Meet the scientists across the world on the hunt for dark energy, an unknown form of energy which is hypothesized to permeate all of space and may be accelerating the expansion of the universe.
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LearningTranscript
00:01The universe is falling apart.
00:05Something is forcing galaxies to rush away from each other
00:09at ever-increasing speeds.
00:12Ever since this alarming discovery,
00:15physicists have struggled to understand what might be causing it.
00:20So far, they've come up with a name.
00:24They've called it Dark Energy.
00:29Dark Energy is basically our name for that thing that we don't understand.
00:37It's not the color of dark, it's just an expression of our ignorance
00:40as to what is this stuff.
00:42The discovery of Dark Energy really surprised theoretical physicists
00:47and remains a deep mystery of nature.
00:52We are absolutely still lacking great ideas.
00:55So it is crying out for some new breakthrough, new thinking.
01:02Scientists all over the world are on the hunt for answers
01:06to modern science's most enduring problem,
01:10to paint the biggest picture of all,
01:13to finally solve the mystery of dark energy.
01:29Energy is all around us.
01:31It comes from the sun, from chemical reactions, from electricity.
01:38Energy powers our vehicles, heats our homes, lights our nights.
01:44Understanding energy has transformed our planet and our lives.
01:50Dark energy is something altogether different.
01:53It seems to serve no useful purpose at all, except to show us
01:58that we understand less than we thought we did.
02:02Dark energy arrived entirely unexpectedly at the very end of the 20th century.
02:12In 1998, a young scientist named Saul Perlmutter was thinking some very big thoughts indeed.
02:21As a graduate student, I really wanted to find a project that would answer some,
02:26or that would at least be looking at some very philosophical questions,
02:30something that felt like it was meaningful about the world we live in, in some deep way.
02:36The question that's been really exciting me is whether the universe will last forever.
02:47Do we live in a universe that is infinite, or will someday we'll come to an end?
02:53The two big options at that time were that the universe could expand forever,
02:58but just slow and slow and slow, but forever be expanding.
03:02Or if there was enough stuff in the universe to gravitationally attract it,
03:06it could slow to a halt and then collapse and come to an end.
03:11Perlmutter was measuring the way the universe was expanding
03:14by observing exploding stars called supernovae.
03:22One particular kind of supernova always explodes the same way,
03:25because it waits until just a critical amount of mass has fallen on it,
03:28and then it explodes.
03:30So they all look very similar to each other.
03:33They brighten as a firework, then fade away, and they reach the same brightness.
03:38And you can then use that as an indicator of how far away it is,
03:41by just looking to see how bright it appears to you.
03:46Because they explode with exactly the same intensity,
03:49these supernovae are known as standard candles.
03:53By comparing their relative brightnesses, relative distances can be calculated.
04:00Perlmutter expected the stars to show what everyone thought at the time,
04:04that the universe was slowing down.
04:06Fainter ones are further, just like when you watch a car recedes in the distance,
04:12you can tell how far away it is by how faint the taillights look.
04:17If you can use the brightness of the supernova to tell you how far away it is,
04:20that's really telling you how long ago the explosion occurred,
04:24because you know how long it takes for light to travel that great distance.
04:27So now we have an object where it explodes,
04:31and its brightness tells you when it exploded, how far back in time it exploded.
04:36No matter how good the theory,
04:38the practical problem of catching an exploding star at just the right time is immense.
04:45But Perlmutter and his team applied the very latest computer technology to the problem.
04:51Finally, we have the analysis completed,
04:53at least the computer's part of the analysis,
04:55and it's beginning to show us on the screen what it thinks might be a supernova.
05:03Eventually, after the team had identified 42 such dying stars,
05:08the calculations began.
05:11What Perlmutter discovered shocked him.
05:15The data was telling the wrong story.
05:19The universe didn't appear to be slowing down.
05:21We thought that that's what we would see,
05:24and it looked like the opposite was taking place,
05:27and in fact, the universe was speeding up in its expansion.
05:31These distant supernovae were fainter than you would have thought,
05:35and fairly significantly fainter.
05:37They were, you know, probably 20% or more,
05:41and that's the hallmark of a universe that's actually speeding up in its expansion.
05:46To say that this result was a surprise would be a major understatement.
05:57It was so unexpected that the initial reaction was disbelief.
06:01Everybody knew Sol, and everybody knew the experiment he was doing.
06:06And I remember sitting in the audience and Sol getting up and expecting him to present an update on the results he'd given a year ago,
06:15that actually the universe was slowing down.
06:18And so I was absolutely amazed that based on only twice as many objects as he had the year before,
06:27that suddenly he was saying that we lived in a universe that was accelerating.
06:31I remember it just being just incredible.
06:34I mean, all the astronomers walking around scratching their heads saying,
06:38this can't be right, surely it can't be right.
06:40It was not the result that people had been expecting.
06:44And such an extraordinary claim demands extraordinary evidence,
06:50more than a few data from a handful of stars.
06:53So here we are on a beach where there's about a billion pebbles.
06:59And if you think you're trying to understand this beach,
07:02you wouldn't think you could understand it from 42 pebbles.
07:06But Sol was right.
07:07He was able to work out that the universe was accelerating just from 42 supernovae,
07:12which is quite incredible when you think about it.
07:17On the one hand, this was a good result.
07:19It was new science and produced a Nobel Prize for Saul Perlmutter.
07:25On the other, it raised an obvious question.
07:31Once you know that the universe is actually speeding up,
07:34then you're faced with the question of, well, what could make it speed up?
07:40So far, the only real progress on that question has been to give the phenomenon a name.
07:46It's become known as dark energy.
07:50Dark energy is just the term we use to describe whatever it is that makes the universe accelerate in its expansion.
07:58What makes it expand faster and faster?
08:01We don't know what that is.
08:02It's a mystery.
08:03And so we call it dark to reflect our ignorance, not because it's the color of your star.
08:07The mystery is so deep, so beguiling, that wherever there are physicists, there are people hoping that they will solve the mystery of dark energy.
08:21People safe in the infuriating knowledge of what they're looking for, if it's there at all, is all around them.
08:32But the fact that no one has yet been able to identify what the dark energy might actually be has opened a can of worms not seen in science since the last time a physicist got involved in cosmology.
08:46In 1915, it seemed that the work of physics was nearly at an end. Everything made sense.
09:05Newton had explained the heavens by invoking gravity, and atoms had been identified as the smallest invisible units of matter. Job done.
09:16Job done.
09:21But then a German man, who liked to muse on trains, turned up with a totally new set of ideas.
09:30I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes.
09:38And I might try to express it in words afterwards.
09:40Einstein called these little flights of fancy his thought experiments.
09:49And they would lead him to develop his theory of general relativity, which totally changed how the workings of the universe were understood.
09:59According to Einstein, space isn't simply a void.
10:03It's more like a four-dimensional fabric woven from both space and time.
10:11The mass of planets can warp and distort the fabric, gathering other celestial objects like moons around them.
10:21And it's this bending of space-time that creates the effect we experience as gravity.
10:28So Einstein's theory of general relativity is a beautiful theory.
10:34It's incredibly elegant, and it's been now around for a hundred years.
10:38It's very predictable. You can write things, make predictions of what the universe should look like,
10:42and what objects should look like in the universe.
10:45And we can test those, and as far as we can tell, it's passed every test.
10:48The power of general relativity is that, like Newton's version of gravity before it, it's predictive.
11:00Bizarre as the curvature of space-time may sound, it's eminently testable.
11:05In 1919, British astronomer Arthur Eddington pointed his telescope at a patch of sky near the sun during an eclipse,
11:17and observed a star known to be actually out of view, behind the sun.
11:22Its rays of light had been bent by the distorted space-time created by the sun's mass.
11:29Einstein's theory had held up. The paradigm had shifted, and the crowd went wild.
11:40Einstein was suddenly famous, undoubtedly the cleverest, yet most incomprehensible man on Earth.
11:48This is what all the fuss was about. This is the equation that the porters and waiters were discussing.
11:59On the one side, the geometry of space-time. On the other, the mass and energy of the universe, which acts on it.
12:10Not incomprehensible at all. At least, not to its author.
12:17But there was one aspect of general relativity that Einstein himself didn't understand.
12:22The problem that Einstein had is when he solved his equations of general relativity, what he found was that he predicted that the universe should actually be expanding.
12:41And that was radically different from the perceived wisdom at the time, which is that we lived in a static universe, both static in time and in space.
12:53So, he put in an extra term into the equation. He called it the cosmological constant. He used the Greek variable lambda.
13:01But effectively, it was really just what a physics undergraduate would call a fudge factor, that was just designed to make the equations come out right.
13:10And it would just make the universe sort of stand still.
13:17When you add the lambda term, it means that the equation is not quite as simple as it was before.
13:23So, in that sense, it's not as beautiful as an equation.
13:27The static universe was restored, but Einstein always felt he'd added lambda against his better judgment.
13:40Despite the fudge factor, lambda, the cosmological constant, Einstein continued to be celebrated as the world's cleverest man.
13:49Until in 1929, he became even more clever.
13:57In the US, an astronomer, Edwin Hubble, was about to get a reputation for scientific cleverness himself.
14:06He'd been using the world's largest telescope at Mount Wilson in California to peer deeper into space than anyone had ever looked before.
14:18What he discovered completely changed the meaning of the word universe.
14:22Until Hubble, it had been thought that the universe was our galaxy.
14:29What Hubble saw was that, in fact, our galaxy is just one of countless millions.
14:36But more importantly, that all these galaxies were moving apart from each other.
14:42The universe wasn't static after all.
14:44This had huge implications.
14:48It introduced the notion of a beginning and an age for the universe.
14:54But more importantly for Einstein, it meant that he could ditch his fudge factor, the cosmological constant, and return general relativity to its former glory.
15:05Einstein was over the moon.
15:13In 1931, he went to Mount Wilson to shake Hubble's hand and thank him for putting beauty back into his equation.
15:21Lambda, he later confessed, was the biggest blunder in his career.
15:26I think that the reason that he said that it was a blunder was because if he had just not introduced that term, then he would have said that, you know, the universe must be expanding.
15:43And done that 14 years before the discovery of the expansion of the universe by Edwin Hubble, which would have been a great achievement.
15:51But despite Einstein's blunder, general relativity has stood the test of time.
15:58It is perhaps the single most successful scientific theory yet.
16:04Every observation we make of gravity, from the smallest scales to solar system scales to galactic scales, all the way to the universe, all of that can be described using the single theory that Einstein created.
16:21So it's the most successful and beautiful theory we have of our universe.
16:30Or at least it was.
16:33For all its beauty and simplicity, general relativity doesn't account for the effects of dark energy.
16:40Expansion, as reported by Hubble, works fine, but the accelerated expansion of the universe that Saul Perlmutter found isn't part of the deal.
16:52That it's there at all is bad enough, but worse, the way that dark energy seems to work is unlike anything that's been observed before.
17:02The density of anything is the amount of stuff you have within a given volume.
17:09And dark energy is an unusual phenomenon in that even though the volume of the universe is increasing as it expands, the density is staying the same.
17:19So it's almost as if there's new dark energy being created all the time as the universe expands, meaning that its density remains the same constant.
17:29So you can think of it as you get more space, you actually get more dark energy, which is like getting something for nothing, which is clearly ridiculous.
17:38I mean, it's clearly against all our training as physicists.
17:45There is one way to adapt general relativity to cope with this magically, constantly self-replenishing force, and that is to simply add it to the equation.
17:58A hundred years after Einstein's biggest blunder, the cosmological constant is back.
18:06Lambda is being written once more, this time not to keep the universe still, but to account for its unexplained accelerating expansion.
18:16The values are different, but the concept is exactly the same.
18:23All this leads to one of two equally alarming conclusions.
18:28Either we need another Hubble, or we need another Einstein.
18:34But before we consign Albert to the scientific scrappy, there is a branch of physics which might help.
18:41An area of where things popping in and out of existence is quite normal.
19:01Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of Claire Burridge, and of quantum mechanics.
19:06Quantum mechanics is the theory of what happens to really, really small things.
19:13It's a theory of how the fundamental particles in the universe work.
19:17Atoms, electrons, protons, and quantum mechanics is intrinsically uncertain.
19:26Einstein hated quantum mechanics.
19:28But even though Einstein didn't like it, quantum mechanics could shed light on dark energy, and come to the aid of his once more under fire theory.
19:42In theory.
19:46Quantum mechanics tells us that particles can come in and out of existence in the vacuum.
19:51And the fact that those particles have mass and potentially are moving around, they have a little bit of energy.
19:55And so when they pop into existence, they give a little bit of energy to the vacuum.
19:59And yes, they disappear again, but the fact that that process is going on all of the time means that there's some energy stored in the vacuum.
20:10And because Einstein told us that energy and mass are the same thing, having lots of energy stored in space affects space-time that cause the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
20:22So it seems that quantum mechanics should, in theory, be able to explain how the cosmological constant works, and how dark energy appears in the vacuum of space and is driving the acceleration of the universe.
20:39But there's a problem.
20:41When they came to calculate this vacuum energy, they discovered how spectacularly wrong they were.
20:48If you were to say there was one pebble on this beach, you'd be wrong by one part in a billion.
20:55If you were to say there was one particle in the universe, you'd be off by 10 to the 80.
21:00But the vacuum energy was calculated to be off by 10 to the 120.
21:08That is a Google.
21:10That is spectacularly wrong.
21:12The fact that our predictions are so far off from what we see tells us that there's something fundamentally missing in the way that we understand physics, that we understand the world around us.
21:26So there's still a mystery, still a puzzle there.
21:28It might be tempting to simply ignore dark energy.
21:34You could argue that the apparent accelerated expansion is, in fact, a trick of the light.
21:40That it may be a function of other inaccessible dimensions at play.
21:45That it just looks like dark energy, but is actually something else.
21:49But dark energy isn't just an irritating threat to Einstein's beautiful equations.
21:57It's also a very practical solution to a fundamental question in cosmology.
22:04Namely, what is the universe made of?
22:07When Einstein was busy thinking about gravity on trains, the answer was simple.
22:13The universe was made of the same stuff that you and I are made of.
22:16The stuff of stars, planets, coke cans, tennis rackets, atoms.
22:24Made from electrons, protons and neutrons.
22:28But physics was about to get a surprise.
22:32It turned out there was something else out there that the universe was also made of.
22:38Matter of a different kind.
22:40In 1975, astronomer Vera Rubin made an unexpected discovery.
22:48If we plot the velocity of the planets as a function of distance from the sun.
22:56Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
23:09And you can see that Mercury orbits much more rapidly than Pluto.
23:15The graph is called a rotation curve.
23:21It is the embodiment of the law of gravity.
23:24The further away you travel from the sun, the weaker its gravitational force.
23:28Galaxies work in the same way as our solar system.
23:34Except that instead of planets orbiting a central sun, in a spiral galaxy, stars are held in orbit by a gravity providing black hole.
23:45Vera Rubin decided to plot the rotation curves in galaxies.
23:50She focused her telescopes on Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our own.
23:56I came out with sets of numbers and I plotted them on pieces of paper and I discovered that the stars as you went further and further out did not slow down.
24:06They were moving just as fast as the stars near the center.
24:09We find that their velocities remained flat all the way to the edge of our observations.
24:18And that was a surprise.
24:21And a surprise that had to be explained.
24:24By all accounts, the stars should have flown off into space, but they didn't.
24:30And wherever spiral galaxies were measured, the same flat curves appeared.
24:34It was decided that the only explanation was that there must be more stuff out there that we couldn't see, providing the extra gravity, holding the galaxies together and flattening the curves.
24:48They called this stuff dark matter.
25:03The new dark matter was a surprise in more ways than one.
25:06The very fact of its existence was almost overshadowed by the fact that when the calculations were made, this new form of matter outweighed the atomic form of stuff by about 90 to one.
25:20In the 1980s, when new ways of measuring dark matter were developed, it was discovered that there simply wasn't enough of it to make the universe work as it clearly does.
25:36The universe was short on stuff to the tune of about 70%.
25:40Cosmology scratched its head.
25:45Then in 1998, a young scientist, Saul Perlmutter, was thinking some very big thoughts indeed.
25:55Something that felt like it was meaningful about the world we live in, in some deep way.
26:02The universe was speeding up in its expansion.
26:04The dark energy that earned Perlmutter his Nobel Prize was an interesting and troubling concept.
26:12But it also had a number.
26:14And that number was very significant.
26:19We know from Einstein that energy and mass are related.
26:22That energy, E, equals mass times the speed of light squared.
26:27E equals mc squared.
26:29Plug dark energy into that equation and you get the missing mass that dark matter couldn't account for.
26:38The universe was complete.
26:41It was made up of about 4% baryonic matter.
26:45The stuff that were made from.
26:4726% dark matter.
26:49And the gaping 70% sized hole was filled with dark energy.
26:54Dark energy.
27:15Despite heroic efforts to find it and overwhelming evidence that it exists,
27:19no one has identified what dark matter is.
27:29And of course dark energy, both useful and confounding, is barely in its infancy when it comes to a convincing explanation.
27:37But there is an idea in cosmology that dark matter and dark energy may be linked by more than just a common adjective.
27:46And if they are, a new European spacecraft called the Euclid may shed light on what that link might be.
27:54The Euclid Consortium is staffed by 1,200 scientists from 14 countries.
28:00Here are some of them having their picture taken at their annual conference in Luzon.
28:09They are hoping that by taking pictures of the universe, they will be able to figure out how it's expanded over its lifetime.
28:16And by determining that, the nature of dark energy will become clearer.
28:20The way we think about it is that it's either some new stuff in the universe, some particle or even just a new field that you put into the universe to explain the properties of the universe.
28:37Alternatively, you could say that the equation you wrote down is not correct.
28:44It's not wrong, but it's sort of, we like to say, it's incomplete.
28:49So you could sort of fiddle with the mathematics of the equation.
28:52So actually what you could do is maybe come up with a natural explanation for it.
28:57So Euclid should be able to tell us which of those alternatives it is.
29:04The satellite will launch and start sending data back to Earth in 2020.
29:09The all-important camera for the Euclid Space Telescope is being built and tested in the UK, in this country house in the Surrey Hills.
29:23Not only will Euclid be able to measure the historic acceleration of stars and galaxies in all directions,
29:31it's hoped that it will also provide data about how dark matter around galaxies has expanded over time.
29:40This is possible because of an effect called gravitational lensing.
29:46So in general relativity, mass bends space and time and then light is bent around large massive objects,
29:54just like Eddington measuring the star behind the Sun.
29:58And so we use the same technique for Euclid.
30:01I can illustrate it using this wine glass and this image of the universe.
30:06So as we draw the wine glass across the image, what you see is that the galaxies behind the wine glass get distorted.
30:15And that distortion is caused by the lens.
30:20In general relativity, the lens is mass because it bends the light.
30:26And that can be shown in this picture.
30:28You have a large clump of mass here, which is like the lens, like our bottom of the wine glass.
30:34And what you can see are all the distorted galaxies behind that lens.
30:38And what you can do with an image like this is you can calculate how much mass would I need within the lens to create the distortions that I see.
30:49And what you find is quite remarkable.
30:51What you find is there is about a hundred times more mass here than you see from the light in the image.
30:58And that missing mass, that mass you cannot see, is what we call dark matter.
31:03So Euclid will make an image of the whole sky at this resolution and it will find all these distorted background galaxies.
31:17And from that, it can infer the distribution of dark matter in the universe.
31:22Euclid will compare lensing all over the universe.
31:25And by doing so, will help paint an accurate picture of how the universe is tearing itself apart under the influence of dark energy.
31:35So Euclid may tell us that it's the cosmological constant.
31:40And then we have to explain that.
31:43It might tell us that our theory of gravity is not complete.
31:50And we'd have to explain that.
31:53It could tell us that actually the dark matter and dark energy are two sides of the same coin.
32:01And that actually there might be a unified dark sector.
32:05But we'd have to explain that.
32:07It could be another theory that we haven't even come up with yet.
32:12And so Euclid will give us a coherent data set that we can test all these theories against.
32:21Whatever the case, the devil's in the details.
32:25And these days, the details can be interrogated to degrees not thought possible
32:31when Einstein first reluctantly inserted his cosmological constant into general relativity.
32:38Cosmology is one of the fields that is actually pushing the boundaries of cosmology itself,
32:45but also statistics and computing.
32:47I think. It is the frontier, I think.
32:50Euclid will be pushing the boundaries like never before.
32:54It will stream more data from space than has ever been processed in the past.
32:59In the end, it will have about one and a half billion galaxies.
33:03It will observe one and a half billion galaxies, so it's huge.
33:06And a lot of the times, your eyes cannot just pick up patterns.
33:09OK, so this cannot be possible without computers and statistics.
33:14The computer-aided searches should give unprecedented clarity
33:19on how science should be thinking about dark energy.
33:22There will be winners and losers.
33:24The amount of data that we have on dark energy hasn't been enough to be able to tell us which path we have to go down to.
33:33So we have, like, lots of theories and a lot of, hundreds of models that could still fit our data.
33:38When Euclid comes, lots of these can be thrown away, and it could, like, you know, narrow down the possibilities of what this dark energy is.
33:45The Euclid telescope is not the only show in town when it comes to mapping the expansion of the universe.
34:10At Kitt Peak in Arizona, Risa Weschler is hoping to use the proposed dark energy spectroscopic instrument DESI
34:21to make a map of part of the universe like this one.
34:28But a hundred times more accurate so that she can check the validity of computer simulations of the universe that she's created.
34:36One of the things that I do is try to simulate the entire universe and tie what we think about the physics of the evolving universe to what we actually see with surveys like DESI.
34:51What we're trying to do in these simulations is take a whole bunch of hypothetical universes.
34:57Some of them will have a cosmological constant, some of them will have a different time-evolving dark energy, some of them will have more or less amount of dark matter.
35:09And then when we compare that to what we actually see, we can rule out a lot of these ideas.
35:14So some of them will not be consistent with what we measure and then we can determine that that's not the universe we live in.
35:22When DESI starts producing data in 2020, it might be that one of Risa Weschler's simulations strikes gold.
35:30It'll be up against a lot of competition.
35:35In the absence of hard data, this is boom time for theories.
35:40Multi-Galileans, ghost condensates and the higher co-dimensional brains world's theory jostle for attention in the race to explain dark energy.
35:50Many of these theories usually try to provide a global solution to the dark energy problem, a fix to general relativity.
36:00But Claire Burridge is working on an idea that suggests Einstein may have been both right and wrong at the same time, depending on where you are.
36:11We know that Einstein's theory works very well on Earth and in the solar system. We've tested it and it works phenomenally well.
36:20But we don't have ways of testing that theory on the kinds of distance scales that are relevant to cosmology.
36:27And so it could be that whilst relativity is a good description of what's happening around us, it doesn't work as a description of the universe as a whole system.
36:36And maybe you need to change the theory.
36:41Claire's solution involves something called a chameleon.
36:47A particle that tries to blend in, not by changing color, but by changing how it exerts its force.
36:54There are two types of particles in the universe.
36:57There are the ones that make up matter, like electrons and protons and neutrons and quarks.
37:02And then there's another set of particles and those are the ones that transmit forces.
37:05So, for example, the photon which makes up light also carries the electromagnetic forces.
37:12It's exactly like what we're doing with the ball and the magnet.
37:15We don't see the photons transmitting the force directly, but we see the fact that the magnet makes the ball move.
37:21In physics, the greater a particle's mass, the smaller the distance over which it's able to exert any force or field it might have.
37:29The mass of a particle tells you how far it can carry information.
37:35If a particle that's transmitting a force is heavier, it only transmits the force over a shorter distance scale.
37:41So the range that you can transmit the force over changes depending on where you're looking.
37:45The idea here is that when the chameleon comes into contact with other stuff, it interacts with it and becomes heavy and its force transmitting capability all but disappears.
37:59But in regions of deep space where there's very little in the way of anything, the chameleon has no stuff with which to interact and so is very light and can transmit its force over vast distances.
38:11We're looking for this simple, elegant solution to this strange accelerated universe and nothing yet has given us that.
38:37Where that simple solution will eventually come from is anyone's guess.
38:46That is one of the infuriating things about science.
38:50It can't always produce the rabbit out of the hat on time and on budget.
38:54Sometimes it takes an unexpected turn of events or what the media like to call a genius.
39:06Though the geniuses themselves have a rather different take on their exploits.
39:11I'm not more gifted than anybody else. I'm just more curious than your average person.
39:20And I will not give up on a problem until I have found the proper solution.
39:24I think that curiosity is what drives most cosmologists and physicists.
39:30The curiosity about the universe. What is the universe made out of? Why are we here?
39:37How did the universe begin? What will happen to the universe in the future?
39:41All of these are questions which are driven by curiosity.
39:43I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
39:54Curiosity, I think, is the best motivating force.
40:01Working hard doesn't necessarily get you to an answer.
40:06Working too hard can actually stifle creativity.
40:11With our work, you know, it's a mixture of inventiveness and persistence and hard work. It's a combination.
40:23It's the end of the Euclid conference in Luzon.
40:26The conference organizers have arranged a social evening cruising around Lake Geneva.
40:31It's a chance for the delegates to unwind and maybe even think a little about the biggest picture of all.
40:39Yeah, but so, so, Einstein's theory was motivated for a reason, right? He had an equivalence principle.
40:45Yeah, and I mean, we're going to measure a lot of things about the nature by looking at how it evolves, how dark energy actually evolves with redshift.
40:51Right, the problem is the zero point energy, the vacuum energy, the quantum mechanical part that you add there.
40:56You know, because you try and study the nature of dark energy and at the same time try and test if general relativity works.
41:02So there's like a lot of work and a lot of discoveries that are going to happen down the road.
41:06Exactly. And I'll drink to that.
41:09Exactly.
41:13The process of scientific discovery sometimes makes progress through sheer hard work,
41:19and sometimes it needs someone to take an inspired alternative view.
41:23We learned an awful lot about animals and plants by simply observing them.
41:30But it took Darwin, with a radical idea, to give us a context to understand life itself.
41:36And in our efforts to understand the wider world and even the universe, observations are critical.
41:43The ideas of dark matter and dark energy come courtesy of people watching stars.
41:51But just as Einstein, musing on his train, managed to take all the known science and see it from a different, more useful angle,
42:00it might be that to solve the dark energy problem, someone needs to pull off a similar trick and come up with an even better idea.
42:08There are an awful lot of very smart people in the world.
42:13I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with another Einstein somewhere along the line here.
42:18I don't know what it will be in our lifetime, but I think we have a good shot of it.
42:23We need teams like Euclid. That's the only way you can get the data that you need.
42:29But to understand that data, to give it some interpretation, to give it an idea, could come from one person.
42:38That could be the next Einstein.
42:40Engineers could come up and put all the observations that we have so far, put it together and come up with a new theory.
42:46Yeah, it is quite possible. I'm kind of hoping it's me.
42:51The tantalizing truth is that all it might take to solve the mystery of the dark energy is one big idea.
43:06For someone out there to see things differently, someone perhaps like you.
43:13And if that new Einstein is you, if you manage to solve the mystery of dark energy, you're likely to become very famous indeed.
43:23As famous as the original Einstein.
43:26Einstein.
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