We know that our universe is expanding.
Brian Schmidt showed that the speed of this expansion is accelerating.
John Mather detected cosmic background radiation, the echo of the Big Bang.
Both of these revelations fundamentally change our view of the universe and pose huge questions for today’s physicists.
The laureates met with 3 young researchers to discuss the current state of astronomy and whether this is indeed a golden age in that field.
John Mather: The golden age of astronomy, so I guess we want to know if it is.
From my perspective it is because this is a time when...
Well not to say that there isn’t going to be another golden age to follow
but we are now at a place where discoveries are being made at an extraordinary pace because...
Minnie Yuan Mao: But there’s also a lot more astronomers.
John Mather: And there are a lot more astronomers, so we have more astronomers and we also have more wonderful equipment.
The number of telescopes that are in space and on the ground and being built is just fantastic.
My impression is that the rate of discovery is continuing to increase and so it’s not...
It can’t always continue forever but I think astronomers have at least a century’s worth of marvellous ideas.
If you look at the things that were submitted to the decadal survey, it will take us a century to do them all.
Brian Schmidt: So there’s an issue here though which is that although we’ve had a period of exponential growth,
clearly from, with a couple of hiccups, from when you came out of graduate school.
And that has made life very golden for us
because unlike your generation our generation there were enough professorships for almost every student created
because of the exponential growth.
So I think astronomy itself is going to continue to grow
but I think our ability to increase funding, my guess, has levelled off.
I think we have seen the end of exponential growth. And we are going to go into an equilibrium situation.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I think we will be judged on how we are able to resolve the problems that have been presented to us.
So I think that we have been presented with this incredible problem of the cosmic acceleration
and alongside that the question of the cosmological constant problem.
Honestly I think that in, you know, 50 year‘s time we’re going to be judged on
whether we were able to come to any conclusions about the problem.
Brian Schmidt: So I don’t disagree that progress on cosmic acceleration
has been woefully slow in the last 30 years, not for lack of trying.
We are using a sledge hammer going out trying to chop down trees in a very large forest.
Valeria Pettorinoro: Yeah, but are we looking at the right thing?
Brian Schmidt: Well, I don’t know. So I think that we need to be very open to ideas.
But astronomy and physics is bigger than just cosmic acceleration.
It’s been very good to me but it’s bigger than that.
We have the idea that we’re being able to, for the first time,
to look back to when the first stars, galaxies, black holes formed.
Ok, there are some big questions. We still don’t know what dark matter is.
Minnie Yuan Mao: How should we go about answering these questions?
We’ve got all these people doing study, looking at stars, galaxies, looking at all this incremental stuff.
Should we refocus astronomy, should we call the people that aren’t doing good astronomy?
John Mather: Hell no, no, who is to say who is doing?
Minnie Yuan Mao: Right, exactly. I think the process...
This is why I disagree that it’s a golden age.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: John Mather was correct when he said it was a golden age for observational astronomy.
Minnie Yuan Mao: I disagree with that, like 20 years ago they were saying exactly the same thing.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Really?
Minnie Yuan Mao: They launched the great observatories.
That was 20 years ago, 20 years ago they…
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: So maybe that’s part of the same age.
Valeria Pettorinoro: It’s not up to us, let’s say, to decide if it’s a golden age or not.
I mean this is really something that you know.
Minnie Yuan Mao: You are right yeah, it’s the people.
Valeria Pettorinoro: The people within...
Exactly, future people will decide what is the golden age and which one was it.
It’s not people within this age that can actually decide if we are the good ones or not, I mean.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I don’t think there’s any way to hypothesise that it’s a golden age for theoretical physics
that touches on questions in astronomy and astrophysics because we haven’t had any really new innovative ideas.
But in observational astronomy there have been, right?
Minnie Yuan Mao: Yeah, that’s true.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: We’ve discovered cosmic acceleration; we’ve discovered extrasolar planets…
We can only see 5% of the material that makes up our universe.
Astronomers call the rest of it dark matter and dark energy.
But we don’t really understand what these are.
John Mather: Well my thought is: Well, if we don’t know something that's the golden age of astronomy,
it’s a question to work on. The questions that we don’t know answers to are really hard.
Dark matter is actually transparent, it’s invisible.
Astronomers can tell that it’s there because it has gravity but this is a fundamentally hard problem.
The dark energy that got the Nobel Prizes last time is even harder to study
because not only does it not emit light, it doesn’t even change what you see very much.
So it’s a very hard thing to work on.
We may never find out what that is or we need a discovery from some completely different direction
like the Hadron collider or a theorist.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Do you think we are making the right decisions on that front?
Brian Schmidt: It is my honest belief that dark energy will be figured out by a theorist not by an observer.
I might be wrong though. That’s why WFIRST is interesting.
If I had my druthers, I would be spending more money on theorists and people.
Minnie Yuan Mao: I like that.
John Mather: I have the similar feeling.
I’ve been on committees about the dark energy and what we should do.
And I kept asking the theorists: Well, what theory are we testing?
And they didn’t, any of them, have a theory that we were testing that they liked.
So I thought: Well, nothing we can do as astronomers, as measurement people, is going to change any of that.
We need the next Stephen Hawking or the next Einstein to actually come up with this thing that makes sense
which we don’t have yet.
Valeria Pettorinoro: So what would you like from a theorist, let’s say...?
One model or some feature which characterises more models and that you can actually test?
Brian Schmidt: Anything I can measure, give me…
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: A signature.
Brian Schmidt: Give me a signature that I as an observer can go out and test.
John Mather: But another way of thinking of it is: You can’t always look under the light post for the keys.
You have to sort of be alert to other things where maybe we’re just not even thinking of the right thing to think about.
And so you really can’t devote all of your effort to just one big project.
We better do everything else that might relate.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I actually really appreciated that they both emphasised
that there was room for theorists and emphasised the importance of theorists.
I found that really refreshing because.
Valeria Pettorinoro: Yes, especially since we’re theorists, it’s fantastic.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Since we’re theorists but it’s particularly...
It’s great coming from observers that they are really understanding
and maybe in that sense we are in a golden age of understanding.
John Schmidt: Science is sometimes subject to revision.
It’s a good thing to go out and measure and see what the universe does
because the one thing I have learned in life is that one should not prejudge the universe.
The universe does what it wants and our job as scientists are to figure it out
rather than to assume it should be the way we want it to be.
John Mather: I never imagined in my wildest dreams 30 years ago
we’d be able to simulate the formation of the first galaxies with moving particles of dark matter.
It shouldn’t be surprising that invisible matter and dark energy are a complete challenge to see.
Brian Schmidt: And they’re going to remain a challenge until some breakthrough happens.
John Mather: They will. It could be 50 years or 100 years before that smart person appears.
Brian Schmidt: And I think theory is really important to solve those things.
But on the other hand observers like me... The question is: Should we be doing these great big projects?
And the answer is: I say, yeah, 20% of our effort should go into those big problems.
But we need to continue to look for planets, to look for stars and understand how the galaxy was born,
understanding how, you know, stars are born. All these questions.
It’s a very rich subject still and so it is still a golden age.
Although I would say maybe not quite as golden because golden age is not the absolute level, it’s the rate of change.
And so I think we’re in the exponential growth and it’s going to slow down a little bit.
But it’s still a great area to be in. It’s not going to crash, I think, tomorrow.
Minnie Yuan Mao: The thing is that there’s so much pressure to publish.
If you don’t publish, you're not going to get a job out of your PhD.
If you don’t publish, you're not going to get another postdoc after, you know.
There’s no time to actually sit there and think about the big questions, there’s so much incremental science going on.
How would you say we can combat this problem?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: And is that actually the best way for science,
for postdocs and graduate students to be under that kind of publication pressure?
John Mather: I had that actually. I was hired as a civil servant.
They couldn’t fire me but they also couldn’t promote me until I wrote papers.
So I had to write some papers too.
Brian Schmidt: So, in my case I started off with a bunch of papers after my PhD
and then I started the project that eventually I got the Nobel Prize for.
And that did slow my publication right down and for me I took the risk.
I said, well, it’s a big project.
It was a high profile project and it was very clear we weren’t going to have a lot of papers initially.
So from 1996 and 1997 I effectively didn’t publish any papers those 2 years.
But 1998 I published papers that got 15,000 citations. So it was worthwhile.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: I was blown away when John kind of started out by saying:
“I was just hired as a civil servant and then I was presented with this challenge of...
Well, they can’t promote me if I don’t get any papers published.”
Minnie Yuan Mao: “And they can’t fire me.”
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: But look, you know, not getting a promotion is your biggest problem?
Minnie Yuan Mao: Yeah, right.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Then I’m happy.
John Mather: I don’t think it’s actually any harder for students today than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago.
But each student has to go through that period of worry about what they’re going to do.
So when I was a student people said: “No you can’t do what you want to do, there’s no job in that field.”
So it happened to me, it happens to most people.
Minnie Yuan Mao: You can come to me and say: “I’ve got this problem.”
I can be like:”Well, we do this, this and this with the current telescopes.”
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Yes.
Valeria Pettorinoro: Yes.
Minnie Yuan Mao: But we can’t do that until this.
Brian Schmidt: Keep going on and trying to solve the mysteries of the universe
but don’t worry too much about your exact future.
Go in, work for the present, do the best you can because the future will sort of take care of itself.
And, you know, I can’t guarantee you’re going to get a job as an astronomer
but I think you’ll have a good happy life if you do something that you enjoy.
Mars Incorporated:
Harold Schmitz: It starts with a belief that the problems that we have facing us in the future
and the opportunities will be solved through understanding nature.
Science is the discipline that helps us to understand nature.
It’s great to be here in Lindau because it is literally the only place in the world
where we can interact with the brightest minds from Nobel laureates like Dudley Herschbach to the brightest young students.
Ralph Jerome: You really want to rub shoulders with the best and the brightest and they’re here in Lindau.
Harold Schmitz: If there’s one reason why Mars needs to be interacting with this meeting, it is
because agriculture is one of the largest footprints on the world in terms of its sustainability.
Ralph Jerome: Yeah, for sure.
Harold Schmitz: However. The best minds in physics and chemistry and medicine often don’t think about how to influence that.
Ralph Jerome: When you think about the impact agriculture has on the planet and the challenges
that are going to be coming forward in the next 10, 15, 20 years,
our role being a catalyst to resolving some of those issues is going to be critical.
We want to attract people that are really talented but also people that want to make a difference.
Sarah Gallagher: My PhD is funded by Mars and I was a bit worried, when I started that being funded by industry,
they would be very driven on profit and not looking into basic research or just wanting to learn things.
And instead, I’ve realised that they’re really a principled company.
And there are many things that they won’t do or things that they will do specifically for the principle of the matter.
Ralph Jerome: Well, the Mars fellows are world class talents that then have the access to a world class community
and that’s where the collaboration happens.
Where the collaboration becomes magical is
when the great fundamental science and discoveries in universities are brought into the private sector.
Harold Schmitz: What's the hardest question that you would like to ask, that you can think of?
No name 1: How are you guys looking at helping those regions which currently support you?
No name 2: How do you bring the problem of food transportation?
No name 3: What kind of role computation and modelling might play in your research?
Ralph Jerome: We don’t have all the answers and some of these solutions are much bigger than us.
So, not only do we have to be delighting our consumers,
we have to be collaborators and a catalyst for change in a lot of our supply chains.
At Mars we fundamentally believe that many of the problems facing us going forward
and really the opportunities are going to be fundamentally science based.
So people that are scientific entrepreneurs, that want to make,
as Steve Jobs used to say, a dent in the universe, this is the place.
Harold Schmitz: We believe that collaboration amongst the brightest scientists throughout all the sectors
is essential to help address these grand challenges.
Leadership matters. And when it comes to collaboration many of you will be leaders in this context.
Dudley Herschbach: All of science is collaborative. You can’t do it by yourself.
Everything you’re thinking about and methods you use they have a history
and you will add your bit to pass it on, that’s the really glory of the enterprise.
Applause.