(Audio) John Mather: From the Big Bang to Searching for Life
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence M. Krauss
4.4 • 592 Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2022
⏱️ 117 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John Mather is an astrophysicist at NASA who has been involved in important space missions to probe our fundamental understanding of the Universe for over four decades. He helped lead the design and deployment of the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE), which launched in 1989 to probe the cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang with a precision that could not be obtained from terrestrial experiments because of absorption of radiation by the atmosphere. The experiments on COBE, and its successor missions WMAP and PLANCK, literally have turned cosmology from an art to a science, allowing the precise measurement of cosmological observables that previously were either not measured at all or only measured to within a factor of two. This has led to a golden age of cosmology, where theories of the early universe can now be compared directly to observation.
John directed the building of the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE which was able to show that the cosmic microwave background radiation was indeed an almost perfect ‘black body’ spectrum associated with a very well defined temperature of the Universe at a time of about 300,000 years after the big bang. Indeed, no terrestrial experiment has ever produced such an accurate black body spectrum, which was one of the fundamental predictions that helped develop quantum mechanics early in the 20th century.
For his work on COBE, John shared the Nobel Prize with George Smoot. But John didn’t rest on his laurels, for several decades after COBE John helped lead the design and development of the James Webb Space Telescope, which recently launched and will probe both the very early universe and also extra solar planets, possibly helping us discover evidence for life elsewhere in the Universe.
John and I talked about his origins in science, the science he has accomplished, and what his future plans are in a discussion that will help provide a valuable perspective for anyone on the current status of cosmology and astrophysics, as well as what we might learn in the future.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome to the Origins Podcast. |
| 0:11.0 | I'm your host Lawrence Krause. |
| 0:13.0 | In this episode, I had the privilege and pleasure of having a conversation with my colleague and friend, |
| 0:19.0 | and also the Nobel laureate, astronomer, |
| 0:22.9 | John Mather. John has been involved in important experiments in space that test our fundamental |
| 0:31.1 | understanding of the universe for many decades. And about 40 years ago or so, he first began to design and eventually become one of the project scientists and principal investigators of a NASA experimental satellite called the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, |
| 0:46.3 | which was designed to measure the cosmic background radiation coming from the Big Bang. |
| 0:51.3 | And when that experiment, which allowed us to measure it with unprecedented accuracy in a way we |
| 0:58.8 | couldn't do on Earth, first reported its results in the late 80s to the early 90s, it changed |
| 1:04.3 | cosmology, turning it from an arc to a science. Cosmic quantities that previously had been |
| 1:10.7 | unmeasurable or only known within a factor of two uncertainty could now be measured to several decimal places. |
| 1:17.6 | And that changed everything. It changed our ability to constrain fundamental cosmological theory and our understanding of the early universe. |
| 1:25.6 | It showed that the cosmic background radiation |
| 1:27.5 | was a black body, |
| 1:29.1 | which demonstrated that the universe had a finite temperature. |
| 1:31.7 | And in fact, that black body radiation |
| 1:33.3 | was the best measured black body in nature. |
| 1:36.0 | And John was in charge of the experiment that measured that. |
| 1:39.4 | Kobe also was able, for the first time, |
| 1:41.9 | to measure the primordial density lumps that would later on coalesce to form galaxies. |
| 1:49.0 | And that would allow us to constrain our theories of galaxy formation, including dark matter and everything else. |
| 1:54.0 | And for those very important developments that changed everything about cosmology, John and his fellow scientist George Smoot were awarded the Nobel Prize, |
... |
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