2011 Nobel Prize in Physics - Cosmos without brakes

On October 4th the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics exceptionally in Astronomy and gave it jointly to three scientists, Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt for their work on Cosmology. By analysing light coming from very distant galaxies the three had observed that not only is the Universe expanding as shown by Red Shift but that the speed of expansion is accelerating challenging our known laws of gravity.



The scientists 

"Saul Perlmutter (born 1959) is an American astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Adam Riess and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating."
(wikipedia)

"Adam Guy Riess (born December 1969, Washington, D.C.) is an American astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute and is widely known for his research in using supernovae as Cosmological Probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating."
(wikipedia)

"Brian P. Schmidt (born February 24, 1967) is a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the Australian National University Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is widely known for his research in using supernovae as Cosmological Probes. He currently holds an Australia Research Council Federation Fellowship. Schmidt shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating."
(wikipedia)





My comments
The following are my personal thoughts about this years Nobel laureates great scientific achievement in my very imprecise language and limited understanding of the Mathematics and Physics involved. There is good text for general public about this year's award in Physics by Jennifer Ouellette in Scientific America.


Red Shift
American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889 – 1953) used the Hooker at Mt. Wilson and changed our concept of Cosmos when he recognized that those nebulous clouds seen in telescopes and tought to be just spots of dust in the known universe (consisting only of our Milky Way) were, in fact, other galaxies like ours. Hubble classified them by their shape and used the tools available at his time to calculate their distances from using Cepheids as milestones. Hubble discovered the crucially important law of nature named after him in Red Shift, a pattern in light from stars and galaxies Doppler's phenomenon similar to the familiar to us from hearing the pattern of the siren of a passing fire engines. (The pitch is higher when it approaches, gets lower when it gets further away.)


Big Bang and Big Collapse
From Edwin Hubble's revolutionary discoveries it logically followed that if the Cosmos is expanding, perhaps there was a time when everything was together, and so the Big Bang theory was born.

From the Big Bang theory our common sense and known laws of Physics, especially gravity, would indicate, that at one point the process is reversed and the expanding balloon of Cosmos begins to collapse again until there is only that one dot left of it.

Maybe then another Big Bang in an endless series of events in an eternal cosmos chewing gum? or that's it and then there is nothing?


Dark energy
Science has evolved rapidly with better tools for observation.

What Galilei Galileo called "horns of Saturn" after seeing the planet through his home-made telescope were seen in better telescopes as "rings of Saturn".

The light from the distant galaxies seen for the first time by Hubble through the Hooker has now been studied in greater detail with modern instruments.

The result is that cosmos is indeed expanding (Saturn has its "horns") but the speed is accelerating against Newton's laws of gravity (the "horns" are actually rings).

Nobody knows at the moment why this is happening and so it is called the dark energy - not dark in the sense of sinister but dark, because scientists are in the dark about what it might be.


Death of the Universe
If it goes on like this and the speed of galaxies just keeps increasing there is perhaps no Big Collapse after all.

Instead, eventually everything freezes in zero Kelvin as there is no energy or dark energy left.

If...

The other thing is, what if they reach the limits of Spacetime continuum, get to the speed of light? Go beyond the horizon of the known Cosmos?

What if...


The research goes on with new and better methods of observation and new ideas that the results from these discoveries raise in that amazing little thing - human brain.


Theological note
The God of Israel who has created the Cosmos is our guarantee that even if the the entire Universe freezes over, we still exist in Him and experience His love or wrath for what we have done good or bad in our life upon this tiny planet Earth.

Nonsense??

Note that two American scientists, Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess, both belong to the chosen people of God. Their first names are from the Bible: Saul, first king of Israel and Adam from the Hebrew word adamah, soil, and then man.

Luckily for the self-esteem of us non-Jews, Brian Schmidt is a regular goy from Australia!


He is Lord!
At the end of the holy Bible entirely written by the Jews there is a mighty sentence by a son of a Jewish mother:

“Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done.  

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End."
Revelation 22:12-13

Edwin Hubble - Red shift

Edwin Hubble (1889-1953)

In the 1920'ies astronomers learned about stars by looking at the visible light they are emitting. The quality of the observatory was measured by the clarity of night sky without clouds and the amount of distortion caused by the optics used to collect star light. Intensive work was going on in mapping the sky, determining the luminosity of stars, describing their colours and observing their behaviour such as the blinking rhythm of Cepheid stars. Pretty boring job and "computers" where needed to check the photographic plates.

Edwin Hubble was made for the job and would not leave his beloved Hooker. After his 1923 discovery of a Cepheid in the spiral nebula of Andromeda the international community of astronomers had picked up the job and continued hunting for them together with him.

The news that we are citizens of a galaxy called Milky Way and that there are many more out there were slowly reaching the general public. However, space exploration is not a necessity in the same way as medical research to find cure to sickness or meteorology predicting tomorrows weather. People can, and they do, live without knowing much about the huge cosmos and this does not particularly affect their everyday lives. The distances are such that space kind of is a world of its own that only occasionally comes to mind, for example when a bright falling star a meteorite is seen on southern sky. Then we can go on with our business again after having made that wish.

Not so Edwin Hubble. He spent a decade on Mount Wilson examining and taking photos not of distant stars but something much further away - galaxies. He concentrated particularly on the single issue of red shift that Vesto Merlin Slipher had noticed in 1912 using the Clark Refractor in Lowell Observatory.

Systematically and patiently he scanned the skies using spectrography to break the visible light into the colours that together give the galaxy its overall tone.

Red shift in wavelengths of light
wikipedia

The dark lines produced by the light emitted by the galaxy is set on the coloured background. On the left side we see the lines from our own star, the sun, and on the right side in comparison to it light from some distant star or galaxy. The arrows show that there is a shift towards red.

So what?

Close your ears, please, I am going to shout now very loud

BIG BANG!!!

The shift in the visible light indicates movement. Red shift is the change in frequency and wavelength of a wave for an observer moving relative to the source of the waves. This is the well known Doppler effect we all know from sounds of passing sirens or trains with the pitch getting higher when it approaches (blue shift of light) or lower when it goes away from us (red shift of light).

Edwin did not just observe that there indeed is red shift indicating that distant galaxies are moving away from us. He did more: using mathematical formulas together with his very accurate observations of the spectrum he established a ratio between the distance of the object measured using Cepheid stars and the amount of red shift seen in the light. Smart guy.

In 1929 he gave, after a decade of careful study, to the world Hubble's Law. It sounds really simple - the galaxies are receding with velocity that is proportional to the distance of the galaxy from us.

But it is not all that easy to conceptualize. Let us assume that we are sitting in the centre of universe. All around us we see galaxies which are trying to get away from us with increasing speed. The further they have reached from us the faster they travel through space. It is as if a huge explosion has blown them into the space.

And God said יהי אור

Modern cosmologists call this huge explosion Big Bang.

In the beginning there was just a dot. Nothing but an insignificant dot. It blew up and voila! particles and atoms and molecules and chemicals and metals and rocks and birds and humans came into being!

Also you and me who wonder was it really just a big bang?

Well

Edwin Hubble

First the guy wins some student boxing fights.

Then he goes and notices that ups! the universe is in reality millions and millions times larger than everybody was assuming and that we are citizens on one galaxy in the midst of billions of others and he also gives a tuning iron to classify these wondrous gardens of stars.

Not satisfied with that he then goes and says that not only the man with the improbable name Vesto Melvin Slipher was right when he noticed red shift in 1912. Those galaxies are speeding away in the space without any fear of a traffic ticket.

No wonder Albert Einstein took the long trip up to Mount Wilson to see the King of the Hill in person.

But especially I like Edwin Hubble for one thing: He said that they should give the Nobel price of physics to Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

WYSIWYG - Edwin Hubble

Edwin Hubble (1889-1953)

The huge piece of ground glass had been transported to the top of Mount Wilson and carefully placed on a huge balanced frame to collect light from the stars seen on the night sky of California.

But all that feat of engineering would be of no use unless someone knew how to use it for something meaningful. The 100 inch Hooker was now the largest telescope humanity had ever built - but so what. A star is a star, eh?

At that time, in the beginning of the 20th century, space was a rather boring place. Astronomers estimated that the entire universe is about 100.000 light years in diameter and filled with stars that are essentially similar to our sun, some bigger some smaller. Probably there are millions of stars and many of them have planets like our sun but they are too small to be seen directly. Huge distances separate these stars from each other as they follow their movements according to the static laws of physics for gravity established by Sir Isaac Newton.

Between the stars 19th and early 20th century scientists observed smaller objects, comets and asteroids and clouds of dust. Everything out there is freezing cold and the entire cosmos is eternal. It has no beginning and no end.

Theologians and Biblical scholars were not particularly interested or impressed by the astronomy of the time and there are no huge quarrels about an eternal universe although the Bible says otherwise. Those Christians and Jews who were talking about natural sciences were discussing Charles Darwin and Sir George Lyell as they were subjects closer to home.

They did not realize that space is the ultimate front for the battle between faith in God and materialistic atheism that dwarfs those discussions about evolution or catastrophic floods. Nothing much has changed in this respect.

Okay.

So the telescope was up there thanks to the generosity and far-sightedness of John Hooker and the enthusiasm and skills of the astronomer George Ellery Hale. It was a great achievement for human engineering skills and a masterful design but it would be basically just a dead piece of glass and metal without someone who would know how to use it.

Hubble with his beloved pipe
Mount Wilson Observatory

Enter the King of the Hill. Edwin Hubble had arrived to Mount Wilson 1919 and Hooker had its days of glory that were soon to entirely change human perception of the universe.

Wikipedia tells nicely about his youth:

Edwin Hubble was born to an insurance executive in Marshfield, Missouri, and moved to Wheaton, Illinois, in 1889. In his younger days he was noted more for his athletic prowess than his intellectual abilities, although he did earn good grades in every subject except for spelling. He won seven first places and a third place in a single high school track & field meet in 1906. That year he also set the state high school record for the high jump in Illinois. Another of his personal interests was dry-fly fishing, and he practiced amateur boxing as well.

I think this interest in athletics was excellent preparation for those long cold winter nights on Mount Wilson when he could not get his mind and eyes off the bright canopy of stars opening above him and the amazing massive telescope he was using with such determination and skill. A round or two around the observatory would warm up those toes as the glass mirror had to be in stable temperature and too much heating could disturb the air and clarity of vision.

Edwin Hubble at work

Hooker telescope saw light on November 2, 1917 and Edwin Hubble began using it in 1919. The biggest eye humanity had ever opened towards the deep space with a massive 2.5 meter mirror collecting very faint rays of light.

But Edwin had not only the best telescope of his time at use. He also had in his pocket something very important that Henrietta Swan Leavitt had understood in the Harvard observatory as a human "computer" looking at photos of the night sky. Henrietta had shown how the Cepheid stars are "blinking" in a standard and measurable way. The variations in their brightness are like Roman milestones in the space and help in determining distances.

Hubble had a view of the space nobody else who did not have access to Hooker had. We cannot blame earlier astronomers for assuming that those hazy clouds, nebulae, they barely saw was for them interstellar dust. They did not see clear enough. Similarly, we cannot blame that Galileo was thinking Saturn has "horns" - that is how the rings looked through his primitive self-made telescope.

Through Hooker the King of the Hill observed in much greater details the structures of the nebulae and eventually he classified these clouds by their shape in his famous "tuning iron" of galaxies.

Hubble's "tuning" iron classifies and groups galaxies by basic shape

On October 5, 1923 Edwin Hubble was looking through Hooker at a cloud on the sky in the constellation of Andromeda and noticed a Cepheid variable star in it.

This very accurate and careful observation made after three years of patient observation of deep sky gave Hubble an idea about the distance. As said above, the scientific community of his time assumed that the universe is about 100.000 light years in diameter and consists mostly of stars and solar systems, mixed with some flying stones and plenty of dust.

As explained in the University of Oregon web page Cepheid stars can be used to measure distances in the space. Hubble understood that Andromeda nebula is much further away than the entire universe assumed at his time and it was not just a cloud of dust - the fine optics of Hooker clearly revealed its fine spiral structure.

The stunning news reached the world from the combination of the patient and truthful and hard work of Henrietta and Edwin - and all those who made it possible for them to work at Harvard and Mount Wilson - that we are inhabitants of a galaxy, Milky Way, and there are many more galaxies like ours out there.

Galaxies in the Local group
www.deepfly.org

Today on the basis of much additional research on the footsteps of Edwin Hubble and Henrietta Swan Leavitt we know that the distance to Andromeda is 2.5 million light years and that this is the largest galaxy in the Local Group that includes our own Milky Way, the Small and Large Magellanian cloud and more than thirty other small galaxies orbiting the two big ones.

How to put it mildly?

The King of the Hill blew into pieces the scientific view of cosmos prevalent at his times.

Not everyone took it nicely.

This revolutionary achievement of Hubble could be more than enough for most people. But he made yet another, perhaps even more fundamental discovery, that has much importance also to space theology.