 1919,

in the form of astronomically large experiment

based on a solar eclipse.

General relativity said if you look at a star

on the path of light that goes right path the Sun,

you would see a shift a little bit because the gravity of the Sun.

So Arthur Eddington actually went out to test that theory

during the solar eclipse of 1919, actually photographed stars,

when the Sun was blocked by the Moon

and you could see the stars behind it.

The ability to see objects that were actually behind the Sun

proved that objets could work space-time.

Einstein became a superstar overnight.

He received the Nobel prize in physics in 1921.

But general relativity opened a Pandora's box for Einstein.

One of the consequences of the Einstein theory

was that the Universe must either be expanding or it must be contracting.

But sitting still being eternal it's not a valid solution.

And that was a problem.

A problem, because if you introduce mass into Einstein's static Universe,

all that mass will through gravity draw together.

What was preventing this from happening?

When you put matter in the fabric Universe, you know matter attracts each other,

and the thing is unstable.

To keep gravity from collapsing the Universe

Einstein postulated a force equal to and opposite gravity.

This constant force perfectly counter gravity

to achieve a static Universe.

Einstein searched for this cosmological constant

convinced it was hiding in his equations

but he was wrong.

If Einstein who had the courage of his convictions in some sense

he would have recognized that the static Universe he believed in

was not compatible with the theory that he come up with.

In fact, relativity pointed to the idea that Universe wasn't static.

But expanding.

Sit right down folks, and enjoy the magic space-time projector.

Watch the Universe linked by four dimensions

move forward in space time.

Einstein himself didn't want to make that prediction, that his own theory was sort of screaming to make.

It was a.. I suppose.. the one time in Einstein's career, where his courage failed him.

and he didn't make the bold prediction

that was actually staring him in the face.

Einstein's theory inevitably leads to the idea of

a moment of creation.

Now brace yourself for the part that Einstein couldn't watch!

Stand back everyone as we run the projector backwards.

Despite what Einstein believed

his theory pointed to a dynamic Universe

that was once much smaller.

The Universe shrinks down to the size of an atom.

Einstein couldn't make that leap, but others would.

A dynamic and expanding Universe fit nicely

into a theory called "The Big Bang".

At the dawn of the 20th century

Albert Einstein may have inadvertently

led us to consider the scientific possibility

that our Universe began.

But the idea of a beginning for everything

has strong religious overtones.

A culture will ask itself: "where did I come from?"

It is a very important question for the humans.

Because if we don't know where we came from, we don't know who we are.

For thousands of years the origin of our world

was a matter for religious scholars, not scientists.

There is a different between science and religion,

they are looking at the world in different ways, they are asking different questions.

Sciencists essentially asks how things happen, what's the process of the world.

religion is asking, what I think is a deeper and more interesting question.

why are things happen? Is something going on. Some meaning and purpose in the world.

Religion and science have been uneasy companions.

If only because they seem motivated by same quest for truth.

So it was ironic.

That an early champion of objective scientific theory

for the origin of the Universe, was the ordained Catholic priest.

And what a strange twist,

that his science based solution would appear so religious.

That the Universe didn't always exist.

But that there was once end in the beginning.

Father George Lemaitre argued that the Universe was born.

Lemaitre is one of my ideals.

For few years from late 20's to the early 30's

he was the one who best understood

the concept of an expanding Universe

and introduced many of the ideas we're still exploring.

Lemaitre studied Einsein's theories during 1920's

and proposed a radical idea.

One even the great Einstein would reject,

he said the Universe wasn't static

but was actually expanding.

Lemaitre studied Einstein's equations kind of without prejudices

and when he found that these equations suggested a Universe that would be expanding today

and for ever smaller in the past

he decided to take that solution seriously.

If the Universe was expanding, Lemaitre reasoned

it was smaller yesterday than it is today.

Therefor it must been ultimately, unimaginably small.

Lemaitre believed the Universe began with what he dubbed

a primeval atom.

an infinitely dense, hot cosmic egg

that at some time in the past exploded,

setting the Universe into motion,

and leading to the formation of everything we know.

When Lemaitre told Einstein about this solution

Einstein reportedly said

"Your mathematical is correct, but your physics is abominable ".

But this abomination

soon received compelling corroboration in 1925.

In the mountains above Los Angeles, astronomer Edwin Hubble saw something

in his telescope that destroyed Einstein's cosmological constant

and altered our image of the Universe.

In the 1920's we had this very comfortable picture of the Universe.

The Universe is the Milky Way galaxy.

We saw this huge slope of milk that it cuts across the night sky

called Milky Way, consisting of about a 100 billion stars.

It's was about 100 thousands light years cross.

That was the Universe in the 1920's, very comfortable.

Hubble peered deeper into the Universe

than Galileo could have imagined

using the most sophisticated telescope of his day.

He revealed our Sun as one star among billions within the Milky Way galaxy.

But, was the Milky Way all there is?

If so, exactly how big was it?

Since the advent of powerful telescopes

astronomers have been looking in the skies

but they had no good measure of how far away things were

except for very close stars.

Edwin Hubble solved that problem by coming up with what's called a standard candle.

A star of known brightness.

And if you know how bright it is, you can measure how far away it is.

Because the dimmer something appear, the further away it is.

Just like a train in the distance the light seems dimer,

gets brighter and brighter and brighter as it's approaches you.

Hubble found one of this standard candle,

within a spiral swirl of stars called Andromeda Nebula.

People thought Andromeda was just a wisps of stardust

inside the Milky Way.

Then Hubble calculated the distance

and then he realized that galaxy is a million light years away.

That was the Eureka moment, and he had this epiphany.

He realized that the Andromeda galaxy was an island Universe

just like the Milky Way galaxy.

So, in one instant, the Universe

went from being a comfortable Milky Way galaxy, a hundred thousand light years across

to becoming this fantastic Universe

perhaps billions light years across,

and it all happened, in just one night.

This alone would have assured Hubble's immortality.

He singlehandedly grew the Universe

from a quaint, one galaxy town,

to a potentially billion galaxy metropolis.

But Hubble went on further.

He also measured the behavior of those galaxies and in 1929

he came to the conclusion that most galaxies are moving away from us.

Not just a lot of them but they actually moving away from the Milky Way

and in fact they are moving away from each other.

In other words, the Universe is expanding.

Getting bigger every second.

And if you went back in the time, the Universe must have been smaller.

Based on the speed of expansion that Hubble measured

he could calculate the age of the Universe.

Hubble actually came up with an estimate for that using his data

he said the Universe is about 2 billions years old.

That was bad because we already knew the Earth was older than that.

Hubble was on the right track.

His formula for determining the age of the Universe was correct,

but his measurements were inaccurate.

And this discrepancy gave some scientists room

to quibble with Lemaitre's theory.

But other less scientific reasons

also may have contributed to Lemaitre's super-atom

being estranged from the physics community

throughout the first half of 20th century.

I think there was some resistance to having somebody

in the scientific camp and in the religious camp, but

did that make it difficult for some scientists to perhaps embrace him as much as

they would, someone who's not in that position?

Probably.

Lemaitre's proposal may have left him estranged from his fellow scientists

but it appealad to Pope Pius the 12th

who interpreted the theory as de facto proof

of the biblical story of Genesis.

Lemaitre wrote to the Pope and said stop saying that

this is a scientific theory,

that makes a prediction that you can measure, makes many predictions that you can test.

But your beliefs are independent of those predictions.

Lemaitre's theory could be measured, but proved?

It seemed unlikely billions of years after the fact

that the Big Bang's smoking gun would turn up.

And unless this smoking gun was find,

other theories of the Universe could be proposed

and Lemaitre's cosmic egg would remain unhatched.

By the middle of 20th century, it seemed as if the primeval atom theory

with Universe expanding violently outward

from an infinitely small spec

would never gain wide acceptance.

Hubble' incorrect estimate for the age of the Universe

allowed a competing theory

to emerge from the halls of Trinity College, Cambridge.

There was a tannable alternative to the Big Bang theory

named the Steady State theory,

which allowed the Universe to exist from everlasting to everlasting.

The Steady State theory championed

the static Universe,

that the primval atom concept rejected.

Proposed by astronomer Fred Hoyle

it was built upon a theory of the origin of elements

nitrogen, carbon and more then 100 others in the periodic table.

Under extreme temperatures, hydrogen fuses to form helium

and the helium fuses in entire different heavier elements.

Fred Hoyle believed this nucleosynthesis, the creation of new elements

took place in the cores of very hot stars.

That was an absolutely staggering achievement at the time.

Hoyle's achievement was to teach us,

that everything after helium in the periodic table

is actually stardust.

It is in the stars that these things were made.

But the theory couldn't account for the formation of hydrogen

and most of th helium of the Universe,

because the first stars must have been made of hydrogen already in existence.

This existing hydrogen makes up more than 74% of the detectable Universe.

Hoyle side-stepped this problem

by adopting a widly held belief

that hydrogen and helium had always existed.

In fact, according to Hoyle, the entire Universe had always existed.

No beginning, and no end, just a steady state.

In a nutshell, a steady state Universe is a Universe that's always been there

always looks like it does now, always has the same average density,

has same temperature.

There was just a little problem though

which was people knew the Universe was already expanding,

when the distribution of matter expands, it becoms more dilute.

Now, if the Universal is very old, it would be infinitely diluted.

Hoyle fixed this flaw by assuming that somewhere

matter was always being created in the Universe.

But the wholesale creation of the matter

was a hard pill for physicists to swallow.

And Hoyle had a nemesis of sorts in the Russian physicist George Gamow

an admirer of Lemaitre's primeval atom.

Gamow usually present in these discussions.

And he always brought up nasty questions for Hoyle to consider.

Questions that the steady state had difficulty dealing with.

Gamow turned to atoms as Hoyle did,

to support his competing theory.

Gamow suggested that hydrogen, and helium, and the other elements

were created in first fiery minutes of the Universe

in a Big Bang,

when the temperatures were thousands of degrees hotter

than they are in the core of any star.

But Gamow was a better idea man than he was a mathematician.

And he had to turn to this

phenomenally talented graduated student, Ralph Alpher

and it was really Alpher who's able to push this idea through

and come to a conclusion.

That if indeed the Universe had synthesized the early elements,

it's should be roughly ten times as much hydrogen as helium.

And that match the observations. Fantastic moment.

Alpher with colleague Robert Herman

refined Lemaitre's prediction of

detectable random heat from creation.

A strong clue supporting the Big Bang.

George Gamow and his students asked a very simple question:

If the Big Bang was so hot then,

then the after the shock, after glow, the echo

of the Big Bang can't be so cold now.

So the residual should be mesurable today.

Unfortunately, no one had the right telescopes in 1949

to measure the radiation or heat left over from the moment of the creation.

And at that time there were other problems with the Big Bang theory.

It offered no explanation

as to the origin of elements beyond hydrogen and helium.

At the same time, Steady State

go on a wide spread media coverage.

The Steady State theory was popular with the general public,

because Fred Hoyle was a master of the popularization

just going out, marketing his wacky idea.

Ironically, the term Big Bang was coined by Hoyle in 1949

during one of this popular radio broadcasts.

He later used it as a term of derision.

I think it was a dislike in their relationship.

They did not see eye to eye on most of the things they were thinking about.

So I think Hoyle come of the worse battles

And I think he did more fighting for

his views than was merrited, that is a personal opinion.

Fred was a very brilliant and innovative sort of person. Ideas just poured out of him.

"Some of them were good, and some of them were bad, and he didn't always know which was which."

By the 1960's

Hubble's inaccurate estimate for the age of the Universe

had been corrected to reflect more accurate data.

Resolving one challenge to the Big Bang theory.

Still it seemed the battle between the Steady State and Big Bang

would end in a draw.

But then, all of sudden, scientists found a somking gun,

one nearly as old as the Universe itself.

It's discovery doomed one of these theories to the dustbin of history.

For 500 years, science has been on quest to discover where we belong.

Now astronomers struggle to solve the riddle of how it all began.

Little did they know, the cosmos was whispering the answer back.

We just couldn't hear it.

That whisper took the form of leftover heat

generated when the Universe exploded into being.

The radiation that George Lemaitre predicted was out there

but that he had no tools to hear.

By 1965, scientists had those tools.

The residual, the echo, the after shocks of the Big Bang

should be mesurable today.

But it took about 2 decades

before instruments became powerful enough

to clinch George Gamow and his students theory

of this background radiation.

The story on this radiation, is like the keystone cards.

First we had George Gamow and its students.

They had the theory, they had the numbers

but they didn't had experimental apparatus.

Then we had the group at Princeton.

Well, they knew the work George Gamow, but they had very primitive instrument

not sensitive enough.

The group at Princeton included physicist Robert Dicke

and some colleagues who supported Lemaitre's theory

and wanted to look for some solid proof.

My teacher, Bob Dicke, he had the idea of looking for this radiation

that would be leftover from the hot Big Bang.

He had two bright young people working with him,

Dave Wilkinson and Peter Roll.

He persuaded them to build a deca-radiometer to look for this radiation.

It was a shoot in the dark.

So these two young colleagues built one,

pointed it into the air

and started looking.

When news of their experiment reached Bob Wilson and Arno Penzias.

Penzias and Wilson were two scientists

working not on the Big Bang theory

but on satellite communications for Bell labs

in Holmdel, New Jersey.

They were using Bell's huge radio telescope

only they couldn't get a clean reading.

Instead they got static nosie.

The nature of this stuff is that it's random noise.

And that nosie is very much like what you would hear

if you tuned the TV set or the FM receiver to an unused channel.

We didn't see what we expected.

The antenna was actually getting more radiation than it should have.

Our clear response to that was there must be something wrong here.

That we're getting all this extra noise.

What was this strange noise?

And where was it coming from?

Aera interference from nearby New York City?

Airplane signals?

Pigeon droppings inside the horn of the telescope?

We didn't doubt physics.

Whatever it was, had to be coming from somewhere.

But we were really running out of ideas of where it might be.

In fact, this mysterious radiations was coming from everywhere.

Every directions and every corner of space.

To Penzias and Wilson that was just crazy.

But Penzias and Wilson had unknowingly found

what Dicke and his colleagues were seeking.

What Gamow, Alpher and Lemaitre had predicted.

They had found the somking gun,

that proved the Universe wasn't eternal.

The source was the creation of the Universe, the Big Bang.

Penzias and Wilson and the Princeton team

published their findings in separate papers

in Astrophysical Journal in 1965.

Their reseach crushed Hoyle's Steady State theory overnight.

Finally, the Big Bang fitted in the puzzle of the Universe.

Our modern theory of the Big Bang is a remarkable achievement,

and it allows us to make a model of

what the Universe was like.

Right back to when everything was only a tiny fraction of a second old.

And was squeezed to immense densitys and temperatures.

And from that very early dense state,

we can understand and broad outline

how the Universe expanded, and cooled,

how at some stage, the first atoms formed,

how at some later stage, the first structures formed

that made early stars, galaxies, advencely planets and people.

In a hospital in Belgium in 1966,

the dying George Lemaitre rejoiced with the news.

He was not alone.

Gamow and his team also felt justified.

We had been arguing for a different view of the Universe

and allow behold that different view seemed to be the correct one.

So that's always a vindication.

For the part of the discovery,

Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel prize in 1978.

The Hoyle Steady State theory,

had fallen out of favour.

His theory of the nucleosynthesis was not rejected.

While most scientists agree that hydrogen

and most of the helium were created in the first few moments of the Big Bang

as Gamow believed.

All other heavier elements like nitrogen and carbon, were created later,

in the hot centers of stars, and in supernovas explosions,

as Hoyle suggested.

So in essence, both Gamow and Hoyle were correct.

Despite this partial vindication of nucleosynthesis,

Hoyle, who dead in 2001,

never accepted the Big Bang.

He could not understand why people were so enthusiastic

about Universe which had a finite beginning in what I supposed he thought was a

recent past a few billion years.

He just never accepted it.

But the rest of the physics community, with almost total unanimity,

did accept it.

The fact that we've discovered it has beginning

allows you to now ask a whole set of questions about how it began.

And that's kind of interesting, that's kind of cool.

Because you can say when did it begin?

How was it different then and today?

What changes unfolded between then and now

to create the Universe we now know?

But accepting the Big Bang theory and thinking it flawless,

are two different things.

There were problems with the details of the theory,

expanding problems.

During the latter days of 20th century

scientists examined problems with the Big Bang

even though theory was generally accepted.

One of the biggest problems

was that the temperature in outer space was strangely uniform.

Physicists didn't expect that the Universe would have the same temperature

roughly everywhere they looked.

The Universe is simply too large for

one end of it to be the same temperature as another.

Yet it is.

It is same thing happen if you had a bath full of cold water

and you pour in some hot water in one extreme.

It's going be a while before the whole bath has steady water

because it's take time for that hot molecules to propegate across

and normalize the whole distribution.

The Universe doesn't appear to be old enough

for its temperature to have equalized yet.

The Big Bang could not explain why such far away points

have the same temperature.

In the early 80's, Alan Guth come up this idea,

that perhaps Universe came for very tiny volume.

So tiny that within that volume

early on there was time enough for these different points

to communicate and normalize the temperature.

Right after this moment Guth theorized that

the Universe expanded even faster

than light.

Faster than the cosmic speed limit.

The ultimate speed according to Einstein.

What Inflation refers to is a theory of

what propelled the expansion of the Big Bang.

Guth called his theory Inflation.

In the earliest moments of creation, for instance

scientists believed the 4 forces of nature

including gravity and electromagnetism

were actually combined into a single superforce.

During the Big Bang

this superforce split into the 4 known forces.

But before it split

when the Universe was incredibly small

Einstein's laws of the physics

including the one that says nothing moves faster than light

didn't apply yet.

Maybe at that moment something happened,

that caused the Universe to expand even faster than light.

So fast that it locked in the uniformity it had

when the Universe was still small.

We do not know exactly when Inflation happened.

Most likely it happened

when gravity had split off from the other 3 forces

but at a time when the other 3 forces

were still very likely unified.

This hyper-expansion, if it happened,

would lock in a certain uniformity of temperature.

On June 3, 2001 NASA launched a satellite

that could potentially determine one way or the other

the truth about Guth inflation theory.

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe or WMAP mission

plan to photograph the fossil random heat of the Big Bang

that Penzias and Wilson had found.

In other words

NASA wanted to take a baby picture of the Universe.

That they could then compare with how the Universe looks today.

In February 2003, scientists got their first glimpse

of WMAP's picture of the baby Universe.

When it was a mere 380 thousand years old.

The clarity of the data stunned scientists.

The reaction people had when they saw this was:

Wow!

It really was the way people had been speculating early on.

Inflation probably happened.

To the untrained eye the WMAP image

looks like a speckled robin's egg.

But to scientists, this was a stellar rosetta stone.

These patterns represent the seeds that later grew

into the vast expansions of stars and galaxies of today.

Besides strongly supporting Guth's inflation theory

the data also gave us concrete clues

to the age, composition, shape, and evolution of the Universe.

Up until a few years ago, cosmology was quite distinct from other sciences

simply because

there were more theories running around than data.

And it was not until these satellites measured what was going on,

shortly after the Big Bang with such high precision

that you could discriminate one cosmological model from another

and you could produce numerical results

about the size of the Universe, the age of the Universe

the expansion rate of the Universe, the contents of the Universe.

You couldn't do that before these data became available.

Before then it was this mixture of mythology and clever thinking.

Thanks to modern tools such as the WMAP satellite,

physicists now have a model for the events

just after the Big Bang.

Less than a billionth of second after the Big Bang

a bubble much smaller than a fraction of an atom forms.

This is the Universe.

It is unimaginably small

and unimaginably hot.

Within this bubble, the 4 known forces of nature

gravity, electromagnetism

plus the strong and the weak nuclear forces.

Are a combined a superforce.

Gravity suddenly splits off from the superforce,

as the Universe expands.

As the Universe expands, it cools

which somehow, sets off a burst of energy,

fueling the hyperinflation of the Universe, suggested by Alan Guth.

This inflation locks in the uniformity of the Universe,

pictured by WMAP satellite.

The Universe is still less than a second old

when the superforce decays into the separate forces of nature.

Roughly 3 minutes after the Big Bang the temperature of the Universe

has dropped to a mere 1 billion degrees F.

cool enough for atomic nucleus to form.

The element hydrogen forms.

Some hydrogen atoms fuse to create helium,

as proposed by Gamow and Alpher.

380 thousand years later

and light travels through the darkness.

The burst of radiation that Penzias and Wilson found

happens now.

A billion years after the Big Bang,

stars take shape.

Producing the heavier elements like nitrogen, oxygen and carbon

as Hoyle predicted.

Roughly 9 billion years out,

matter and gravity combined,

to form a perfectly typical star.

Pressure creates heat at its core.

This heat triggers thermonuclear fusion.

A star is born.

Stellar outflow clears away residual gases.

A circumstellar disc of dust remains

that eventually excrete into an entourage of planets and moons.

One of these lumps of stardust

after being pummeled for eons by residual solar debris

has temperatures warm enough to allow

water to build up in the atmosphere.

Liquid water gathers on a planet's surface.

Under water mysterious chemical reactions ultimacy form life.

13.7 billion years after the Big Bang,

our Universe is now 156 billions light years across.

The sky is full of stars.

Our Solar System has eight planets, more or less.

The third planet is nearly covered in carbon based life form.

Some are just realizing what infinitely small specs they are

in the great scheme of the things.

If you don't understand this process, that's ok.

It's the combination of millions of human brains struggling for thousands of years

to figure it out how the Universe began

and where man fits within it.

It's enough to overwhelm any one human brain.

If I take seriously the idea that my brain was evolved, to be able

to throw rocks and take bananas and stuff, it's pretty remarkable

that we humans would be able to figure out much about physics

figure out much about things that didn't have survival value to our ancestors.

Ya, I think it's quite stunning how well

we humans have been able to make progress in this regard.

And not go completely bananas in the process.

This is our story of everything.

Our world, our solar system, our Universe.

And how what it all began.

This is what we think we know.

It's a work in progress, the script is still being written.

Let's see how it ends.

New York City.

A beautiful but unremarkable autumn day,

like thousands before it and thousands to come

until there aren't anymore autumn days.

Imagine for a moment, travelling into the future for billions of years.

Pass the end of the human civilization

and the lives all living creatures on Earth.

Imagine we are 5 billion years into the future.

The Sun is running out of the nuclear fuel that gives it fire.

As it cools, it expands and reddens

coming closer and closer to Earth.

It swallows up Mercury and Venus.

Water on Earth evaporates and Earth becomes melted again.

When the fuel was gone, the Sun's core ultimately contracts

as it transform from a red giant to a white dwarf.

The expanding outer layers of the Sun called a planetary nebula.

Drifting in the space as ghostly shrouds of glowing gas.

The planets that survive this process

the outer ones like Saturn and Neptune

are utterly changed by it.

The planetary nebula blows away their gaseous atmospheres

leaving small, rocky and metallic cores behind.

The distant planets

no longer held by the less massive Sun's gravity

drift into the vastness of space.

Travel billions of years after that

and all remaining heat from the Sun has radiated out.

And its small, dark surface

is same frigid temperature as the rest of the space.

The Sun is now a black dwarf.

Now billions of years later

propelled by a mysterious, only recently discovered dark energy

the Universe expands, ever faster

flying apart everywhere.

On a grand scale and at a molecular one, expansion overwhelms gravity.

Everything rips apart

not just galaxies, solar system and stars

but even atoms.

Finally, matter itself is torn sunder.

This is the big rip, the big resting piece of our Universe

the legacy of the dark energy, that stuff we still haven't figured out.

Right now, dark energy is mostly a code word for our ignorance.

What this substance is, some people think it's some sort of stuff, somepeople think

it's a constant that should be in Einstein's equation

some people think it's just a reflection of the fact

that we may got the gravity wrong again.

Right now the Big Rip theory of the end of the Universe leads the pack.

But who can say if this will remain our theory

or if some new discovery will challenge it.

The stuff we haven't figured out yet, it goes on forever.

One more blow to our centrality in the grand scheme of things.

But that doesn't mean we do not know anything.

Copernicus, Newton, Einstein

even Alpher, Wilson and Guth

they have given us pieces of an endless puzzle.

The've helped tell us how we fit in the picture.

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body

the atoms that construct the molecules, a traceable

to the crucibles that were once to centers of high mass stars

and exploded their chemically enrich guts into the galaxy

enriching pristine gas clouds

with the chemistry of life.

So that we are all connected, to each other biologically,

to the Earth, chemically,

and to the rest of the Universe, atomically.

That's kind of cool.

That makes me smile.

And I actually feel quite large at the end of that.

It is not that we are better than the Universe,

We are part of the Universe.

We are in the Universe and the Universe is in us.

We are not the center of the Universe,

we are in it and of it,

trying to figure it all out.

There's so much we know,

and yet so much we still don't know.

We hold on tight as our little planet

goes hurtling through space.

Around the Sun, around the galaxy, around the Universe.

Don't forget to look up,

There's so much to see,

so much to know.

Where do we begin?

Technische Bewerking "2007" MURDY