"What Einstein called his biggest mistake would be my greatest discovery" - The País.com (Spain)

“The cosmological constant, which Einstein called his greatest mistake, could be my greatest discovery.” Very few people can afford to say something. Australian astronomer Brian Schmidt can, and it says in the conditional, but have given the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery made 31 years and the doctoral thesis. It all started, remember now, with a few observations of galaxies whose results were so crazy that when he saw them, he asked: “What did we do wrong?”. Even feared that this was the end of his scientific career almost brand new. He went through it all again for weeks with his team, about twenty people, and kept coming out the same: the expansion of the universe, rather than slowing down, was accelerating. But they said the same identical results U.S. competitor team, Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess (who shared the Nobel with Schmidt). “Then I realized it was going to be something big,” says the scientist from the Austral ian National University. Although many scientists, recognized, greeted the news with disbelief. “Is that science is conservative: we are always testing our ideas, but when a turns everything upside down, we are skeptical,” says Schmidt, who this week has lectured in Madrid, in the BBVA Foundation.

“Maybe the universe is very lonely in the future, no galaxies”

Einstein

What do you paint in? The history of the acceleration of the universe, dark energy, as known, is fascinating from beginning to end, and nobody knows when it will clarify the mystery. But an idea of ??the German scholar, in 1917, which he considered his “biggest mistake” may explain the amazing discovery of 1998.

To understand it is better to follow the explanations of Schmidt. “What we did was to observe exploding stars, called supernovae, and use them to measure its apparent brightness, distances in the universe.” It was, he says, to take advantage of the latest technologies in astronomy with the largest telescopes to accurately measure “how much you stretch the universe”, ie the so-called Hubble constant. It was the American astronomer Edwin Hubble who discovered in 1929 that the galaxies are separated from each other and that the farther they are from the observer, the greater the apparent speed at which turn away from him. Thus was born the Big Bang theory, which describes the overall mass flight of galaxies from a large initial explosion. Einstein did not expect. I thought, like all scientists, then, that the universe was static and, as his equations of relativity gave a cosmos would collapse on itself, had introduced the cosmological constant to stop it. When Hubble found that the universe was expanding, there was no need in the Einstein equations that apparent artifice, which is “an energy space,” says Schmidt. It turns out that now is the best theory that physicists have to explain his great discovery.

“The web and wifi born of basic research”

“That energy of space is a vacuum, and that people understand that, if I take the piston of an engine and I press it, the air that is inside press against, out”, says the Australian. In the universe says, the effect of tightening the piston is the gravitational attraction of matter that would make the universe frenase and outward pressure is dark energy. When this energy dominates the cosmos, getting bigger, its effect counteracts the attraction instead of slowing down and accelerating. But attention, “this energy is space itself and is everywhere, is in you, in the galaxy … what happens is that here the proportion is negligible and not noticeable. “

So Einstein believed was right even when wrong? “There are many alternative explanations, thousands of them, for the acceleration of the expansion we observe, but the cosmological constant is the best, and simplest,” he replies Schmidt. The mystery remains open.

“We now know that the universe is made of dark energy (nearly 70%), dark matter (25%) and ordinary atoms (5%). 70% had gone unnoticed, “Schmidt is surprised.

“If the cosmos lose information in its evolution can not be understood”

So scientists know about the universe? “We are in that of the known, what we know we do not know and we do not know we do not know. So we’ve moved from the third to the second, but that’s the beauty of science. ” And more questions that open: “With the acceleration, if the universe is expanding faster and faster, both galaxies are separated from each other and so fast and be so far from us that their light will fail to reach us. You will see a sky with stars, but galaxies, Andromeda only, “says Schmidt. “It will be a lonely cosmos astronomer like me would not work,” he laments.

Schmidt declares optimistic about dark energy and expected to achieve understanding in a few years. But maybe … “Imagine that the Earth had formed about 9,000 million years after the Big Bang until much later, how cosmologist, watch the sky and I see galaxies, so I can not find the expansion of the universe, no acceleration, ie I can not understand how the cosmos because his information was lost evolution “raises Schmidt. “I find it disturbing, as a scientist, I like to think that you can get to understand almost everything.”

“The scientist must dare to make mistakes, not infallible”

Schmidt is still daring, although it says that the Nobel Prize for scientific conservative “because it takes a fair assumption, because it seems to be infallible, when the scientist, who is exploring the frontier of knowledge itself, into what new, must dare to make mistakes “.

not want this Australian born in the United States end without giving ogre twist on science that it shows, loves. Y refers to its usefulness, to why you need to invest in basic research effort. “Science, astronomy is to think, and in doing so open your mind to new ideas, to how to address problems and possibilities, and it is worthwhile to society. When you’re researching a new telescope things no one has thought of before and that trains people, “he says. Topped with two examples: “The Web was born at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, a center for basic research, and the wifi was invented by a colleague of mine radio astronomer in Australia, John O’Sullivan, who studied as a hole evaporates black and had to solve the problem of how to bounce radio waves in the galaxy … So began working with multiple signals and the solution of astronomy led to the wifi “.