The Universe s01e14 Episode Script

Every story has a beginning, even the story of the Universe.
Some 13.
7 million years ago, a mysterious event forced the Universe in to motion, in the Big Bang.
The ultimate creation every atom, every star and every galaxy.
But this is our story, how for thousands years we piece together a vision of the Universe, made sense through science and discover our place within it.
This is our story of everything, from Shaman to scientists, beyond The Big Bang.
For thousands of years we gathered our observations of the heaven into books that would more than fill a library.
We build a vast body of knowledge about our Universe.
How it all began, and how it will End It is a work in progress.
The script still is being written and the ink still is wet on the page.
Where do we began? Let's begin at beginning.
Let's begin with The Big Bang.
The Big Bang is a theory of cosmic evolution.
It tell us how the Universe evolved, how it changed from a split second after whatever brought it to the existence.
And still we do not know what that is until today.
When you look out the Universe and look the other distant galaxies, you see that all is flying away from us they all moving outward, at huge velocity.
You string that all the way back.
You see the one time, maybe everything was must be compress in an inconceivably dense point.
We know we do not have the whole story but we ever have whole story in the history of the physics.
We have series better and better of approaches rebuilding, start building more and more beautiful and interesting truths.
The Big Bang is ours theory for the beginning of the Universe.
But for a long time, people neither did not think about the origin of the Universe or they assumed the universe had always existed and was ever lasting.
Even the scientists, they 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 wasn't big and it was no Bang.
It wasn't big because we think that the Universe started of a singularity of some sort And it was no Bang because there was no air to carry the vibrations.
So Big Bang is in some sense a misnomer but the name stuck.
And so has the theory.
Right now Big Bang theory is a solid part of science we understand it.
Anybody who do not accept it will be regard by most of the community as a crackpot.
But acceptance and understanding they are two different things.
The Big Bang theory doesn't yet provided all the answers science seeks, to explain how our Universe was born.
When cosmologists refer to talk about the Big Band theory, it is really on description of aftermath The Big Band.
The conventional Big Bang theory say anything about what Bang, why Bang or what happened before Bang.
Right now, at this very second we're in the aftermath of the Big Bang.
Everything what we see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and touch is 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 the Earth.
This is the Earth.
Silicon and oxygen based with metallic core.
The surface is mostly water.
It teems with life and rotate once every 24 hours while orbit the star called sun every 365 days.
This it is the Sun.
Mostly hydrogen and helium.
Its surface temperature it is nearly 10,000 degrees F For energy our sun convert 700 million tons of hydrogen into 695 million tons of helium every second.
The Sun is part of the Solar System, Formed around 4.
5 billion years ago, that includes the Earth and 7 others orbiting planets.
From Mercury to Neptune.
And it isn't a static system.
Our Solar System is spanning, flying thought 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 Milky Way Galaxy.
And assumed 6 billions of these stars with planetary system like ours.
Our Solar System orbit the center of the Milky Way, on one of outer arms.
The Milky Way is one of more than 125 billions of galaxies, that make up the observable Universe.
This it is the Universe.
It is really really big.
And it's getting greater.
It is expanding.
If the universe is expanding, then it used to be smaller.
Much smaller.
In fact, if we were backing time, we could watch it shrink.
That's far enough, and Universe would be smaller than a galaxy.
Back, and the Universe smaller than our Solar System.
Further back and everything exists fits inside a studio, a coffee cup, an atom.
the Universal was smaller than the smallest part of an atom.
Unbelievably small.
Then something happened.
In a flash, each thing suddenly expanded.
This was how all began the first moment of the existence, what we now called The Big Bang.
That's what we know it's be true, not because theories be invented but because all the observations result.
We can predict the abundance of light elements they agree over 10 orders of magnitude over what we see.
So the fundamentals picture of Universe is expanding, emerging, got a hot, dense universe, find that time in the past it is the the Big Bang picture.
The theory of Big Bang isn't sort of thing you can figure out over night.
It takes years.
Centuries of accumulated wisdom.
Mankind has been thinking about it for a long time.
Even before we realized, we were thinking about it.
Everytime we looked at stars, we will thinking about it.
How do we know what we now know? How do we figure it all out? That is the heart of our story.
The story of how ours concept of the Universe evolved.
We stock pilled 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 the fact, anyone of us it's just too stupid to figure it all out So where do we began? Today, professional astronomers and physicists on camps like the Massachusets 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 heaven is really were.
Away before that science exist or with even contemplation in the mind of anybody people asking questions about origin.
When early man look at the sky He saw dominated it by the warming, life giving sun At night, he saw the Moon and the stars.
This was the Universe harsh, hostile and chaotic.
With a drifting sun shifted cross the sky the season one from warm to cold The primitive people needed to understand their world in order to survive it.
People has absolutely no control of the nature.
The balance of expected and unexpected made people make nature into Gods in order to establish some kind of relation with them.
Without telescopes as modern observatories primitive people relies in the simple structures to help them to understand skies.
At places like Stonehenge, in England or Chichen Itza, in Mexico they attemped to connected into heaven the perceived home of the Gods.
This were simple instruments of observation and tools of analysis that help to make sense for dancing universe We are here is Eastern part of Germany and 700 km south of Berlin in a little village, called Gosek.
One of the oldest monuments, dedicated to the sun and stars it was found here.
This is the solar observatory of Gosek.
It was build 7000 years ago, and was used by early farmer to tell the time of the year.
Constructed 2000 years before Stonehenge and reconstructed here this is the Europe oldest known calendar.
During the winter and summer solstices the shortest and longest day of the year the setting sun lights up with gate in the parlances.
The knowledge of days helped this people understand the life giving sun.
The nice sky is a clock.
It is a gigantic clock staring you at face that allowed the ancient to calculate when to plant, when to harvest.
In other words, they are very livelihood depended on their understanding of the motions 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 with the dogma of the astrology the belief that the motion of heavens predetermined our fate.
That meteor signal military victory.
A new star, the birth of a king.
Back there astronomy was predicted the motion of stars.
Astrology was predicted how the stars effected us.
And it's real hard in the ancient may to separate this two.
If you understand the clock works on heavens you understand how our fate are going to be.
The astrologers divide the skies in regions as early as 6 century B.
C.
They saw shapes in the stars and named the regions after the shapes.
Aries Taurus and Geminis among others.
But the astrologers give a story sky to divied their fate.
They also watched and learned how the heaven moved.
From superstitious models comes to baby steps of the scientific observation.
I see science as a journey that ours species has been on for roughly 2500 years to try to contiguous deep way as possible with the universe the laws of the universe, structure of the universe, what make things up how they evolve and what's their force, their govern changes.
But sometimes, the simple observation can leave fundamental worry conclusions.
When you look out the Universe the first sight you get is we are the center of the earth, that universe is revolved around us, Stars goes cross the night sky, the sun goes cross the day, and the sight was the Earth was fixed and the heaven was rotated about us.
But that perception is completely wrong.
Earth is not fixed, it is 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 move 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 the Earth curves.
By look at the shades, they calculated the size of the Earth to within about 10% accuracy.
They actually calculated the distance from the Earth to the Moon and rough dimension of the distance from the Earth to the Sun so in other words, the ancient were no fools.
The ancient Greeks also recognized 2 types of stars.
The most was fixed and small and moved together.
A few were larger and moved half-hazardly so was seem.
This were the planets And predict thire motion become centuries long goal.
With just the naked eye to scan the skies.
The Greeks saw only 5 planets naming each their Gods.
Today we more familiar with the Roman denominations: Mercury, Venus Mars, Saturn and 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 revolved elegant around it in perfect crystalline spheres.
Aristotle's universe was finite, it was a big sphere actually was like an onion, was like an onion with many concept spheres First century astronomy Tolomeo Improved on Aristotle by actually trace path of planets.
Which don't move half-hazardly at all Using complex circular motion calls epicitios Tolomeo could predict proscribe patterns and changing velocitys.
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 this planets goin loops and works builtfuly but was just worry.
The idea that you can predict something doesn't mean you understand fundamental principles behind that.
Tolomeo's system did not actually review the universe but it did try.
He essentially showed that the positions of planets could be calculated for any time past or future It was a tour de force of the mathematics understanding.
Interestingly the astronomy seemed to stand still for centuries after that.
In fact after the claps of Rome in the 476 A.
D.
The astronomy actually lose the ground.
Europe fragmented into smaller powers and a lot of wisdom of Greek was lost.
Thousand years later, a new theory would confront the accepted beliefs about how the heaven worked and would move man kind one step closer to the theory of the Big Bang During 15 century A.
D.
An idea called heliocentrism, claimed the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Universe.
This horrified the Christian clergy who felt contradicted the word of God.
If God created the Earth and man his own image then Earth and its devotee inhabitants must be the center of everything.
Ironically, the champion of the sun center universe was devotee church deacon from Frombork, Poland.
Name 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 heart at all.
When Copernicus put the planets going around the sun He discovered that planet Mercury, which goes around about 3 months Ultimately fell close to the sun.
Saturn, the slowest planet, which goes around about 30 years, ultimately fell the outside edge.
Copernicus wrote: In no other way do we find such harmonious connection between the size of the orbit and its period.
That seemed almost magic.
Copernicus also insisted that the Earth was rotated that it spun completely around its axis every 24 hours.
The heaven did not move, we did.
The stars chasing across sky each night, was mearly an illusion created by the rotating Earth.
Likely, afraid of Church reprisals.
Copernicus abstained from to publish his theory until he was on his death bed in 1543.
But his book "Concerning the revolution of celestial orbit" paved the way for Johannes Kepler, born in 1571 the champion of observational science.
Kepler was the true hero here, because he was the one really come out, trumpeted to the world the Sun has to be the center.
Kepler had his disposition a trove of astronomical data, collected through years staring of sky When he checked his observations and did calculations, and realized that's not only was the sun center of the Solar System but the perfect circles were a figment also.
Maybe it's uglyer philosophically, but it really match the data.
Kepler improved on Copernicus's system by hypothesis that planets traveled not in perfect circles, but in ellipses around the sun.
Kepler's data also pointed a strange phenomenon struggled but fault to understand.
As the planets approached the Sun, they speed up.
For their away, they slow down.
Together, the sun centered Universe and the variable speed of the planets, best explained what we see here in the Earth.
Suddenly and for the first time, the sun centered pictures, gives better predictions than Earth centered pictures.
And you have normal something trace by data, but does something scientist suppose to do which is make predictions, which is good.
But it's a cosmic riddle seemed solved, another remained.
Kepler saw that the sun influenced speed of planets as they traveled through the space.
But how? Before anyone address this mystery, dogma and science collided.
In a conflict revibration to this very day.
At the turning of 17 century, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei would take the theories of Copernicus and Kepler that the sun was center of the Solar System And prove them right beyond any shade of doubts.
He did it with a new technology, that would change the course of history.
The telescope, in a some sense, is most blasphemous most seditious, most revolutionary and most splendorous instrument of science.
All science received a greatest gift in this tool bring distant objects close.
Once the idea get out, you can take 2 lenses, one open in such a way put them in a tube and make a spyglass out of it.
That's bright like wild fire around world as it did.
So the issure now is not who got the telescope, but you now knew what to do with it.
Would you looking people's windows? Would you look up and out of the Universe.
Galileo improved the design in 1609 by grinding his own lenses, and creating one that could magnify in unprecedent 30 times.
And with that telescope for some resaen, he decided to look at sky, that suppose to in come the sharp of republic of Venice and what he saw complate changed scope of astronomy.
Galileo was treated to the clearest and most detailed view of heaven that any person had ever know.
Through its telescope, Galileo saw thousands more stars a Moon populate with craters satellites circleing Jupiter Saturn with giant ears.
Greatest of all, Galileo plainly saw that Venus went through phases like our moon.
Clear evidence that Venus orbited the sun.
Proved the sun centered system.
This show in first time that Copernicus was right the Earth was not the center of the Solar System, the Sun was.
So Galileo with its telescope push earth away from center of the Universe, said: "We are not the center of everything.
We are one planet among others.
And could be much larger universe than we known.
" With Copernicus had assumed for aesthetic reasons With Kepler had deduced measurement and mathematical Galileo proved.
Galileo saw.
Galileo reviewed.
The ancient had seen everything could possible seen through naked eye.
It's really take a new instrument to get beyond that.
The telescope that was the break point was between ancient and the modern's.
Centuries of church dogmas claiming the Earth was the center of the Universe, with now clearly worry.
With the Catholic Church still waving for schism of protestant reformation Galileo discovery seemed to undermine scripture.
Dangerous for a Church they felt under siege Dangerous for the scientist who posting 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 the first.
Had Galileo been a little more careful with his approach, may got no way with it.
A famous quotation from cardinal Baroni, a predecessor, was "The Bible tell us how to go to heaven, not how the heaven's 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 St Augustin, who said that: "If you find interpretation of scriptures which same to be contradicted established knowledge then you should reconsider that interpretation of scriptures".
But the Church concent with perceived frash its own power, could not concent the biblical interpretation to Galileo.
In 1633, after Galileo publish a new book champion in the sun centered system.
The Pope saw him for standing trial for heresy.
He forced to giveup all his copernican ideas, which apparently he did kneeling in front of the tribunal.
In spite of its confession, Galileo quietly hold fast for his beliefs throw out his final years under house arrest at Siena outside of Florence.
Galileo is the first modern scientist, in the sense that he actively in gage observations with the telescope he actively proposed theories consistent with telescope and he dared, he dared to challenge the Orthodoxy at the moment.
Shortly before his death in 1642 Galileo inadvertently steped over a clues to Kepler puzzle about the Sun strange influence on planetary motion.
It was a cluse would help pointed future generations pull the theory of Big Bang.
Galileo's last published work dialogue on the properties of the falling bodies.
Which he noticed always accelerated to same rate no matter what their mass.
But would take other genius to connect this two puzzle pieces together in a theory of the gravity.
Isaac Newton, born in 1643 he explained the mechanism by which the planets moved.
And not just how the 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 the 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 could also be like magnets? Galileo's theorized about the rate acceleration of the falling bodies.
And he realize is regardless 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 project goes moving falling the Earth it is same things makes the planets going around the Sun in the skies.
In a sense, the planets are falling towards the Sun, just as Galileo's falling bodies fall towards the earth.
The crack at all is the gravity that strange action at distance that hold everything together.
Newton didn't just observed the gravity, he draw 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 the matter in the Universe.
Give the universe order.
And the gravity is described by the science of the Physics.
Newton created the physics.
He was the person who first saw the fundamental laws, underneath all these observations.
The Newton's laws explained almost everything.
Newton postulated the laws of the motion, the universal rules of the gravity.
He begin a new area in science.
Using observations and the mathematics to describe the laws of the nature.
He could show the way which apple fell to the Earth which directly related the way the Moon follow around the Earth.
Because he understood that same laws let the motion of the planets around the Sun let 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 Earth could be explained through pulling of the gravity because everything with mass it exerts pulling force on everything else with mass.
The Moon pulls the oceans, the Earth pulls the Moon, the Sun pulls the Earth, and closer this objects all to each other, the stronger gravit pulls.
Newton's principia is such a engulfing work of genius that almost makes up a disconcert fact.
Although Newton formulated the laws that they govern the 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's happen if the sun suddenly move? What did the Earth do? This actually distants something with, he give up on it, say I'm just not going worry about that question because the laws work.
Although the physicists still stuggle to define the gravity.
Newton had going far in reviewing it.
Two hundred years later Albert Einstein would arrive Newton's genius.
Not only creat new laws at physics but re-inventing the Universe.
Albert Einstein born in Germany in 1879.
Maybe is most famous scientist to ever lived.
Because what he did here, in Bern, Switzerland, in 1905.
Fearing secure teaching position after his years as student.
Einstein took a job at this Patents office.
And then he begin to think.
In fact, he thought about revolution in space and time.
Without Einstein, we may still be strugglling to understand how the Universe really works.
I think if you asked who was the greatest scientist of 20 century.
Mostly would say: Einstein I think that is a partly because of the fact just a natural fascination with the space and time, in mysteries he solved.
But also I think it's partly because He fitted in the arqueotipica public perception of 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 static and infinite one.
Philosophically, he belive that the universe was eternal, and the universe had have a beginning and a ending, was aesthetic, was not pretty.
The idea that the Universe was infinitely and eternal was old one.
It 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 the gravity would ultimately suggest the Universe was not eternal.
Einstein's ideas was so bizarre It's almost easy to think them to apply some other crazy carnival world.
But strangers may seem our world is Einstein's world.
Gather around, gather around! Don't push! Don't shove! Make sure you get good view.
The show is about start, you don't want to miss a thing.
Hurry, Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up to Einstein's world.
Where things are always what they appear to be but not always what you expect.
First, the wonderous Einstein in himself.
Born missing the region of the brain that influences the speech He did not speak until the age 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 insight thinking about it.
Sometimes result 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.
Einstein's theory isn't really separated thing space and time.
But just one thing, space-time we all lived in.
He thought this new space-time as fabric, waving together space and time.
In 1915, Einstein developed his theory about general relativity which modified special relativity, to include the gravity and it effects in this fabric space-time.
Welcomes to the bounce trampoline of the gravity! We take our fabric space-time, stretched it, and placed heavy weight on it.
See how this worked on fabric space-time! When we rolled the ball cross the fabric it's magically seem to be drew or tracked to the mass weight of the center.
The general theory of relativity was a new theory of the gravity When they told us the gravity worked because space and time are curved in the presence of the matter and could respond dynamically, space in itself, expand, contracted in the presence of the matter.
A crazy but ture idea.
Mass is a term used to describe the energy and the matter the objects contain.
The larger the mass of object, the greater restoration of the space time fabric, the stronger effects of the gravity.
Gravity is not really a force, it is a fabric.
It is a shape of space and time.
And we just move on the curve of shapes.
And the act to do so, takes what otherwise be a straight line to you bends it into which now you described like orbits, as trajectories, as path ways through the cosmos.
Einstein said not even light could escape of the effects of the gravity.
As crazy as it sounds, prove conveniently arrived in 1919, in the form of astronomical large experiment based on a solar eclipse.
General relativity said if you look at a star on the path of light 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 in 1919, actually photograph stars.
When the sun was blocked by the Moon you could see the stars behind it.
The ability to see objects they were actually behind the sun proved that objets could work space-time.
Einstein became a superstar overnight.
He received the Nobel prize of physics at 1921.
But general relativity open Pandora box for Einstein.
One of the consequences of the Einstein theory was that the universe must either be expanding or must be contracting.
But setting still be eternal it's not a valid solution.
And that was a problem.
A problem, because if you introduce mass in the Einstein static universe, all that mass will through gravity draw together.
What was preventing this for happened? When you place matter in the fabric universe, you know matter attract echo other, and the thing is unstable.
To keep the gravity for clapping the universe Einstein postulated a force equal to and opposite gravity.
This constant force perfectly contra gravity to achieve a static universe.
Einstein seached for this cosmological constant convinced it's hiding in his equations but he was worry.
If Einstein had the anger of his convictions, some sense he was recognized that the static universe believed in was not compatible with the theory come out with.
In fact, relativity pointed a idea that universe wasn't static.
But expanding.
Site right down, focus, and enjoy magical space-time projector.
Watch the universe link by 4 dimensions move forward in space time.
Einstein himself didn't want make that prediction, that his own theory was sort of screaming make.
I suppose is one time on sense career, his career failed him.
He did make it, the both directions was actually staring him in the face.
Einstein's theory inevitably leaved to the idea of a moment of creation.
Now breath youself for the part that Einstein couldn't watch! Stay back everyone as we rolled projector backwards.
In spite of when Einstein believed his theory pointed at dynamic universe that was once much smaller.
The Universe shirks down to the size of an atom.
Einstein couldn't make that leap, but others would.
A dynamic and expanding universe fitted nicely in the theory called Big Bang.
At dawn to 20 century Albert Einstein may have inadvertently let us to consider the scientific possibility that our universe begun.
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 it was matter for religion scholar, not scientists.
There is different between science and religion, they are looking at world in different way, they ask different question.
Science is asking how things happen, what's process.
While religion is asking, as I think is different, interest question.
Why things happen? Is something going on.
Some meaning of 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 early champion of objective scientific theory for the origin of the Universe, was the ordinary catholic priest.
And what a strange twist, the science based solutions was appear so religious.
That the Universe didn't always existed.
But 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 late 20's and early 30's he was the one who better understood the concept of expanding Universe and introduced many of ideas that still are exploring.
Lemaitre studied the 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 the Einstein's equations kind of without prejudices when he find this equations suggested the Universe that would be expanding today and for ever smaller in the past he decided take that solution seriously.
If the Universe was expanding, Lemaitre reasoned it was smaller yesterday than it is today.
Therefor it must been ultimaclly, unimaginably small.
Lemaitre belived the universe begun look what he dubed the primitive atom.
A infinitely dense, hot cosmic egg that some time in the past exploded, Setting the Universe into motion, and leading 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 receive compacting corroboration in 1925.
In mountains above the Los Angels, astronomer Edwin Hubble saw something in his telescope that destroyed the Einstein's cosmological constant and it altered our image of the Universe.
In the 1920's we had 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, consisted of about 100 billion stars.
It's about 100 thousands light years cross.
That was the Universe in the 1920's, very comfortable.
Hubble pure deeper into the Universe that Galileo couldn't imagined using the more fastigiate telescope in his day.
He revealed our Sun as one star amount billion within the Milky Way galaxy.
But, was the Milky Way all there is? If so, exactly how big was it? Since sprouted powerful telescopes the astronomers looking in the sky but they had no could measures of how far a way things were exception for very close stars.
Edwin Hubble solved that problem by come up what's that called 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 dimer something appear, the farer way it is.
Just like a train in the distance the light seems dimer, comes brighter, brighter it's approach to you.
Hubble found one of this standard candle, within a spiral swirl of stars called Andromeda Nebula.
People saw Andromeda with just visable dust inside the Milky Way.
Then Hubble calculated distance.
Then he realized that galaxy is a million light years away.
That was the Eureka moment, and he had this epiphany.
He realized that Andrmoeda galaxy was island Universe just like the Milky Way galaxy.
So, in one instant, the Universe from be a comfortable Milky Way galaxy, to become this fantastic universe perhaps billions light years cross, and 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 potentially billions galaxies metropolis.
But Hubble was went further.
He also measured the behavior of those galaxies in 1929 He come a concluded the most of galaxies moving away from us.
Not just a lot of them but actually they moving away of the Milky Way and in fact they moving away from each other.
In other words, the Universe is expanding.
Getting bigger every second.
If you went back in the time, the Universe must been smaller.
Based on the speed of expansion that Hubble measured He could calculate the age of the Universe.
Hubble actually come out a measurement for that using his data he said the Universe about 2 billions years old.
That was bad because we already knew the Earth was old then that.
Hubble was on correct track.
His formula for determine the age of the Universal was correct, but his measurement wasn't accurate.
And this discrepancy gave some scientists room to quibble with Lemaitre theory.
But other less scientific reasons also may has contributed to Lemaitre's super atom be a strange of the physics community through while at first half of 20 century.
I think there was some distants to having somebody in the scientific compaign and in religious compaign, but did that made difficult for some scientists perhaps embrace them as much as they would, someone not in that position? Probably.
Lemaitre's proposal may have left him astranged from that follow scientists but the Pope Pius the 12th interpreted the theory as defective prove of the biblical story of the Genesis.
Lemaitre wrote to the Pope and said stop saying that this is scientific theory, that makes prediction you can measure, makes many predictions you can test.
But your beliefs was independent those predictions.
Lemaitre's theory could be measured, but proved? It seems unlikely billion's years after the fact the Big Bang's smoking gun will turn up.
And unless this smoking gun was find, other theories of the Universe could be proposed and the Lemaitre's cosmic egg would remain unhatched.
By middle of 20 century, it seemed that the primitive atom theory with Universe expanding violently outward form the infinitely small would never give wide acceptance.
Hubble incorrect estimation for the age of the Universe it allowed a competing theory to emerge for house of the Trinity College, Cambridge.
There was a tannable alternative to Big Bang theory the Steady state theory, which allowed the Universe to exist never lasting to never lasting.
The steady state theory champion the static universe, that the primitive atom concept rejected Proposal by astronomer Fred Hoyle It was build part of a theory of the origin of the elements Nitrogen, Carbon and more then Under extreme temperatures, Hydrogen fuses to form Helium and the Helium fuses in entire different heavier elements.
Fred Hoyle belive this nucleosynthesis creation of new elements took place in the cores of very hot stars.
That was an absolutely staggering achievement at that time.
Hoyle's achievement was to teach us, everything after Helium in the periodic table it's actually star dust.
It is in the stars when this things were made.
But the theory couldn't count for the formation of Hydrogen and most of Helium of the Universe, because the first stars must be made by Hydrogen already in existing.
This existing Hydrogen makes up more of the 74% of the detectable Universe.
Hoyle side-stepped this problem by adopting a widly holy belief that Hydrogen and Helium had always existed.
In fact, according to Hoyle, the entire Universe had always existed.
No beginning, no end, just a steady state.
In a nutshell, stationary state universe is universe always been there always looks like it does now, always has same average density, has same temperature.
There was just a little problem unknow which was people knew Universe was already expanding, when the distribution of matter expands, because more dilute.
Now, if the Universal very old, it would be infinitely diluted.
Hoyle fixed this fault by assuming that somewhere matter was always being created in the universe.
But the wholesale creation of the matter was a hard pill to physicists to swallow.
And Hoyle had a nemesis source in the Russian physicist George Gamow an admirer of Lemetrie's primitive atom.
Gamow usually present in these discussions.
And he always product disloyal questions for Hoyle's considered.
Questions that the steady state is difficulty dealing with.
Gamow turn to atoms as Hoyle did, to supporting his contending theory.
Gamow suggested the Hydrogen, the Helium and other elements were created in first fiery minutes of the Universe in the Big Bang, when the temperatures were thousands degrees hotter than they are in the core of any star.
But Gamow was better idea man than he was a mathematics.
And he had to turn to this phenomenally talented graduated student, Ralph Alpher and it was really Alpher who's really 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 10 times 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 cluse supporting the Big Bang.
George Gamow and his student asked a simple question: If Big Bang was so hot then, then the after the shock, after glare the echo of Big Bang can't be so cold now.
So the residual should be mesurable today.
Unfortunately, noone had the right telescopes in 1949 to measure the radiation or heat left over from the moment of the creation.
And that time there were other problem with the Big Bang theory.
It offer no explanation to the origin of elements beyond Hydrogen and Helium.
At the same time, the steady state goes on wide bright media coverage.
The steady state theory was popular with general public, because Fred Hoyle was master of the popularization just going on, 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 the term dirision.
I think he was dislike in their relationship.
They did not see eye to eye on most things will thinking about it.
So I think Hoyle come out worse battles And I think he did more fighting for his views than was merrited, that is a personal opinion.
Fred was very brilliant and innovating person.
I just did point out him.
"Someone were good, someone were bad, you just didn't 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 challenges to the Big Bang theory.
Still it seemed the battle between the Steady state and Big Bang would ended draw.
But then, all of suddenly, scientists found the somking gun, a nearly old as universe as itself.
This discovery condemn one of the theories to the dust bin of the history.
For 500 years, science has been on quest discover where we belong.
Now astronomers stuggle 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 forms of the left over heat generated when the Universe exploded in to being The radiation George Lemaitre predicted was out there but they had no tools to hear.
By 1965, scientists had those tools.
The residual, the echo, the after shocks after Big Bang should be mesurable today.
But it took about 2 decades before instruments be come powerful enough to clench George Gamow and his students theory of this background radiation.
The story on this radiation, it 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.
Than we had group of Princeton.
Well, they knew the work George Gamow, but they had very primitive instruments not sensitive enough.
The group of Princeton included to the physicist Robert Dicke and some colleagues who supported the theory of Lemaitre and wanted to look for some solid prove.
My teacher, Bob Dicke, had the idea to look for this radiation be left over from hot Big Band.
He had two brilliant young people working with him Dave Wilkinson and Peter Roll.
He persuaded them to build a deca-radiometer to look this radiation.
It was a shoot at the dark.
So this two young colleagues built one, point it in to air and started to looking.
When the news of experiment reached at Bob Wilson and Arno Penzias.
Penzias and Wilson were two scientists working not on the Big Bang theory but on satellite communications for the Bell labs in Holmdel, New Jersey.
They were using Bell's huge radio telescope only they couldn't get clear reading.
Instead they got static nosie.
The nature stuff it is a random noise.
And that nosie was very much like what's you hear if you tuned the TV set or the FM reciver to unuse channel.
We don't see we expected.
The antenna actually get more radiation than it should have.
Our clear respanse to that was there must be something worry here.
We get all extraordinary noise.
What was this strange noise? And where it came from? Aera interference from nearby New York city? Airplane signals? Pigeon dropping inside the horn of the telescope? We didn't doubts physics.
Whatever was, had to come from somewhere.
But we are real running out ideas, where it may be.
In fact, this mysterious radiations was coming from everywhere.
Every directions and every corner of the space.
To Penzias and Wilson that's just crazy.
But Penzias and Wilson had unknowing they find what Dicke and his colleagues were seeking.
What Gamow, Alpher and Lemaitre had predicted.
They had found the somking gun, that proved 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 separated paper in the Astrophysics Journey in 1965.
Their reseach crashed Hoyle's steady state theory over night.
Finally, thr 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 look like.
Rough back to ran everything was only a tiny fraction second old.
And was squeeze to immense densies and temperatures.
And from that very early dense state, we can understand and broad outline how the Universe expanded, cooled how some stage, the first atoms formed how some late stage the first structures formed made early stars, galaxies, advencely planets and people.
In a hospital in Belgium in 1966 The dying George Lemaitre rejoiced with the news.
It was not alone.
Gamow and his team also felt justified.
We had been arguing for 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.
Hls theory of the nucleosynthesis was not rejected.
While most scientists agree that Hydrogen and most of the Helium were created at first the moment of Big Bang as Gamow believed.
All other heavy elements like Nitrogen and Carbon, were ceart later, in the hot center of stars, in supernovas explosions, as Hoyle suggested.
So 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 pasted a few billion years.
He just never accepted it.
But the rest of the physical community, with almost total unanimous did accepted it.
The fact we discoveied it has beginning allow you to know ask whole series questions about how it began.
That's kind interesting, that's kind cool.
Because you can say when did it began? How was different there and today? What changes the influenced between there and now to creat the Universe we now know? But accepting the Big Bang theory and thinking it fluence, are two different things.
There were problems with the details of the theory, expanding problems.
During the last days of 20 century scientists examined problems with the Big Bang even the theory generally accepted.
One of the biggest problems was the temperature in outer space are strangely uniform.
Physicists didn't expanect the Universe would had same temperature roughly everywhere they looked.
The universe is simply too large for one end has same temperature as the other.
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 to hot molecules to properly get cross and to normalized whole distribution.
The universe doesn't appear to old enough for its temperature to has equalize yet.
The Big Bang could not explain why which 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 this volume early on there was time enough for these different points communicate normalized the temperature.
Right after this moment Guth theorized that the universe expanded even faster than light.
Faster than the cosmic speed limit.
The ultima speed according to Einstein.
What Inflation refer to it is a theory? What propelled the expansion of Big Bang.
Guth called to his theory inflation.
At the earlyest moment of the creation, for instance scientists believe that the 4 forces of the nature including the gravity and electromagnetism they were acctually combined into a single super force.
During Big Bang this superforce split into 4 known forces.
But before the split when the Universal was incredibly small Einstein's laws of the phyics including the one that is nothing moves faster than the light didn't apply yet.
Maybe at that moment something happen, that cause the Universe to expanding even faster than the light.
So fast that locked in the uniformity they had when the Universe still small.
We do not know exactly when the Inflation happened.
Most likely it happened when the gravity had splited from other 3 forces but at that time other 3 forces would still likely unified.
This hiper-expansion, if it happened would locked in a certain uniformity of temperature.
On June 3, 2001 NASA lunched a satellite that could potentially determine one way or the other the truth about the Guth inflation theory.
The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe or WMAP mission plan to photograph the fossil random heat of Big Bang that Penzias and Wilson were found.
In other words NASA wanted to take a baby picture of the Universe.
They could then compare it with how the Universe looks today.
In February 2003, the scientists got their first glimpse of WMAP picture of the baby universe.
When it near 380 thousand years old.
The clarity of the data astonished the scientists.
The reaction people had when saw this was: Well! It really was the way people had speculating early on.
The Inflation probably happened.
To the untrained eye the WMAP image looks like speckled robin's egg.
But scientists, it is a stellar rosetta stone.
These pattern represent the seeds that later grow into vast expensions of stars and galaxies of today.
Aside strongly supporting Guth's inflation theory the data also gave us concrete cluses to the age, composition, shapes and evolution of the Universe.
Up to few years ago, cosmology was quite think from the other sciences simply because there were more theories on them around than data.
And it not until these satellites measured what was going on, shortly after Big Bang with such high precision that you can describing one cosmological model from another and you can produced numerical results about the size of the Universe, the age of the Universe the expansion rate of the Universe, the content of the Universe.
You couldn't do that before these data be come available.
Before there was a mixture mythology and clever thinking.
Thanks to modern tools such as WMAP satellite, physicists now have a model of events just after Big Bang.
Less than billionth of second after Big Bang a bubbled much small than a fraction of atom formes.
This is the Universe.
It is unimaginably small and unimaginably hot.
Within this bubble, the 4 known forces the nature gravity, electromagnetism plus strong and weak nuclear force.
Were combined a super force.
Gravity suddenly separated of the super force, as the Universe expands.
As the Universe expands, it cools which somehow, sends out a burst of energy, feelling the hyperinflation of Universe, suggested by Alan Guth.
This inflation locks in uniformity of the Universe, picture by WMAP satellite.
The Universe still less than a second old when the super force decaies separated forces of the nature.
Roughly 3 minutes after the Big Bang the temperature of the Universe had droped to near 1 million degrees F.
Colder enough for atomic nucleus to form.
The element Hydrogen forms.
Some Hydrogen atoms fuse to cerat the Helium, that's proposed by Gamow and Alpher.
and light travel through the darkness.
The burst of radiation that Penzias and Wilson find happens now.
A billions years after Big Bang, stars took 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 created heat at its core.
This heat trigge thermonuclear fusion.
A star was born.
The stellar outflow clears away residual gases.
A circunestelar disc of dust remains that eventually excrete into an entourage of planets and moons.
One of these lumps of star dust after being pummeled for eons by residual solar debris has tempture warm enough to allow hydrogen dioxide, water to build up the atmosphere.
Liquid water gathers on planet surface.
Under water mysterious chemical reactions ultimaclly form life.
our Universe is now 156 billions light years cross.
The sky 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 spects they are in the great scheme of the things.
If you don't understand this process, that's ok.
It is the culmination of million of human brains struggling for thousands of years to figure it out how the Universe began and where man fits with in it.
It is enough to overran to any one human brain.
If I take seriously the idea that my brain was evolved, be able to throw rocks and take bananas and things thus, 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 all began.
It is what we thought we know.
It is a work in progress, the script still is 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 imagine travel in 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 in the future.
The Sun is running out the nuclear fuel that give its fire.
As it cools and it expands and it reddens coming closer and closer to Earth.
It swallows Mercury and Venus.
Water on Earth evaporates and the Earth be come melt again.
When the fuel was gone, the sun's core ultimately contracted as transform from a white giant to a white dwarf.
The expanding outal layers of the Sun called planetary nebulae.
Drifting in the space as ghostly shrouds of glowing gas.
The planets that's survive the process the outer one like Saturn and Neptune are utterly changed by it.
The planetary nebulae blows away their gaseous atmospheres leaving small, rocky and metallic core behind.
The distant planets no longer hold by less massive sun's gravity drift in to the vastness of the space.
Travel billions of years after that and all remaining heat from 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 prepared by a mysterious, only recently discoved dark energy the Universe expands, ever faster flying apart everywhere.
On a grand scale and at a molecular one, the expansion overwhelms of the gravity.
And everything rips a part not just galaxies, Solar System and stars but even atoms.
Finally, matter itself is torn sunder.
This it is the big rip, the big restting piece of our Universe the legacy of the dark energy, that stuff we still haven't figure it out.
Rightnow, dark energy is mostly a code word of our ignorance.
What this substance it is, some people think is sort of stuff, somepeople think it is a constant should be in Einstein's equations some people think is just a reflection of fact we may got that gravity worry again.
Right now the Big Rip theory of the end of the Universe leads the pack.
Who can say if it is remain our theory or some new discovery will challenge.
The stuff we haven't figure out yet, goes on for ever.
One more blow to our centrality in the great scheme of the things.
But that does not mean that we do not know anything.
Copernicus, Newton, Einstein even Alpher, Wilson and Guth they have given pieces us of endless puzzle.
They help tell us how we fit in the picture.
Recognize the very molecules that make up your body the atoms that construct molecules, a traceable to the crucibles that were once to center of high mass star and exploded there chemically enrich goods in the galaxy enriching the pristine gas clouds which chemistry of the life.
So we are connected, to each other by biologically, to the Earth, chemically, and to the rest of the Universe, atomically.
That's kind cool.
That makes me smile.
And I actually feel quite large in 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, try to figure it all out.
So much we know, and yet so much we still don't know.
We hold on tightly our little planet goes hurries through space.
Around the sun, around the galaxy, around the Universe.
Don't forget to look up, so much to see, so much to know.
By where we began?