I'm here at the Mount Stromlo
observatory to talk to one of this
year's Nobel Prize winners for physics
professor Brian Schmidt still feels kind
of weird I know I don't really feel like
a Nobel Prize when I go and say okay got
Heisenberg Einstein
does the same point that ordinary honor
so you know congratulations to you and
so can you tell us why have you been
awarded this prize so in 1998 Adam riess
is one of the other Co recipients and I
working with the team of 18 other people
discovered that the universal expansion
the cosmic expansion of the universe was
speeding up and that was the wrong
direction we had expected gravity to
cause the universe to slow down and so
the fact that the universe is speeding
up meant that gravity was not working as
we had expected and we think that's
because about 73 percent of the universe
is something we call dark energy
something we didn't know existed before
and that causes gravity to push rather
than pull because it actually caused
gravity to change well it means that we
always think that gravity always holds
but according to Einstein the way
gravity works really depends on the
material itself and energy tied to space
gravity pushes it doesn't pull so do we
have any sort of hints as to what this
energy in space could be well Einstein
said it might just be energy that's just
there but it would be nice to have a
better explanation than that and
honestly no we do not have any hints of
what it might be so why is this result
so remarkable why are people so excited
about it you know it's big when you
discover 73% of everything there is you
know that's that's overturning what we
expected and it's weird it's not even
normal stuff it's weird stuff and so you
know I think it it highlights either
that we were just missing this huge part
of the universe before or that somehow
gravity and quantum mechanics which we
know we don't have a theory for are
playing tricks with physics in a way
that we don't quite have sorted out and
so I guess some of the hope is that
maybe we can use these observations to
probe the link between gravity and
quantum mechanics and hopefully
potentially sort that out have you heard
about this study that says that Nobel
Prize winners live a few years longer
then similar scientists who were
shortlisted for the prize but don't
actually win wow I have not heard that
uh are you doing are you feeling
healthier now oh no actually I'm not
feeling I'm kind of feeling stress so I
will see maybe in the long term I think
it should pay off well I'm hoping it's
because of all the good wine and things
I get to drink of course all right well
thank you so much for having a chat with
me to have my pleasure appreciate it
wash