Transcriber: Allison Servey Reviewer: Denise RQ
This is Stephen Hawking,
arguably, the most famous scientist of our generation.
Yet, what if I told you Stephen Hawking was imprisoned for heresy.
(Cell door closes)
Thought crimes, crimes against the state.
Clearly, this would be seemingly ridiculous
that such a thing could happen.
But this is exactly what happened
to the greatest scientific genius of his age: Galileo.
381 years ago,
Galileo was the first person to give evidence
that we are not the only planet in our Solar System,
and we are not, in fact,
the center of the Solar System nor are we the center of the Universe.
In fact, the Earth was just one of many planets.
He did that by observing the planet Jupiter.
Through a very revolutionary instrument called the refracting telescope,
he was able to glimpse that Jupiter had moons,
and these moons orbited not around the Earth, but around Jupiter itself.
This was incontrovertible proof
that the Earth was not the center of the Solar System,
which was effectively the universe back then.
He did it all
with an amazing scientific instrument, a revolutionary product,
that as Steve Jobs would say, "just fits in your pocket,"
the refracting telescope.
This is Galileo's 450th birthday year,
and tonight we're going to throw him a little celebration party.
Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter, and in doing so, pricked our cosmic egos.
He demonstrated that the Earth is not the center of it all.
And tonight, I'm going to invite you to come along with me
on a journey to the very bottom of the world,
A journey which has the potential, perhaps, to make discoveries
equal to the discoveries that Galileo made.
So what Galileo did got him into a little bit of trouble.
This is Galileo in front of the Holy Office.
Holy Office is a euphemism for the Inquisition.
Don't you love euphemisms like this? I do.
It's like calling the IRS the 'Money Donation Service'.
(Laughter)
He was imprisoned for the remaining nine years of his life
for thought crimes.
And what he was able to do was so amazing and revolutionary,
and he did it with a simple instrument.
But he used it in a powerful way.
And I claim this instrument changed our understanding of the universe
more than any other scientific instrument.
This is the Earth at night looking out on the stars,
which we now know are but pinpricks of light to our eyes,
the 2 refracting telescopes in our heads.
With our eyes, we can look out in space and look out in time,
and we can glimpse these distant objects.
We now know that these objects represent suns that harbor planets and moons,
and these suns are just one of hundreds of billions in our galaxy alone.
And guess what.
There are hundreds of billions of galaxies as well in the universe.
Galileo unseated us as the center of it all,
and with the telescope,
magnified if you will, to mix metaphors, our insignificance.
So, tonight what will be interesting to discover along with me
is what you would see if you had microwave eyes.
If you had microwave eyes,
instead of seeing pinpricks of light from stars,
you'd see this magnificent tapestry
that represents the pattern of photons coming to us from the Big Bang itself,
13.8 billion years ago.
It's an amazing image
that captures the properties of matter, dark matter, energy, dark energy,
throughout our entire cosmic history.
With our eyes and our brains,
we can attempt to make an image of the infant universe.
To what can this be compared?
I like to think of what would be the earliest possible baby photograph
that you could possibly take.
That would be the image of this object over here.
So I'm a doctor.
I'm not a real doctor according to my brothers
(Laughter)
but I still prescribe medicine.
No, I don't do that.
This is called a blastocyst.
It's a collection of cells, about 200 to 400 cells,
that represent the human embryo roughly 1,000 seconds after conception.
1,000 seconds after your own personal big bang.
(Laughter)
This blastocyst is an amazingly complicated structure.
Imagine if we were trying to unravel what your blastocyst looked like.
I can't take a picture of every one of you in the audience,
but I can take the most famous person on the planet: our president, Barack Obama.
Imagine if I was trying to use this image of Barack today
to get an image of baby Barack; baby Barack's blastocyst.
(Laughter)
This only represents an extrapolation in time by a factor of a million.
From 2 billion seconds to 1,000 seconds.
And yet, what we're trying to do with our instrument at the South Pole
is uncover what the universe looked like
a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second
after the Big Bang.
The so-called inflationary universe, the spark that ignited the Big Bang.
Inflation takes place in a vast landscape, potentially, called the multiverse,
in which multiple universes could exist.
We're trying to take this image of the night sky, in microwaves,
and transform from it
an image of what the baby universe must have looked like.
My colleagues at NASA have done a wonderful job of rendering this image
as if you were an omniscient deity looking down on our universe,
and seeing it from a distance.
This is the pattern that you'd see, on this beach ball.
This image inspired me to unravel what caused these colorful fluctuations.
What could break the symmetry, the isotropy of the early universe,
filled with chaos and randomness.
What could possibly be the origin of those fluctuations
is what has driven me in my career.
In 2001, I pitched an idea to my advisor at Cal Tech, Professor Andrew Lange,
who believed in me, thank God,
because it was a crazy and risky thing to do as a young postdoc toiling away.
He said: "Brian, this might be the ultimate cosmic wild goose chase,
but we should do it."
And we did do it.
We assembled an amazing team
of about two dozen scientists from around the world,
led by Professor John Kovac at Harvard University.
And with this amazing team, we were able to construct
a beautiful instrument that's compact yet powerful.
It doesn't quite fit in your pocket
- it's about five feet long and weighs about ten thousand pounds -
but Galileo would recognize it.
If your pocket holds an iPhone 6, maybe it does.
(Laughter)
Instead of glass lenses that Galileo used to peer out into the universe,
our telescope uses this Frisbee-looking device.
It's a lens made of high-density polyethylene,
that's nothing more than the same material used to make milk jugs.
And just as you can feel heat or cold through a milk jug,
microwave heat passes beautifully through
transparent-to-microwaves plastics like this.
This is the simple part of our telescope.
The complicated part of our telescope, which you can't buy in the supermarket,
are these amazing detectors,
designed by Professor Chao-Lin Kuo at Stanford University,
and built by Jamie Bock, Professor at Cal Tech,
and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
These are the most sensitive detectors ever made,
and they are made of exotic materials that operate near absolute zero
called superconductors.
With this amazing technology,
we decided we needed to build an instrument so powerful
that we would need an observatory just as good as our telescope was powerful.
For microwaves, if you're looking for heat,
you don't want to build a telescope here in sunny San Diego.
You want to build it at the bottom of the world, Antarctica.
Antarctica is the coldest, driest, highest continent on earth,
and it's ideal for obtaining images of the infant universe.
We did build this telescope, and we shipped it down to the South Pole.
The South Pole was the site of the Space Race of the 1900s.
It was first reached in 1911 by Roald Amundsen,
and a month later by Robert Scott.
It was the moon race of its time.
And sort of like our Moon race,
nobody went back to the South Pole for almost 50 years.
I hope we go back to the Moon.
Scott's team famously perished, just seven miles away
from their life-giving stockpile of food and supplies, tragically.
And today Antarctica is still a place ripe with danger, man-made and natural,
as this video, grainy as it is, captures from my last expedition to the South Pole.
(Laughter)
It's still friendlier than a lot of faculty meetings I go to.
(Laughter)
This is the South Pole research station;
the Amundsen-Scott research station at the very bottom of the world,
built by the National Science Foundation with taxpayer money,
thank you.
(Laughter) (Applause)
When you get there, you have a solemn duty:
to take the world's most southern selfie, and post it to Foursquare to check in.
After doing this, you get to work.
Our telescope sits
in the second-most important building at the South Pole
called the Dark Sector Laboratory ; there it is.
And if you climb to the top of the Dark Sector Laboratory,
you look down, and you peer down, and you see our instrument, our baby,
that's hoping to take these amazing images of the microwave background radiation.
This fanciful pattern is rendered on the top of this image.
It was taken by this gentleman here, Steffen Richter,
who's a man that we pay to spend almost a full year at the South Pole.
Why?
Because it's so cold,
you cannot get in or out of the South Pole for almost a year at a time.
This image captures sunset which only occurs once per year.
Six months later, the sun comes up; One day and one night per year.
How do we get someone to spend a year of their lives at the bottom of the world?
It's simple.
We told him: "We'll pay you 75,000 USD tax-free.
And all you have to do is work for one night."
(Laughter)
Tragically, just a month after we got the data
that first came out of our telescope,
my advisor, my friend, my mentor, Andrew Lange, took his own life.
We still don't understand why he would do such a thing.
I'm still angry at him, I'm still frustrated; we miss him terribly.
Everyday, we think about him,
and we dedicated our results to his memory and tribute.
What do our results look like?
This image, which was printed in the Washington Post, shows our real data
produced by Professor Clem Pryke of the University of Minnesota.
This image shows the swirling, twisting, curling pattern of microwaves,
that some say indicate the very birth of the universe.
A birth called inflation.
Our results are powerful.
They're controversial, though, for two reasons that I'll explain.
One reason they're controversial is
that it may be there are other explanations for these images,
rather than just the amazing image of the infant universe.
It could be that there is dust, so to speak, on the cosmic lens cap.
It might be that microscopic grains of dust that look like this greatly magnified
can get aligned by the weak magnetic fields in our Galaxy,
and form swirling patterns of microwaves, which can masquerade as the pattern
that we claim represents the genesis of the Big Bang.
The second controversy is more fundamental.
It is a philosophical, and some say, theological controversy.
It revolves around the fact that the multiverse theory seems to mean
that our Universe is just one, potentially,
of an infinite number of universes.
Some that pop into and out of existence every nanosecond,
but they're so far away from us
in this infinite landscape called the multiverse,
that we can never see them.
Some say that this is evidence of how special we are;
an anthropic principle stating that we are so special
that we have the conditions that allow for the evolution of life,
the evolution of stars, planets, people, TED conferences.
But it might be that we'll never be believed
until we have evidence of another universe colliding with our own Universe
not flitting and floating out of existence.
Instead, some say: "Wait until we have evidence
that we have collided with another universe inside the multiverse."
Well, this is pretty improbable.
And I thought for Galileo's 450th birthday we'd throw him a little party.
I'm going to throw this beach ball out into the audience.
It represents Earth.
There are ten beach balls distributed throughout this auditorium
that represent other universes in the multiverse.
Let's see if any of those will collide with this gigantic Earth beach ball.
Watch out.
Now, release the universes.
(Laughter)
What would Galileo, my hero, have to say about all of this?
I think
(Crowd sounds)
I think Galileo himself, the maestro,
(Crowd cheers)
would be very pleased that our discoveries made with a simple refracting telescope,
have changed our view of the universe, yet again.
Let us thank the maestro by giving him a bigger BICEP.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)