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.

Vesto Melvin Slipher - the man who saw Red

The Clark telescope dome on Mars Hill, Flagstaff Arizona
From wikipedia

The Lowell Observatory located on Mars Hill in Flagstaff, Arizona cannot boast a huge super-duper telescope like the Hooker on Mount Wilson. In fact, the 24-inch Clark Refracting Telescope is a rather modest affair according to modern concepts. The famed telescope maker Alvan Clark (1804-1887) constructed it using glass blanks made by Chance Brothers of Birmingham and Feil-Mantois of Paris.

But at the time it was taken into use in 1896 the instrument was definitely a great achievement. And also in this case, as in the case of the massive 100-inch Hooker in Mt. Wilson Observatory, the decisive matter was not the power of the telescope itself but the power of the mind that was looking through it.


The founding of the Lowell observatory was made possible by the dedication and skill of Percival Lawrence Lowell (1855 -1916). He is best known for his burning vision to identify that distant dwarf planet that has detectable gravitational effects but is so hard to see. In 1930 his interest finally carried fruit fourteen years after his death when a real nerd, Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997), discovered it using the 13 inch astrograph in this observatory. In honor of the observatory founder Percival Lowell this "almost planet" was given a name that has his initials PL.

Lowell Observatory astrograph
Discovery of Pluto in 1930

Today the original 24-inch Clark Telescope is still in working condition and is used for educational purposes. The observatory has a place of honor in the history of Astronomy because of the discovery of Pluto. So for good reason it is protected as cultural heritage and as a National Park by the US government.

But on Mars Hill something much more significant was noticed than yet another rock orbiting our sun.

Slipher crater on the moon

The director of Lowell Observatory Earl C. Slipher (1883-1964) had a brother with the unlikely name Vesto Melvin (1875-1969). The boys must have made their mom and dad very proud since their name is now engraved on the moon - the Slipher crater is called after them.

In the time of the First World War things were in quite a flux among the most advanced students of cosmology. A strange fellow who rarely combed his hair had published some of his mathematical thinking on 30th of June, 1905 in a paper titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies". This introduces the special theory of relativity which, simply put, is the physical theory of measurement in inertial frames of reference. Easy peacy. Some respected professors of Physics deep in Newtonian world were not all that impressed.

It is one of the three revolutionary papers published in Einstein's Annus Mirabilis that is still causing waves among humanity. Or rather tsunamis, nuclear powerstations and bombs and black holes and so.

The point is that the mathematics this fellow was thinking were indicating that the space is not such a static place after all as the mainstream cosmology based on Newtonian physics had suggested.

But where is the proof? How to verify such cosmic theories that go far and beyon the conditions on planet Earth?

Well - let us see how was my introduction to the subject - does the following sentence ring any bells my dear fellow citizen on planet Earth:

1912, three years after the publication of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, an astronomerwith the unlikely name of Vesto Melvin Slipher used the 24-inch Clark Refracting Telescope in Lowell Observatory, Mars Hill, Flagstaff, Arizona, to demonstrate that light coming from the spiral nebulae, those hazy clouds in the sky, has a spectral shift towards red.