This is exploration every week on exploration we discuss the fascinating world of science and its impact on society and today leading off we're going to summarize some of the top stories in science today on exploration we're going to continue our discussion about the whole question of the origin of the universe we realize that Christian fundamentalists have not only targeted the theory of evolution but they've also targeted the theory of the Big Bang as well and they would like to ban both theories from high school textbooks but today we're also going to talk about something different concerning the Big Bang and that is the role of women in science we realize that the president of Harvard University created quite a firestorm when he mentioned that perhaps there's some reason why women don't do that well in the hard sciences Well women are present in the hard sciences especially astronomy However in the area of astronomy it's rather scandalous that some of the biggest discoveries in the area of astronomy were done by women and they never got the credit for it and that will be very intimidating for a young female wanting to go into astronomy realizing that some of the biggest discoveries in that field were made by women who never got the credit for it and perhaps the most egregious example is that of Henrietta Leavitt we all know that the stars are very far away but precisely how far are they in order to judge that this is to a star you need what is called a standard candle that is a star that is the same throughout the universe therefore a star that is very far away could be very damn or very bright depending upon how intense its light is so you need a standard candle a star that doesn't change in brightness throughout the universe and that's what Henrietta Leavitt found she found that the said he'd variables are in fact the standard candles anywhere in the universe and you can calibrate them you know exactly how bright they are using a formula that she came up with however she never got credit for it so today we can measure the scale of the universe using the result of Henrietta Leavitt who in her . On lifetime and many lifetimes afterwards never got any credit for great discovery we also have the sad story of Joslin Bell a woman graduate student who discover the polls are but it was her thesis advisor who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the pulse R. And we also have the sad story of their Reuben back in the 1960 S. He was one of the 1st people to point to the fact that the universe seems to be full of something called dark matter but her result was ignored and only recently has the theory of dark matter being been given experimental verification because of all the males who have now jumped into the field so our special guest today is George Johnson he's a writer for The New York Times science section also author of many books including fire in the mind strange beauty and his latest book is called Miss Leavitt's stars The Untold Story of the woman who discovered how to measure the universe and it's one of the scandals of science that Henrietta Leavitt never got the credit for measuring the universe and then in the 2nd half of exploration I'm going to bring on Michael Lemonick is a pre recorded interview he is a science writer for Time magazine and he's going to talk about the latest results from the W. Map satellite which give us a fine tuning of the distances to the stars and in fact the age of the universe itself so once again our 1st special guest today is George Johnson author of the new book Miss Leavitt's stars The Untold Story of the woman who discovered how to measure the universe. But before we begin let me say that Currently I'm on a book tour the book is called the future of humanity is about the future of the space program the pros the cons the promise the dangers are we really going to go back to the moon to Mars and even beyond are we going to mind the asteroid belt and perhaps even leave the solar system to reach extra solar planets will find out the book is called the future of humanity and I'm on a book tour I'll be speaking through San Francisco Berkeley Los Angeles Philadelphia Washington do York Boston Kansas and many other cities and to find out more about my schedule go to my website it's M. Kaku dot org am K K U dot org And once again the book is called the future of humanity in other words the future of the space program is it our destiny or is it a waste of time find out by going to my book tour the 1st question for you is how did you 1st get interested in science as a youth. I think it must have been the combination of the all about books these great children's books about different scientific subjects and then there was the whole space program which was just getting off to a start and I would see these wonderful pictures of Life magazine in the Saturday Evening Post and sometime around the 2nd grade I wrote my 1st book which was called the Solar System Really it was made of you know big chief tablet paper and my father's shirt cardboards crayon front page for each class. Not not a very penetrating. Treatment I don't think nothing like David Sobel New York now you also mention that you read science fiction as a child yes later on I did junior high school I really got interested in reading Isaac Asimov the great Bradbury Robert Heinlein. That was very inspiring because I mean there's a one high one story that I mentioned in my introduction about the telepathic twin Yeah I probably read that book too as a kid oh did you. Just really the thing that really moved me in that was the idea of them. Landing on this planet of a distant star system and looking back and seeing the Earth as a tiny little star that's part of the suddenly unfamiliar sky it's all distorted by the different point of view. You know when I read the science fiction story as a kid I said that 2 twins communicating telepathically that's up in the speed of light not give me a break so you're way ahead of me I. Thought that her quite a well I did that with the question now why did you decide to write a book about Henrietta Leavitt who for the most part is a tiny tiny little footnote in most astronomy books but most astronomy books wouldn't be written without her work yeah. Partly out of a sense of frustration because I keep seeing these little footnote for these kind of 22 sentence glancing mentions of her work and then I started to get the picture in my mind of the. This woman around the turn of the century kind of little post Victorian times sitting up in some dark room in the harbor the deserve a Tory in Cambridge poring over the star chart and that image kind of fixed itself in my mind then I thought I would start a book about measuring the universe within Riyadh a level just kind of to get into the book but then I just really became very curious about who this person was what if anything we knew about her and. Lucky enough to find some documents with a good researcher in the Harvard archives that helped flush out her story a little OK Well let's now set the stage for exactly why her discoveries are so important. In ancient times of course ancient peoples look at the night sky look at the stars and wonder how far are they you can still rocks to hit the stars and jump even the highest mountain top you can't reach the stars so how did astronomers 1st begin to estimate the distance to the stars yes. They were able to estimate distances to things on Earth using triangulation we do the same thing with modern surveying where you. Look at something from 2 different vantage points and see that it shifts slightly against the against the more distant backdrop and you can use trigonometry. Figure out how far it is in the park with. Ancient Greek times did that with the moon got a pretty good estimate of the distance but the stars are so far away even the closest star that you could measure from 2 different parts of the earth and you wouldn't see any shift of the position so you can't triangulate so it was a big problem with the Stars tiny enclosed by normal and very distant now this process is called parallax and it's also the reason why we have to eyeballs So explain to us why we have 2 eyes rather than one and if you injure one eye it's quite difficult to judge distances Yeah. You're really if you think about your eyes is forming the end of the base of the triangle. You're sexually triangulating unconsciously on things that you will walk outside like right now I'm looking out my office window with this old church across the street and it's like walk around through the window the church you know seems to move against the backdrop and my brain is presumably doing some unconscious complications and giving me a sense of how far away that is so we were born with one eye we would always be running into things because we didn't know how far away they were and that's also how 3 D. Glasses work right your left eye sees red here right I sees blue your brain puts the red in the blue together to create a 3 dimensional image Yes right all those old story up the cars where you have the the 2 postcard images that are slightly different 11 for each eye and it gives you a 3 D. Effect. OK so the radius of the Earth's orbit around the sun is about 93000000 miles or so and so if you take a picture of the night sky in summer time and picture the night sky in wintertime you'd actually move the telescope over almost 200000000 miles. So you can imagine the folks having an eye on each side of the solar system and then from seeing how form of the stars the very close of one shift a little between every 6 months. That gave astronomers a way to triangulate the distance to the very very nearest stars those just a few light years away but most of the stars by far. You don't see any parallax at all from season to season now children often say gee Daddy how come the moon is following me everywhere I move the moon is following me but that's because the moon is so far away it has no parallax and it gives you the optical illusion that it's always above your shoulder right oh yeah you know I've never actually thought about what it was but sure Cor now also the a light beam from the earth to the sun takes about 8 minutes so the diameter of the Earth's orbit is about 16 minutes by light you just mentioned that the nearby stars are tens of light years away that are familiar to us every night and so the parallax must be very small to be far away stars right yes it was just a fraction of the 2nd of a minute of it agree. So it was a very very delicate measurement something that wasn't really possible to let think it was the 19th century when they really had the equipment good enough to make measurements that finally. Usually when we judge distances we use what is called a standard candle if I have a candle that is the same everywhere in a room and I move the candle anywhere in the room I can judge distances because the fainter the candle the father is away right is the same candle but stars are not standard candles right you know we don't and we had no way of knowing how bright they were inherently So you know again it's the question of is a very bright and really close to a I mean very bright really distant or is it very dim and really close to or somewhere in between but yeah without actually going out there in space you have been measuring it up close you know it was a big mystery of how we know how bright they were so we could calculate their distance. OK now let's go to the 1920 S where when scientists had Saunders had a pretty firm idea that the Milky Way galaxy which we see every night this watts of light cutting across the night sky about the most the Way galaxy was in some sense the entire universe could you explain to us how we view the universe of the 1920 S. If that was one of the things that I really found most astonishing and that drew me into wanting to write a book about measuring the universe was to realize that as recently as 1920 it was a matter of godly scientific debate whether the Milky Way was the whole universe or not. And if that were true than something like a drama The which we now know to be a neighboring galaxy would be instead just a very small little little smudge a little bit of a little bit of silver dust or something very very close to the earth and that's certainly what Harlan Shapley one of the greatest raw numbers of the 20th century thought. And in fact wasn't there a great debate that you mention in your book concerning the structure of the universe and how far the stars really are yes in Washington D.C. At the National Academy of Sciences Shapley took the position that the Milky Way is the whole universe and that there aren't any other galaxies and Heber Curtis another astronomer took the opposing view that actually the Milky Way was just one of many many what Emanuel contant called island universes or that there are many galaxies and drama to being one of them the Magellanic clouds the smaller satellite galaxy so it was a very very heated debate and each man really left Washington convinced that he won so how big was the universe to Harold Shively in the early 1920 S. He must have had an estimate as to how big the Milky Way galaxy was and that was the universe so how big was the universe to him Well let's see. I can't really immediately recall the number from Japanese calculations but he used. The standard Campbell 10 Riyad 11 discovered to kind of measure out the Milky Way. But it was just you know obviously vastly smaller than the universe that we know about today OK Well now let's get into Henrietta Leavitt's work itself tell us a little bit about where she was born way she grew up and how did you wind up as an astronomer at Radcliffe It was a. Very interesting trajectory she was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister very very puritan kind of upbringing in Lancaster Pennsylvania and some point her family moved to Cambridge Massachusetts were father had a church and later out to the Midwest to well 1st of all Highland then to Wisconsin boy Wisconsin and she followed the family there. Went to the family valued education and they encouraged her to go to school when she was employed college in Wisconsin at 1st and then later transferred to Redcliffe University back in Cambridge Massachusetts partly because she had relatives there and. During school she had what was really a general liberal arts education she had sometimes class. But mostly humanities toward the end of her all her time there before she graduated to took them astronomy classes that were taught by astronomers who just walked across the street from the Harvard University observatory and that's when she got hooked and she took a volunteer position at the observatory right after school I mean right out of school and this led into her job what to call the computer someone who was hired to do calculations. Now even today grad students have to support themselves either by part time jobs or scholarships so what have you you mention in your book that she came from probably an upper middle class background so she doesn't have to worry about a job right I think she probably I was never able to confirm that but it seems clear that she must have been of somewhat independent means because there are these letters in which she talks about going off on cruises to Europe and things this was she was being paid $0.25 an hour which if you put it into an inflation calculator comes out to be about $5.00 in today's terms so you know basically what you make working at McDonald's OK so I understand that back then of course they didn't have calculators and astronomers relied upon teams of women to you know do their calculation for them is that really the tended to be women and it was considered a good job to get at the time that they better than working in the cotton mill of course for someone like my can read at a level. That was you know somewhat intellectual occupation she seemed to enjoy it and had a computer at the Harvard Observatory. Was it only adding up columns of numbers and doing calculations but also studying the photographic plates of the sky that had been taken at the Harvard observatory down Caruso was pretty interesting work I guess for someone who was interested in astronomy but also very very tedious very very painstaking work and there was a certain. Sense that it was women's work you know the men would make the discoveries and talk about what the stars meant to the interpret the data the women were there to to gather it and precisely what did she do to change the course of astronomy. The director of the observatory Edward Pickering really quickly realized that she was you know very very good at the moon. Even very overqualified at one point he gave a raise to $0.30 an hour and he assigned her a project of looking for variable stars in the haze of light called the Magellanic Clouds this is been photographed by the Harvard Observatory in Peru because you can only see it see the clouds in the southern hemisphere they look them up like like the Milky Way except it's the round. The leather was looking at these plates that asked to look for stars that varied in brightness from Mom week to week or month to month and sometimes even from day to day and she do this by comparing a plate taken day in January with one taken February of the same part of the sky and then would look for stars that have very dim brightness so she was doing this and she discovered just a very large number of variable stars within the Magellanic clouds so she was curious about how you know what their periods the pulsation were so she made a with them and some point she noticed that there was a correlation. That the dimmer a star was in the Magellanic clouds the differ a variable star was in the Magellanic Clouds. The more rapidly it blinked and vice versa and she drew a little graphic to show that there was a definite relationship between the stars rhythm of pull station and its dimness or brightness. And how could that be used to then establish a standard candle that could be used throughout the universe well functionally since all these stars were in the Magellanic Clouds she knew they were roughly the same distance from her so it essentially meant that you could measure the rhythm of the pulsation and from that you could derive hair and bright it would sort of be like if an international commission decreed that a 50 watt light bulb blink at a certain rhythm in the 100 watt light bulb we could have different rhythm and there was the not exact relationship between the dentist right and then if you looked out your window on to the town you could tell by how fast the bulb was blinking how bright it was what you need help right it really was you could calculate how far away it was using the inverse scale him for square law OK so what astronomers did was they looked at a variable star calculated how fast it was blinking that would then tell you how dim or bright it was and since these are standard candles that would tell you the distance to this point in the. Pretty quickly found that there were variable stars within the Milky Way. They were able to use this to get you know kind of a sense of you know could have to calibrate the scale in other words because they could say busy that well here's a variable star blinking you know at this rate so it must be. So many times further away than that 2nd star looking at another rate but it was all relative to that point so she was aware therefore of the importance of her discovery right I mean yes it was clear and that's one thing that was. Has kind of been controversial at least from some things you've read you'd almost think that she had just gather the data in the dead were occurring or someone had figured out the relationship but if you really look closely at her paper. It's just obvious that she knew exactly what she found and why or so she published her results so you could then and for from the publication exactly what she knew and what she didn't write down you know there's always the question of you know her being being an assistant to the computer and working for Pickering there's a question of how much input he had into the papers but it was you know right there with her name on it that's what counts so in some reports I've seen they sort of treat her as just a computer yeah that just punches out the numbers but she didn't know what the numbers meant but you're saying that she actually did not know you had to have a static candle Yeah there's one part of me the papers are very she was a very reserved quiet woman and her papers reflect that and then toward the end of one of them she she basically mentions that this would be I mean the. Distance measurement and. She says it in such a way that you know it just comes out very clearly like like a hot you can see the light bulb going off that are had so wasn't this heralded as a big discovery Well you know all kind of you think. Within astronomy people quickly realized it was important. Astronomer name heard sprung used used to in Riyadh 11 stars to tooth to measure some distances within the Milky Way and 1st started calibrating the yardstick and then Harlow Shapley who went on to become the head of our Harvard observatory used Leavitt standard candles to really map out the Milky Way. And just show how great it was. But the real big breakthrough came when another astronomer Edwin Hubble found some of these. So if you variables are called Love It stars in the Andromeda nebula hand what the knew that he had had the standard Campbell there he could measure how far a drama was and show that it was not Shapley believe this little smudge close by but that it was indeed a huge galaxy now so what Edwin Hubble did was he took Henrietta Leavitt result to show that the universe was hell of a lot bigger than I originally thought right well yes sure because you're you know once you show that there's one galaxy you know before long it was just one after another after another and many of them were remeasured using using Henrietta Leavitt yardstick and once they knew roughly how far in drama to some of the near galaxies were they could use the whole galaxy the standard CAMPBELL So if you made the not completely justified assumption that all galaxies are roughly the same size you could see the galaxy that was smaller and dimmer than a drama done rushed out at least some sense of how far away it might be then more precise standard candles involving a whole galaxy that. Developed but really it's all flow on the whole yardstick comes down to it's very base to these variables that loveth discovered So in other words during Harris Japanese time the universe was perhaps 5100000 light years across Yeah that's right and here comes Hubble saying the Andromeda Galaxy is millions of light years across the universe could be billions of light years you know this is a huge huge discovery right yeah yeah I mean it's a it's a truly. Breakthroughs in the history of astronomy going from thinking that the Milky Way was the whole universe than I think the numbers coming back to me with 300000 light years of Shapley measured a cross for the Milky Way And you know it was just a little bigger than that to mine the whole universe of them you know hope you'll find that Andromeda is according to his 1st measurement a 1000000 light years from the Milky Way and later with some revisions the turned out to be 2000000 light years away and that was just the beginning so did people recognize the importance of Henrietta Leavitt is work or was it simply a footnote even back then yes totally but. The people who got the glory were horrible. Because that's the service and you know people would mention love appreciatively. But you know basically you know as a footnote or a glancing mention of them so some people will suggest that that if her story had really really got you know airing it deserved maybe you know we have a law that space telescope well of the Hubble Hubble Space Telescope or did you get a crater on the Moon named after high now I understand she also passed away fairly early and wasn't alive really to see the warmest application of her discoveries that were her very. It was clear from the correspondence that we found when she was exchanging letters with the boss that recurring and she often was disappearing for 6 months a year at a time and having to go back to boy to stay with her parents and their allusions to some kind of illness and just wasn't clear what it was until toward the very end she was hospitalized. With stomach problems and it turned out she had stomach. Well that concludes the 1st part of exploration our special guest has been George Johnson author of the new book Miss Leavitt's stars The Untold Story of the woman who discovered how to measure the universe and if you want to copy of today's program call the Pacifica program service at 180-735-0230 extension 0 Stay tuned now for the 2nd half of exploration as we bring on Michael Lemonick He's a science writer for Time magazine talking to us about the very latest satellite data pouring in from out of space and of course all that data is based on the work of Henrietta Lacks. 2 6 2 welcome once again this is Dr Michio Kaku professor of theoretical physics of the City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and this is the 2nd half of exploration in the 1st half of exploration we had an interview with George Johnson he's a science writer for The New York Times and the author of a new book called Miss Leavitt stars The Untold Story of the woman who discovered how to measure the universe and in the 2nd half of exploration we're going to air a pre recorded interview with Michael Lemonick He's a science writer for Time magazine and author of the book echo of the Big Bang and we're going to explain how Henrietta Leavitt work led to satellite data satellite analyses that allow us to calculate the size of the universe the age of the universe itself all of it made possible because we now know how to locate standard candles throughout the universe the discovery made by Henrietta Leavitt So once again our special guest in the 2nd half of exploration is Michael Lemonick science reporter for Time magazine author of the book the echo of the big bang and we will be discussing the W. Maps satellite currently orbiting the planet Earth giving us the latest cause I'm a logical data. But before we continue with the 2nd half of exploration let me say once again that Currently I'm on a book tour I'm traveling through San Francisco Berkeley Los Angeles New York Washington Philadelphia Kansas City and I'll be talking about mind latest book that is the future of humanity and it concerns the future of the space program are we really going to go back to the moon to Mars and even beyond what about the promise what about the perils of space travel and of course who's going to foot the bill if we're going to explore outer space and if you want to know the cities I'll be traveling to in the schedule go to my website it's M. Kaku dot org am a kid a huge dot org and list all the cities I'll be traveling to and maybe just maybe I'll be autographed in your copy of my latest book The future of humanity 1st question for you is Why did you write a book about the creation of the universe and the echo of the Big Bang Well I did it for 2 reasons 1st of all that topic is really the grandest topic you can imagine the story of the birth and evolution of our universe the big thing we know about. It you know sort of where we all came from ultimately So that's just inherently fascinating that extreme the reason to write a book at this time was that I was aware that a number of scientists had put up a satellite in orbit that was looking at radiation left over from it's going to look at this radiation in unprecedented detail and that if the satellite work. It would tell us all sorts of things about the early universe and about our cosmos as a whole that we didn't really know very precisely before so it was going to nail down a lot of a numbers of ideas so that prospect excited me as. Well let me play devil's advocate there are some people out there who say whoa wrong I mean the big bang they don't believe it itself fantastic the whole universe coming out of an object smaller than an atom. There's always some people who say that it couldn't have been this way so what do you thoughts what do you say to somebody who says they don't believe in the Big Bang Theory I say that Sirius the stars didn't really like it very much either back and I think if they didn't take it very seriously because it was the professor. And gradually over the next couple of decades evidence began to come in that surprisingly confirmed this wacky theory and as more and more evidence has accumulated. Alternative theories that maybe you could still maintain had a possibility of being true have fallen by the wayside there are a number of lines of evidence that tell us the big bang actually did happen and they're pretty hard to refute OK Well let's get into them starting with the red shift and the expansion of the universe explain how that works OK Well that's that's pretty straightforward back in the 1920 S. Edwin Hubble the great observation astronomer measured the distances proximate distances to the number of galaxies the on the Milky Way and he was also using able using the redshift that is the reddening of light that takes place when an object is moving away from us. To measure their speed of recession all the galaxies we could see were rushing away from us. And the farther away a galaxy was the faster it seemed to be moving and the simplest explanation for that group of fact was that the entire universe as a unit was expanding growing at a certain percentage rate every year and if that were the case then all distances would increase by that same percentage each year and if that were true then something that farther away would increase by would move away by a bigger amount would be moving faster in that same amount of time so the short answer is that the expanding universe which is really very firmly. Established shows that the universe is getting bigger all the time and if you run the movie in your imagination backwards it was smaller and smaller and smaller in the distant past so and there's no there's nothing that we can think of that would keep it from becoming arbitrarily small so if it started out very very very small and been expanding ever since that is the 1st evidence with. OK And like you said if you have a movie of an explosion and you know the rate at which things are expanding and you run the movie backwards This means that you can actually calculate when the explosion itself 1st began right so tell us a little bit about how cosmologists are so certain that they can calculate the age of the universe even though no one was there to witness this event. Well I like to liken it to a high school high school geometry or add about sorry we're probably 2 cars leave it's Berg and. 10 hours later going in opposite direction 10 hours later one car is . 500 miles west and the other car is 500 miles east How fast were they going and when did they leave and you can calculate based on on what you know about them today their speed and their location how long it was that they started on their journey and I'd rather not do the algebra because I had this problem high school but a professional astrophysicist through those calculations all the time so that's the basic way they calculate the age of the universe that's the simple way OK So we talked about the redshift and expansion of the universe and there's something else called nucleosynthesis that is the ability to predict the ratio of all the different 100 or so elements in the universe so get to tell us a little bit about how the Big Bang affects the abundance of elements in the universe Yes that's that's another key piece of evidence for the Big Bang. It turns out that. In the very hot dense conditions of the early universe. The original material of the universe the simplest atoms or hydrogen atom that was the 1st thing that was created out of the Big Bang 1st thing that condensed that of energy. Released in the Big Bang and in the nuclear furnace that was the early universe those hydrogen atoms some of them were forged into helium out and some of those helium that were formed in forged into lithium and if you assume the conditions that you can sort of predict. PREDICT in the past for the big bang you can you can calculate at what rate. Those reactions should have taken place and how much hydrogen should have been changed into those heavier elements and when you look around you the modern universe we look at at interstellar gas and stars and so on it turns out that the ratios are consistent with there having been that early hot condition and we don't know of any other process that could have that the ratios of these basic elements throughout the universe at exactly this at exactly this number so that also is that universe was was hot and dense and it's not anymore so when we look at our own sun right outside the door and we realize that it's roughly 75 percent hydrogen and 25 percent helium in some sense I guess we can thank the Big Bang for that absolutely in a very literal sense and anything heavier than lithium I guess beryllium maybe was also created some small amount. Any element heavier than that up to iron is then created inside stars so we can thank the big bang for the sun but we can thank stars like the sun who long ago. Made the heavier elements that exploded and speeded interstellar space with with elements like carbon and so on we can thank those for the earth and for us. And I guess for elements beyond iron we can thank supernovas that is the death of the explosive cataclysmic death of stars themselves that create the elements even beyond iron exactly Well now let's talk about the heart of your book The Heart of your book talks about something called the 3 degree microwave background radiation which really turned the tide on the question of the Big Bang and it's really given so much fertile grounds for experimental research So explain to us what is this echo of the Big Bang OK well this is the 3rd piece of powerful evidence and in some ways the most powerful evidence that the Big Bang happened I talked about the fact that the early universe was hot and dense and about how such an early hot universe would create basic elements but the other thing is that something that hot would have been shining growing brilliantly with light and. The that light would have. Emerged and shine shown throughout the universe in all directions from every point to every point but as the universe has expanded since the beginning the wavelength of that light has been stretched and you can also think of it as the universe cooling down to the point where the average temperature. Of Space interstellar space should be about 3 degrees above absolute 02.5 degrees in the end and. If you think of the universe as an object growing at that cold but the bureau temperature it should be growing with not visible light but microwave and back in the late 1940 S. Several physicists said look these microwave should be out there this is the temperature that they should represent and if you go looking for them you should be them you should be the the after goal or the echo the Big Bang. The response from most astronomers and physicists was to ignore that that was because as I said it was a pretty wacky theory there were there were so many crazy things about it that it just didn't seem worthwhile to go and do that about 18 years later in 1985 to scientists from Bell Labs who were. Looking for entirely different things stumbled on this radiation they didn't know what it was they observed and they didn't know what it was they said these be something coming from space at the same time about 30 miles away from their New Jersey lab at Princeton a group of physicists had sort of rediscovered the idea of this background radiation they were about 2 or 3 months away from finishing their antenna and aiming it at the sky when they got word that Bell Labs the Bell Labs guys took them and as a result Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson at Bell Labs received the Nobel Prize and the folks at Princeton received a handshake. But the reason that the 2 got the Nobel Prize is that the most of them that they had had fulfilled a prediction of the Big Bang Theory and by fulfilling prediction they had put it on a very solid footing where it had been very fake before so with that discovery and we'd have confirmation by the Princeton guys a few months later the Big Bang went from being a wacky. Outsider theory to the leading theory of cosmology by the way this is an aside but you do think that the Nobel Prize committee was fair in the sense that the people in the 19th forties predicted this background radiation but were ignored the people later who discovered it and we discovered it at Princeton theoretically speaking we're looking for it and didn't have the equipment and but the people who actually got the Nobel Prize didn't know what the hell they were looking at Yeah that's it was that's a very tough problem and there's some very bad feelings all the way around for most of the way around. I think that the Nobel Committee actually did the only thing it could do for the following reason. First of all the the folks at Princeton although the folks at Princeton although I they don't like me to say it because I live that really didn't deserve the prize and the reason is that they had failed to acknowledge the earlier work of offer and Herman in the forty's in coming up with this prediction 1st of the Princeton guys were not the 1st ones to make the prediction that they shouldn't get the prize for making a prediction they didn't they were the 1st to discover the stuff so they should get the Prize for discovering it. And whether you might argue that offer and Herman who were still alive at the time should have shared the prize with Wilson and Penzias. The Nobel committee can't the rules that you can't get out for a prize 3 is the max so they would either of had to pick one of the 2 offer or Herman or they could take this sort of coward's way out and that neither of. Knowledge talk about satellites because satellites have really revolutionized cosmology and have placed it on a footing where it can be considered an experimental science so tell us a little about the Coby satellites and of course the W. Map satellite which is the subject of your book OK Well soon after does the discovery of this radiation theorist realize. That it should actually have a pattern to it there should be a pattern of hot and cold spots in this radiation reason is that the modern universe is actually very lumpy we have very large structures super clusters of galaxies which are concentrations of matter and in between them there are big empty spaces where there's essentially nothing and for that structure to exist today it had to be present at least in rudimentary form from the beginning so that gravity would have worked on areas of slightly higher density making the more and more dense and emptying areas lowered and so there had to be some kind of pattern in the matter early on and that had should have been reflected in hot and cold about the radiation coming from that So let's look a look for this these patterns and by looking at them we may be able to say very many useful things about what things what conditions were like in detail back then so they started looking from the ground at 1st and they could see them in the hot cold spots were much too faint the ground started launching loon's But again we couldn't see them from from Ballou. So in the mid seventy's number cosmologist got together with NASA to start building a satellite get up above the contamination of light and atmosphere for the earth and to look for these hot cold and finally remember I started in the mid seventy's in 1992 at last they detected this radiation they detected the hot and cold spot the cosmic black background Explorer or Kobi that a light. Detect at these things for the 1st time which is a great confirmation for Big Bang theory unfortunately what they hadn't realized when the satellite was designed was that if you don't look at the fact of the right but is you're not actually going to learn anything useful and the spots of the right byes were smaller than what Koby. Was able to. So Koby confirm the existence of a cold spot but the ones that found were too big to say anything he's so immediately. Started thinking about making another satellite that could be much finer grained gold that would tell them what was going on OK and when the Coby result was came out the authors of the report published a picture a photograph showing the a very kind of out of focus picture showing some of the dark and bright spots and George Smoot one of the leaders of the group called it the face of God Yeah I was I was there at the press conference when he said this he said if you're religious it's like being God and he was actually trying to make an analogy he was trying to give you a sense of how important this was but the press just picked up on this comment and went wild with it and he got a huge amount of attention he also. Got a contract with the report is $2000000.00 He was he was he got an enormous amount of publicist and many people thought it went to his head and he kind of started thinking about this as a project that he himself had carried out alone when in fact it was a large team a lot of people got annoyed with it so when they. When they got together to make this next satellite many people really didn't want to explode on their team and he was kind of frozen out from from several of the team. OK Well it's not really the face of God but it is a baby picture of the early universe when it was about 300000 years old so explain how we know that this is a baby picture of the universe when it was quite young 300000 years old well we know we basically know that the light generated from the very hot matter in the in the Big Bang. At 1st couldn't travel very far because atoms were were split into. Positive and negative charge particles and light would just get absorbed if it tried to travel any distance so the light was shining brilliantly but it couldn't travel any distance but finally at a certain point it cooled to the point where atoms could actually form light could travel freely and that light began streaming through the universe and has been streaming ever since and we can calculate what the density and heat required for that event would be we can calculate about how long after the Big Bang. Light would be able to travel freely and so any light that we see coming from the Big Bang had to come from that 1st moment when light was able to shine for that once a chunk freely it never stopped until we conduct our telescopes OK now let's talk about the W. Maps satellite that everyone's talking about specifically what were its characteristics and what were some of its rather stunning conclusions that made the front page in many newspapers around the world well its characteristics were basically that it was a very carefully built set of microwave detectors operating in 5 different wavelengths . And that the technology itself was not particularly. Innovative it was pretty much off the shelf technology of course it was off the shelf mid ninety's technology compared to the Coby technology of the mid seventy's so it's much more powerful but what distinguished this from other satellite project is that the builders were extraordinarily careful to eliminate any possible sources of error that is to say the satellite itself if it got too warm could send out its own microwave and confuse the signal it could it could go currents going through the through the electronics could send out their own microwave thing which would confuse the answer so they 1st of all designed it to have an absolute minimum of these external errors the confuse what they were seeing and secondly they went to extreme lengths to understand and characterize what errors they would have because it's not avoidable have some kind of contamination from the satellite so I mention that if part of the satellite heaped up it can cause a fall signal they work to keep it from eating up by putting on shielding and so on but they also put dozens and dozens of thermometers at strategic points along with that like so if it did heat up they would know it and they would say I gladly this much heat cause this much contamination we can account for that and it was that extreme care that characterized the satellite The other thing that was important is that unlike most NASA satellites this one was built by the scientists not by contract engineers and most of it most of the instruments were actually put together on the campus of Princeton University in a clean room that they designed for the purpose not at the big NASA facility and the reason is that the closer the scientists are to handling the actual experiment the more they can control for the fact they need to control. OK now let's get into some of the rather astounding conclusions coming from the W. Map satellite the 1st one being that the universe is 13700000000 years old plus or minus one percent how do they calculate that number and are they really certain that the universe is 13700000000 years old well the answer to the 2nd question is that they are there are quite certain and the best measure of that is that no one to my knowledge you know astronomers are are friendly with each other but they're also competitive and so the minute these results came out everyone scrutinize their results scrutinize their techniques of analysis because it would be deliciously fun to say oh guys you forgot to carry the 3. You know in the 3rd column and your number is off and we proven that you know we've got the right number you have the wrong one we're doing very embarrassing for the math folks to my knowledge nobody has challenged this. Which is a good sign that that they really are sure they have a right the way they calculated it is. They actually used a simulator a computer based simulator to create artificial pattern of how called in this early universe. By burying their a lot of different cosmic parameters they would say OK well they the universe is made of this amount of stuff and say that light began to shine freely at this particular time and they the universe is this particular age and look at the structure of the modern cosmos where the galaxies are and so on and what with what with a pattern of how cold spot look like in that case OK now it's very one of these numbers by a little bit what would it look like in this case now it's very another number and they went through and varied each of these numbers and many more dozens of different time produced literally tens of thousands of stimulation. And when the actual pattern was revealed by that they went and did a statistical analysis of that pattern and have all of those tens of thousands of a simulated pattern and they found the one that most nearly matched the actual universe and looked at what the numbers were and the numbers are the ones that they determined were in fact the real numbers so they actually don't universes. Build model universes in their computer and went back and compare them with the real universe and pick the one that most resembled. Now cosmology historically over the decades was sort of like the laughing stock of the scientific community because he kept claiming that the age of the universe was it was in some sense younger than its stars and younger than the Earth. Hubble himself computed the age of the universe to be about a 1000000000 years old and yet we know that stars are billions of years old and the earth is probably 4 and a half 1000000000 years old so you think finally that we've got many of these contradictions out of the way and this number really fits so that no one else is going to say that that can't be the age of the universe because there's a star that's older than that right then and the answer is that as well as cosmology has. As instruments have improved and as our measurements of improved as we can be farther and more clearly with such devices the Hubble telescope. We can refine our understanding. And can make our numbers more precise in fact the reason Hubble got the age of the universe wrong is that he had estimated the distances to the Galaxy correctly which is very crude methods he basically looked at him and said well this one seems about twice as bright though it's probably twice as far away but that's very very very rough. And so he got this so that when he had a he was using the wrong input in his calculation that's one reason that nobody took the Big Bang very seriously that that. You know according to Hubble is that the universe was younger than the Earth so forget this theory as the as the techniques have become better the numbers have become more believable and so it's not surprising that we've got to a point now where. Where we can say this is the age and it's not going to change and in fact there are no there's no strong argument that there are any stars older than 30 point them daily. OK Another shocking conclusion from the W. Map satellite is that matter that we see around us only makes up perhaps 4 percent say a trivial amount of the total matter energy content of the universe so tell us a little bit about dark energy and dark matter OK Well yes that's. The astrophysicist done the calls that a press conference announcing these results we now are forced to face the fact that has been looming for for a couple decades that we live in a preposterous universe in which the stuff we're made of and everything we know of the stars of the planet galaxies about only 4 percent of what's actually out there . Well I'm afraid that's it for exploration once again we had 2 special guests today the 1st pressure guest was Joyce Johnson a science reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book Miss Leavitt's stars The Untold Story of the woman who discovered how to measure the universe and in the 2nd half of the exploration we had a prerecorded interview with Michael Lemonick science reporter for Time magazine and author of the book echo of the big bang and the book is based on the Map satellite which in turn relies upon Henrietta Leavitt's results to measure the universe Well this is Dr Michio Kaku and if you want to copy of today's program called the Pacifica program service add 180-735-0230 extension 0 make sure that on the my web site is www. Dot org M.K. . Org and so far the blog over 40000000 hits on the website good day. Michael spear head and. 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