Physicists That Discovered the Universe's Cold Dark Future In the Void Win Nobel
Posted by Michael_Byrne on Tuesday, Oct 04, 2011
Three more scientists got the Nobel nod today, this round for physics. The winners: Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University in Weston Creek, Australia, and Adam G. Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The subject: dark energy and the expanding universe. Or, as the Guardian put it this morning, for the “discovery that the universe is accelerating into the void.”
From a fairly sexy press release:
“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice…”
What will be the final destiny of the Universe? Probably it will end in ice, if we are to believe this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics. They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. The discovery came as a complete surprise even to the Laureates themselves.
This expansion has to do with a quanitity that Einstein theorized and then discarded, the cosmological constant. Simply: the cosmological constant was/is a value that kept the universe in a static state. Without it, the universe, even at equilibrium, would contract. This was ditched when observations by Edwin Hubble seemed to show an expanding, unstatic universe.
Finally, in 1998 our Nobel winners announced that universse isn’t just expanding, but accelerating. Oddly enough, this jives with Einstein’s original prediction of a cosmological constant. Though, you’re more likely to hear it referred to now as dark energy, the universe’s biggest mystery, a something that makes up two-thirds of everything. We have little to no idea of what that something is. So the upshot of the discovery is not just that the universe will end in an icey nothing, but that most of the universe is hidden.
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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
Winner Adam Reiss, via the AP
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About the author
Michael covers physics, climate science, the future of music, and assorted things fallen through cracks at Motherboard. A native of Colorado, Michigan, and Oregon, he currently resides in Baltimore...
