I'm John Batson with David Livingston.

This is Hotel Mars Episode N, and we're speaking to Professor Jamie J. Bach.

He is the Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Physics at Caltech,

and the senior research scientist at Jet Propulsion Lab, and his specialty right now is a magic robot

called SphereX, looking at the universe. Well, you're going to solve the origin of the universe,

Jamie, so you've got an unlimited budget. What's next? Okay. Boy, this is great. So I'm really

interested in the origins of the universe, how the universe came about, and it likely came about through, you know, exotic physics that, you know, we don't understand.

But I am also an experimentalist. So, you know, before I go off and spend your unlimited amount of money, I have to say that the first order of business for me would really still be to look at the SphereX data. Because it's kind of the first measurement of its kind to look through the large-scale structure of galaxies for signatures of the Big Bang. And I, you know, before building the next thing, I want to see how that process works and what it has

to tell us so that they don't just go off, you know, into some corner based on what I think

I know now.

But there's definitely room for improvement.

There's a lot more information that we could extract from the

universe to tell us about the beginnings. And, you know, improved version of spherics or

studying the properties of the polarization of the microwave background are ways to get out

that epic. But, you know, I do build upon what has been done in the past.

So I would be patient with spending your unlimited budget.

Did I hear you say that we needed different physics and new physics?

Our physics is not adequate.

I misunderstood that.

Well, that's right.

So the very beginning of the universe,

you think there was this rapid expansion called inflation, where the universe, the space itself expanded more rapidly than the speed of light. And that is possible in Einstein's equations, but you need some substance with special properties. And we don't know of anything quite like it in our models of high energy physics today.

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