Kind: captions
Language: en
[Applause]
I'm here at the mount Strow Observatory
to talk to one of this year's Nobel
Prize winners for physics Professor
Brian Schmidt still feels kind of weird
I don't know I don't really feel like a
Nobel Prize when I go and say okay got
Heisenberg got
Einstein doesn't seem quite well that's
an extraordinary honor so you know
congratulations to you um so can you
tell us why have you been awarded this
prize so in 1998 uh Adam Reese was one
of the other co-recipients and I uh
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 was speeding
up meant that gravity was not working as
we had expected and we think that's
because about 73% of the universe is
something we called Dark Energy
something we didn't know existed before
and that causes gravity to push rather
than pull does it actually cause gravity
to change
well it means that we always think the
gravity always pulls but according to
Einstein the way gravity works really
depends on 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 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 uh 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 than similar
scientists who are short listed for the
prize but don't actually win wow I have
not heard that uh how are you feeling
are you feeling healthier now uh no
actually I'm not feeling kind of feeling
stressed so uh I we'll see maybe uh in
the long term I think it it should pay
off well I'm hoping it's because of good
wine and things I get to drink of course
all right well thank you so much for
having a chat with me today yeah my
pleasure appreciate
it