Episode 76: First ever Live Show debut at Astronomy Olympics
featuring Dr. Nicole Thomas and Nobel Laureate Prof Brian Schmidt
This week, join us for a special live episode from the IAU General Assembly in Cape Town, South Africa, featuring black hole simulations expert Dr. Nicole Thomas and winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics Prof. Brian Schmidt.
Cape Town born Dr Nicole Thomas returns to The Cosmic Savannah four years after previously featuring in episodes 9 and 14 as a PhD student. She shares with us the story of her illustrious academic career around the world since then, including a postdoctoral research position in the UK at the Institute of Computational Cosmology, University of Durham and now a prestigious Jim Buckee Fellowship at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, University of Western Australia.
Nicole explains to us her latest research on using state-of-the-art supercomputer simulations to understanding the havoc that supermassive black holes wreak on galaxies. She does this by trying to model how the Universe works using our current understanding of physics and comparing her results to images of the real Universe taken with South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope. She hints that she looks forward to applying these simulations to the findings of the upcoming SKA telescope!
Next, Nobel Laureate Prof Brian Schmidt, a Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University joins the team on stage. Brian takes us back to the night of the 4th of October 2011 when he received a call from Sweden telling him he had won the Nobel Prize. Brian received the prize, alongside two other people, for having discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe. He discusses what life has been like after such a monumental achievement, including his experiences as Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University. Finally, he tells us about his plans to get back to doing research and reveals what he thinks the next big astrophysical breakthroughs will be using the SKA telescope under construction in South Africa and Australia.
Join us for this insightful and exciting episode of The Cosmic Savannah!
Watch the whole show on YouTube!
https://www.youtube.com/live/Dgw6mz5bTG4?si=xAr-fa0GvLwpT-pc
This Week’s Guests
Highlights from the Live Show
Photos credit: IAUGA 2024.
Related links
- More info on Brian Schmidt’s Nobel Prize winning discovery
- The 2024 IAU General Assembly in Cape Town, South Africa
- Previous episodes of The Cosmic Savannah featuring Nicole Thomas:
Acknowledgements
- Podcast Manager: Francois Campher
- Podcast Assistant Manager: Karabo Rantwane
- Social Media Manager: Sumari Hattingh
- Assistant Social Media Manager: Kaashifa Salojee
- Transcripts: Abigail Thambiran
- Assistant Transcripts: Sisa Shibane
- Audio Editing: Jacob Fine
- Music: Rainbow Sounds Marimba Ensemble
- And all of our volunteers!
Transcript
[00:00:00] Jacinta: Hi everyone. Welcome to today’s episode. It’s Jacinta here. , letting you know that today’s episode is the recording of The Cosmic Savannah live show that we did at the Cape Town International Convention Center a couple of weeks ago as part of the IAU, the International Astronomical Union’s General Assembly which was a massive event.
The live show was so much fun and we are very excited to bring it to you now. So you can listen to this episode as audio only on this podcast, or you can head to our website the show notes to this episode where we’ll have the link to the YouTube video where you can watch it live with the video as well.
And it was a really cool show so, I do actually hope that you go and watch it on YouTube. We had a live marimba band you can hear them playing in the background, you can hear the crowd. Other than that, the audio quality’s not great, but hopefully you’ll enjoy it anyway. Our guests for the show were Dr. Nicole Thomas, who is a Jim Buckee fellow in Western Australia and Professor Brian Schmidt, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe. So we hope you enjoy this episode with the very special guests. We’ll speak to you again in about a fortnight when we release a another normal episode of The Cosmic Savannah.
Bye for now.
[Marimba band plays theme song]
[00:02:00] Dan: Welcome to The Cosmic Savannah with Dr. Daniel Cunnama.
[00:02:04] Jacinta: Dr. Jacinta Delhaize.
[00:02:06] Tshia: And Dr Tshiamiso Makwela.
[00:02:08] Dan: It is, oh-
[00:02:08] Dan: [laughs]
[00:02:11] Tshia: Sorry, Jacob. [laughs] Each episode we will be giving you behind the scenes look at worldclass astronomy and astrophysics happening under the African skies.
[00:02:21] Dan: Let us introduce you to the people involved, the technology we use, the exciting work we do, and the fascinating discoveries we make.
[00:02:28] Jacinta: So sit back and relax as we take you on a safari through the skies.
[Marimba band plays theme song and audience applauds]
[00:02:39] Dan: Welcome to our very first live show.
[00:02:41] Tshia: Yay!
[00:02:41] Dan: Thanks all for being here. It’s great to see you and as you can tell, we normally do edit, so we’ve already made a few mistakes…
[audience laughs]
[00:02:51] Jacinta: And after five years, we still don’t know our intro, after every episode. We’re very excited to be here, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, I’m not meant to read that. No, hello everyone, thank you very much for joining us in person and also hello to the people who are joining live online. Hi mom! She’s in Australia, but I know she’s already woken up, in the middle of the night to watch
[00:03:18] Tshia: And thank you again for being here today, but most importantly, we have some brilliant guest lined up for you, so please sit back and relax.
[00:03:29] Dan: Firstly, a quick thanks to the Rainbow Sounds Marimba Ensemble. Thank you….
The claps you- [audience applauds] guys were getting before we walked in made me worried about we should just let them play.
[00:03:46] Jacinta: And also a credit to the Astrophotographers who are Janik Alheit, Kyle Goetsch and also my uncle, Manu Delhaize they’re responsible for the beautiful photos up there.
[audience applauds] So two of those were taken in Sutherland here in South Africa. And some of them were taken in Canberra, Australia from my uncle’s backyard, which is where one of our guests for tonight- is actually from so we’re all under one sky.
[00:04:14] Dan: Thank you.
[00:04:16] Tshia: Before we go any further, some of you might not know us and some of you might. So I am Dr Tshiamiso Makwela, I’m a research scientist and an Astronomy Education researcher at the IAU Office of Astronomy for Education at the University of Cape Town.
[00:04:30] Dan: I’m- yeah.
[audience applauds for Tshia] I’m Dr. Daniel Cunnama I am the Science Engagement astronomer at the South African Astronomical Observatory here in Cape Town.
[audience applauds]
[00:04:44] Jacinta: And I’m Jacinta Delhaize I’m a lecturer at the University of Cape Town. Um, is that all I am? Yeah, that’s all I am. Hi to my third years as well.
Originally from Australia, as you can hear from my accent, but I’m now a permanent resident here, so woo woo.
[audience applauds]
[00:05:09] Tshia: Perhaps I should also mention why we are all here. So over the last two weeks, it’s been two weeks, right? Over 2000 astronomers across the globe have been here with us in Cape Town, joining us for the Astronomical Union General Assembly.
[00:05:25] Dan: Yeah. So the International Astronomical Union is an international body of astronomers, professional astronomers. Over 12,000 astronomers from around the world and every three years they get together for a big general assembly and we are here in Cape Town for that general assembly for the first time in, on Africa. In Africa, in the gen- in the IAU’s history.
[00:05:46] Tshia: Sorry, Jacob.
[00:05:47] Dan: Edit that out Jacob.
[laughs]
[00:05:52] Tshia: You are all here because really you want to see us, but there are also some special guests that are lined up for today, so before we take any more time, we would like to first bring up our homegrown Cape Townian, Dr. Nicole Thomas to come up.
[audience applauds and marimba band plays theme music]
[00:06:19] Dan: Great, so tonight’s first guest Dr. Nicole Thomas has joined us on the podcast way back in episode nine almost five years ago and episode 14, actually and since then Nicole has grown in leaps and bounds and traveled the world and is currently the Jim Buckee Fellow in astrophysics at the University of Western Australia. A note of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research.
[audience applauds]
[00:06:53] Jacinta: Okay, so Nicole’s research lies in understanding the mechanisms behind the growth of super massive black holes and the role this plays in galaxy evolution and so she’s going to be explaining that to us tonight.
[00:07:08] Tshia: Yeah maybe I should also share a little bit more about Nicole, she actually obtained her PhD right here in South Africa at the University of Western Cape in 2021, and she continued as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Computational Cosmology and the center of extra galactic astronomy at Durham University before arriving at UWA in 2024.
[00:07:31] Nicole: Thank you.
[00:07:33] Tshia: So, welcome, Nicole.
[00:07:35] Dan: We promise Nicole we’ll let you do some talking.
[00:07:37] Nicole: Okay thank you. Thank you so much for that welcome, thank you for having me and five years of The Cosmic Savannah, congratulations that’s amazing as well. It’s lovely to be here!
[00:07:47] Dan: Yeah, welcome back.
[00:07:48] Nicole: Thank you.
[00:07:50] Tshia: So maybe we all want to know what really sparked your interest in astronomy? And really tell us about your career path to where you are today.
[00:07:58] Nicole: Sort of the sparking of my interest in astronomy was basically led by really enjoying maths and physics when I was in school. So being able to explain physical phenomenon on using mathematics was crazy to me. I thought it was an amazing way to do things and which also sparked my interest in using simulation specifically.
So I did my, as you mentioned, my undergraduate degree at the University of the Western Cape. Then moving onto the National Astrophysics and Space Science Program, which if they are any undergraduates in the audience at the moment, this is an amazing astronomy program in South Africa, which aims to train the next generation of Astronomers.
So I did the National Astrophysics and Space Science Program for my honors and masters, and then continuing on to do a PhD in using cosmological simulations to understand galaxy evolution, before moving on to Durham University and now being based at the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research in Perth, Australia. It’s been a crazy ride, but it’s been a fantastic opportunity and fantastic experience.
[00:09:08] Tshia: Nice.
[00:09:09] Dan: That’s brilliant. I’m also actually a graduate of the NASSP program and I can absolutely say, I mean, NASSP just celebrated their twenty year anniversary and has had over 400 graduates come through and it’s really grown astronomy in South Africa and Africa and you know, now spreading out across the world. So really, really proud of you and your fellowship is very prestigious and your work is really quite amazing these days. I worked in very similar field back when I was at UWC myself and you gave an invited talk this morning at the conference. Congratulations!.
[00:09:46] Nicole: Yeah, thank you.
[00:09:48] Dan: And on a very aptly name, because we like to keep an African and wildlife theme in this, uh, “The Cosmic Savannah”, your computer simulation’s called Simba. Can you tell us a little bit about them?
[00:10:01] Nicole: Right, so Simba is a cosmological hydrodynamic simulation and what this essentially means is that you can, in a computer simulation, put in the equations that we think govern the way that the universe works and how galaxies evolve over many millions to billions of years. And what this entails is essentially putting in the equations for different physical, not just mechanisms, but physical processes that we understand. So things like gravity, and so on. So it models particles in the form of representing gas, dust and dark matter, for example, in the universe, putting the equations for those physical processes that we understand, but also some processes that, you know, maybe we don’t understand completely. And we put this into a computer and run this over many millions to billions of years. And what we hope by the end-
[00:10:56] Dan: The simulation doesn’t run for billions?
[00:10:58] Nicole: No, no. [laughs] Um, in computer time so what we hope at the end of running these simulations is that we have a picture that looks like. The universe as we observe it, and if it does, fantastic, great. That means that the physics that we’ve input into these simulations is somewhat representative of the real universe. If not, that means we have to go back to the drawing board and, you know, try to re-evaluate the equations that we’ve put into these simulation. So Simba is one of these, cosmological simulations and what I specifically do is try to understand how supermassive black holes impact the evolution of galaxies within these simulations.
[00:11:41] Dan: So supermassive black holes are something which resides at the center of a galaxy?
[00:11:46] Jacinta: That’s my question, Dan.
[laughs]
[00:11:48] Dan: We’re gonna let you get your question.
[00:11:49] Jacinta: No, fine
[00:11:51] Dan: Go on, this happens.
[00:11:52] Jacinta: It’s fine.
[00:11:53] Dan: Go on.
[00:11:54] Jacinta: No, I don’t want anymore.
[00:11:55] Dan: No I just wanted to say in terms of the simulations you mentioned that you’re, simulating the universe as we see it now. How, what does that look like? I mean, how accurately are we doing this? Are we making galaxies? Are we making stars? We see a universe around us, but maybe for our guests here, what does this really look like in terms of how well we can simulate the universe?
[00:12:22] Nicole: So that’s a difficult question. But essentially what we hope is that we have some sort of representative understanding of how different physics takes place within galaxies. So what we hope are the end is that we have some sort of image of a galaxy population that looks like what we see observationally. So that means, being able to reproduce how the population of stellar components, black hole components, gas, dust, all the different things that we do see in the real universe, whether we are able to actually reproduce those things as well.
So that’s the hope. Sometimes this works or goes according to plan, sometimes not. But it is a very large task of going back and being able to just re-look at things and try to essentially tune the knobs onto what we think the real universe should look like.
[00:13:19] Jacinta: All right, so Nicole, you study in these simulations galaxies that are a particular type of galaxies, which we call AGN. It stands for Active Galactic Nucleus. Just tell, explain to our listeners and our audience what is an AGN and why do we care about it?
[00:13:36] Nicole: Right. So as Daniel mentioned, at the center of essentially every galaxy there is a supermassive black hole. Some of these are very relaxed, similar to the Supermassive black hole that’s at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy they’re not doing too much. Some black holes on the other hand grow very quickly. So this means they feed on gas and dust and all sorts of things that are very nearby to them and when this happens, they can also heat up its surroundings and emits a lot of energy. And these are the things that we typically call active galactic nuclei because they can emit so much energy that they outshine their own galaxy that they live in.
And while this maybe doesn’t sound as amazing as what it actually is, the fact that a, a super massive black hole is so much smaller in physical size compared to the host galaxy that it lives in, this is an amazing amount of energy that something so small is able to produce on such massive scales. So these are what we typically refer to as active galactic nuclei, just these very high energy sources within the center of these galaxies.
[00:14:42] Jacinta: And then you said that your particular work is about kind of comparing them to observations as well. So, in astronomy, there’s generally two types of astronomers, although we’ve got lots of people here who might disagree. So I have to be careful what I say. But you’ve got kind of observational astronomers, and then you’ve got kind of, well, I guess traditionally we call them astrophysicists.
The people who work with the simulation, the theorists, all right and observational astronomers kind of go and take data with actual telescopes, whether it be radio telescopes, such as the MeerKAT telescope which is here in the Karoo , in South Africa or optical telescopes such as the SALT telescope, which is also in South Africa, in Sutherland, it’s the largest optical telescope in the Southern hemisphere , and you collect that data. You collect light from space, which can come from galaxies at a whole range of different wavelengths, which is why you need these different types of telescopes and then you kind of see what’s going on in the universe. But in order to really understand the physics behind what’s going on, in order to interpret that data, we need to compare it to our knowledge of physics and what we expect to happen.
But just going from like our fundamental knowledge of physics, what do we expect to happen? That’s kind of where Nicole’s work comes in, because we look in a supercomputer, we throw in the physics that we understand, we see what comes out, and then we compare the observations and simulations and see do the simulations reproduce the data?
If yes, then great, we understand physics. If no, then well, are our observations biased or have we missed something in the simulations and we go back and rinse and repeat. So tell me about the data that you are comparing to with the observations.
[00:16:30] Nicole: Yeah, so at the moment we are very fortunate to have the SKA that’s been built within South Africa as well as in Western Australia, so we are really starting to probe the next generation of the radio astronomy community. So at the moment we are comparing to the MIGHTEE Survey, which maybe Jacinta can tell you more about since she is the observer.
[00:16:54] Jacinta: Oh, I’m so glad you asked.
[00:16:56] Nicole: MIGHTEE is really a very impressive radio astronomy survey that is really probing a new regime of radio sources that we’ve never seen before. So we are being able for the first time, being able to really compare our simulations in this new regime of radio astronomy.
[00:17:17] Jacinta: Yeah, so I guess we’re both part of the MIGHTEE team and it’s a good name for it. It’s a mighty survey! It’s you know, you use the MeerKAT telescope. The MeerKAT telescope is really good because it’s so sensitive and so we can use this telescope to study galaxies. In a way that we can detect things that are much more fainter than we previously could detect and smaller. So then we compare with your simulations and what have you found so far?
[00:17:45] Nicole: So what we found so far is actually in contrast to a lot of previous observations. So when I say that MIGHTEE is really probing a new regime of radio astronomy- it’s kind of upsetting a lot of people, which has been very interesting to try to explain to a lot of astronomers, but, we are finally able to do very direct comparisons between the simulations and the observations. So what this is really helpful for, as you mentioned before, is that yes, we’re now able to, you know, tune our simulations and make better constraints on the physical processes that we understand and are trying to understand, but we are really probing a regime now, when the full SKA array comes online, being able to make better interpretations of those observations as well.
[00:18:35] Tshia: Yeah, so I think Nicole has told us about her science, and I hope that Jacinta’s not going to test the students on this.
[laughs]
[00:18:44] Jacinta: Oh, by the way, as a present to you guys, no lecture tomorrow morning. [laughs] That’s not a joke. I’m sleeping in. .
[00:18:55] Tshia: So Nicole, please tell us where to from here in your career, so where do you see yourself in the next couple of years?
[00:19:02] Nicole: In the next couple of years. Well, firstly, I need a holiday.
[laughs]
[00:19:06] Jacinta: Don’t we all?
[00:19:06] Nicole: But in all seriousness, I’m very excited to have taken up this new position in Western Australia. Over the next couple of years, I do hope to really focus more on my research, but what my biggest goal for the next three to five years is to be able to have a model or a suite of simulations that I can one bring back to South Africa so that we can really optimize these observations to take advantage of the SKA that is being built here. And while I’m on the topic, if there are any researchers around, I would really love to get more South Africans involved in using cosmological simulations. So if you do feel like your research could benefit from, whether it be comparing or using these simulations, I would love to have a conversation whether you are a student or postdoc or at any research level really, that would be fantastic.
[00:19:58] Jacinta: Yes, myself and my grad students will be talking to you soon.
[00:20:02] Dan: I’m still recovering simulator. I don’t, yeah.
[00:20:06] Nicole: Yeah Dan mentioned that he was also in simulations, but we were actually under the same supervisors, so-
[00:20:13] Dan: He must be here.
[00:20:14] Nicole: Ramil?
[00:20:14] Tshia: I don’t think he’s in though.
[00:20:15] Dan: Unbelievable!
[(laughs)]
[00:20:20] Dan: So I’ve gone on to other things but maybe I’ll get back to simulations at some point.
[00:20:26] Nicole: You’re very welcome.
[00:20:28] Dan: Thank you, and thank you so much for joining us again, Nicole. It’s-
[00:20:31] Jacinta: No wait I have a question. Wait, wait. I have another question, sorry.
[00:20:34] Dan: I have a question for you.
[00:20:36] Jacinta: What?
[00:20:36] Dan: Does MIGHTEE stand for?
[laughs] It stands for the MeerKAT International Gigahertz Tiered Extragalactic Explorations.
Okay, beautiful well done.
[00:20:48] Jacinta: I practiced that, [audience applauds] I don’t know why I get a round of applause? But Nicole, so you are now at ICRAR in Western Australia. So this is actually where I did my PhD, I’m born and raised in Western Australia, and now you are across there and of course it’s the other site of the SKA telescope one SKA telescope there, one SKA telescope here. So we’ve kind of swapped cities. How are you finding Perth in Australia?
[00:21:15] Nicole: Annoyingly. I really like it.
[00:21:18] Dan: Wrong answer.
[00:21:19] Nicole: Yeah, no, after, I mean, I was in the UK before I moved to Western Australia, which was, so I don’t wanna say it was an upgrade it’s really nice to be in the sun, be near the beach. It’s been lovely and the department has been incredibly supportive. I have an amazing, group of collaborators there, so I do not have too many complaints so far.
[00:21:46] Jacinta: Wonderful. That’s good to hear. They’re in the audience. So you kind of had to say that. And final question, how has your experience been kind of being a Cape Town and then moving to two different countries, um, continents, in fact? How, how have you found that experience?
[00:22:02] Nicole: I’m actually so happy you asked this question ’cause I’ve been somewhat reflecting over the General Assembly over the last few days and, you know, being able to move and work in all these different places has been an amazing experience. It’s not for the lighthearted being able to move so often.
What I really started to appreciate is, for one, and in this room, online, I have such a fantastic support network across all these different places that I have lived. So I’m very fortunate to be able to say that I’ve had people, you know, backing me in a both professional and personal points of view.
So for those that are here, thank you. I really appreciate it. We do so easily forget that we are people before we are astronomers. So I would really love to acknowledge the support that I have received over the last few days. Just people egging me on telling me like, “it’s all fine”. That sort of support has been absolutely vital in, you know, progressing my career.
So it’s been fantastic in that regard. I’m very happy to say that I’veve made it through, mostly due to just having an amazing support network. And I highly recommend that for those that are coming through the ranks at the moment, you know, surround yourself by people that support your professional and personal goals is invaluable. Yeah. Thank you.
[audience applauds]
[00:23:37] Tshia: Thank you very much, Nicole, for joining us.
[00:23:39] Nicole: Thank you.
[00:23:40] Tshia: We really appreciate it and you know, we are a fan of you.
[00:23:44] Dan: Thank you, we’re looking forward to following your career.
[00:23:46] Nicole: Thank you. And, and again, five years of Cosmic Savannah. Congratulations that’s also amazing.
[00:23:51] Dan: Hopefully not another five years before we have you back.
[00:23:55] Nicole: Yeah, I’ll catch up in a few years….
[00:23:58] Jacinta: Okay, final round of applause for Nicole. Thank you very much, Nicole.
[00:24:02] Nicole: Thank you.
[audience applauds]
[00:24:08] Tshia: And I’m gonna have to stand for this one.
[00:24:10] Dan: Okay.
[00:24:10] Jacinta: I’m gonna stand too.
[00:24:11] Nicole: Are we all standing?
[laughs]
[00:24:20] Tshia: Next up, we have another very special guest who is currently a distinguished professor at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia and is best known for sharing the 2011 Noble Prize in physics with Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of the distant supernova.
[00:24:45] Jacinta: Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Professor Brian Schmidt.
[audience applauds and marimba band plays theme song]
How good is the marimba band?
[00:25:10] Brian: I’ve done many things, but I have never had live walk on music.
[00:25:15] Jacinta: There you go! Wow! We gave Brian Schmidt a first, yes!
[00:25:19] Dan: Well that leads, that leads us into my very first, welcome Brian. Welcome to The Cosmic Savannah. Now, as you heard, Nicole has done this all before but this is your first time on The Cosmic Savannah. So would you consider this a highlight of your career so far?
[00:25:37] Brian: Indeed, a great highlight. Of course, I’ve had a chance to see Cosmic Savannah from Australia and watch it evolve over the last five years. So it’s not completely the first time for me. No, I’ve interacted with it in its purest form… the digital form.
[00:25:55] Dan: Thank you. You can follow us online.
[00:25:57] Jacinta: Yes and Brian’s going to share a tweet from this, aren’t you Brian?
[00:26:00] Brian: [laughs] Me and Elon are not getting along so well.
[00:26:04] Jacinta: Okay. Instagram then…
[laughs] And so Brian, is this your first time in South Africa?
[00:26:13] Brian: No, I’ve been here, I was here many times from about 1999 till about 2010. So I think this is probably… Roughly my fifth time in Cape Town, so I’ve had a good chance to interact with bits and pieces of it over the time, but it’s the first time I’ve been here in about 15 years and the first time I’ve been here since winning the Nobel Prize.
[00:26:36] Tshia: Oh, nice. And also, you’re not just here for anything. You’re also here for the IAU General Assembly and so have you enjoyed that so far? How’s your experience been?
[00:26:46] Brian: Yeah, so, the IAU General assemblies bring together people from, you know, hundreds of countries and being able to, in one place, get a catch up of what’s going on scientifically around the world, and the science that’s going on around the world is very varied. So it’s quite different than your normal, conference you really meet just a highly varied group of people. From people who were my undergraduate supervisors are here to people I’ve met for the first time and I’ll probably work with, you know, perhaps for the rest of my life.
So it’s really a place that really brings things together. So it’s been really exciting and Cape Town, of course, is an amazing place even in your winter, which is my winter as well. So I don’t mind. But-
[00:27:36] Dan: Sorry about that.
[00:27:37] Brian: It’s, no, I like winter, I’m from Alaska, so it’s beautiful.
[00:27:42] Tshia: It’s definitely the African flavor.
[00:27:44] Jacinta: Yeah, the sky’s leaking a bit, but it’s better than the opposite, in Cape Town anyway. So Brian, you and I go way back… Don’t we Bri-bri?.
[laughs]
[00:27:57] Brian: We do.
[laughs]
[00:28:01] Jacinta: So I knew Brian before he was famous. [laughs] He told me I could say that!
[00:28:09] Dan: And he knows you before you are.
[00:28:11] Jacinta: Yeah, yeah. Hey! So I did my PhD in Australia and where Brian was a professor at the Mount Strom low observatory at the Australian National University and then of course he went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011.
And then the next year was Brian’s first year at the Linde meeting of Nobel Laureates, which happens every year. And it cycles between which kind of prize it’s about, so this was a science Lindell meeting, happened to be year after Brian won so that was his first year. And in celebration of that, there was a delegation of astronomy students could go.
And, so there’s about 500 students from all around the world. And I don’t know, there was maybe like 20 Nobel laureates or something along those lines there and I got to, to meet Brian there. And you remember those days, don’t you Brian?
[00:29:08] Brian: I do. I do. It was a big deal. It was the first time I had ever met so many Nobel Prize winners and they were, they were an interesting group of people. Including many of your heroes and you do learn sometimes it’s not good to meet your heroes as, I found out. But-
[00:29:23] Dan: yeah, you’ve been all right though.
[00:29:24] Brian: That was a great time.
[00:29:28] Jacinta: So winning the Nobel Prize is obviously a monumental achievement. Can you take us back to the time when you first learned that you and your team have won the prize for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe? How did that feel?
[00:29:45] Brian: Okay. Well, it kind of comes out of the blue, so, you know, there’s a lot of people who talk about people winning the Nobel Prize, but it doesn’t happen to many people and it’s kind of a lightning bolt when it comes out. So, in my case, on the 4th of October, 2011 at 8:39 PM local time in Canberra, we had had sports night with my two boys out and we were cooking a green thai curry, and the phone rang and my wife answered it. She looked puzzled and handed it to me, and you literally get someone saying, “hello, is this Brian Schmidt?”, “Yes?” and they’re like, “are you sure this is a very important call from Sweden?” I’m like, “what is going on?”
I thought it was one of my PhD students playing a practical joke on me. And then they tell you, you won a Nobel Prize and we’re going to be telling the world about this in six minutes and
[00:30:42] Jacinta: Six minutes?!
[00:30:43] Brian: Yeah, 8:45 was when it was announced.
[00:30:45] Dan: And, if you don’t answer, do they still announce it?
[00:30:47] Brian: Yes, they do. Although that was the year someone died before they announced it. In the very thing so they were a little…
[00:30:54] Dan: so were you second prize or?
[(laughs)]
[00:30:58] Brian: No, but it was quite interesting. They hadn’t been able to get a hold of Saul Pearl Mutter and they’re like, “do you have his mobile phone number?”, and I’m like, “I do”. Okay…
[00:31:07] Dan: what now I’ve gotta share?
[00:31:08] Brian: Yeah, well so it’s kind of surreal and it does happen and you know it’s amazing to be part of. But you know, ultimately I think we need to think of it as a celebration of science, less of individuals. But it is, you know, unfortunately it’s very focused on individuals, even though the science in that case was 60 people, so it was a lot of people working on it.
[00:31:33] Dan: Well, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the science. I mean, what made it so significant? What is the importance of the discovery?
[00:31:42] Brian: Alright, so, when we look out at the universe, it’s been known since the time of the 1920s that the universe is expanding. That is, everything in the universe is moving away from everything else. Okay. So that’s great. Now it turns out one of the interesting things, and this comes to your simulations, which is that when we look back out at more and more distant things. We’re looking back at time and so you get kind of this scrambled look at the universe where you keep seeing things, but the fainter things, the fainter things are typically the further away they are. So the simulations kind of help us piece together time when we look at this onion skin of things getting older and older as we look back in time. But that allows us to do something really interesting in my field, which is to measure how fast the universe is moving apart. That’s how fast it’s expanding and then look at more distant objects, make the same measurement and compare and what we were expecting is that the universe is full of gravity, and we would expect that the expansion rate of the universe would slow down over time- gravity would pull everything and slow it down.
And the question was, would it slow down a little bit? Or would it slow down a lot? If the universe was slowing down a lot, then it might sometime in the future, stop and go in reverse and we’d have the “gnab gib”, which is the big bang in reverse. So that’s what I-
[00:33:14] Jacinta: you’ve done that before.
[00:33:16] Brian: So for me, it was a chance due to technology and some amazing work done in Chile on Supernovae that allowed us to go through and do this experiment, which had been known from the time of Einstein, but it was the technology of today that allowed us to do that. And so, we measured how fast the universe was slowing down, but it wasn’t slowing down at all. It was actually speeding up and that was the big surprise. Gravity was pushing rather than pulling.
[00:33:45] Tshia: Sho! That is so interesting.
[00:33:48] Dan: How did you… how… but how… what, when was the day, how did you, who, who plotted it?
[00:33:55] Jacinta: How did you, how did you know that it was. real and hadn’t made a mistake?
[00:33:59] Brian: Okay, so you don’t. So in my case Adam Riesse, also a winner, was a postdoc at the time and he was leading sort of the next trench of objects. And one day in November of 1997, he just sent me a plot and said, “what do you think of this?”, and it basically showed the accelerating universe.
And I called him up and said, “I think we’ve got a lot of work to do ’cause this is, we’ve made a mistake, some horrible mistakes”. So over the next six weeks, he and I worked kind of through every single step ourselves, and then we had to, of course, share with the rest of the team, and then we had to work through a whole bunch of other new steps again.
And so you don’t really, you don’t have a eureka moment- at least I didn’t. I was more of a going through the, you know, the “known unknowns” so-to-speak and knocking ’em off one by one. But at the end you’re like, “oh, we gotta publish this”. But you’re always worried about the “unknown unknowns”. Yeah, the things no one- that you haven’t thought of, no one has thought of, and you’re just worried they’re gonna come back to bite you.
So even when we published, I was worried about the unknown unknowns. So it really took a few years until we got really good confirmation from the cosmic microwave background where I suddenly realized, actually, I think we’re right but that took a couple years.
[00:35:29] Dan: I guess that’s one of the exciting things about the scientific process too, right? Like you share it as a community and you, you want their input and you want them to test it and-
[00:35:40] Brian: Well, it’s very communal, science are not individual little heroes. There are, it’s lots of people working on it, you know, there are thousands of people who ultimately contributed to our prize winning experiment, and that’s, that’s something to be celebrated.
[00:35:57] Tshia: And, and this work on the accelerating universe has definitely reshaped our whole understanding of cosmology. So another question to you is, how do you see this field of cosmology, Nicole’s field, evolving in the next decade?
[00:36:14] Brian: It’s hard to know. So the, accelerating universe was a big surprise and at the first order, it fixed a lot of outstanding issues. It made the universe not curve. So it made it so that the universe as we would say was flat. It doesn’t bend, you know, space can be curved in general relativity and this made it kind of balanced. Precariously between curved away from itself and curved onto itself, and that turns out for reasons to understand the very early times after the Big Bang, that was something theorists really liked. It also made the universe about the right age. You know, we had the problem where it looked like the universe might not be as old as the things in it, and that’s a not a good thing for cosmology.
So it fixed a number of things like that, but it’s been really, really hard to understand why there would be acceleration except for saying that Einstein invented this little term, which he called Lambda in his equations. We call this the cosmological constant and if that exists it reproduces exactly what we see and that’s been pretty much true since 1998. There are some perhaps little chinks in that now, which is where I think the future lies. Are those discrepancies from just the simplest possible model- posited 1917 by Einstein- are those potentially real or are they, you know, kind of the splattered bugs on the windscreen?
A distraction from a clear view and we’ll figure that over the next 10 years. In the meantime, we do have SKA, James Web Space Telescope. We have these amazing black hole discoveries so, there’s all these things happening in cosmology where every day is a discovery. So we’re doing that at the same time. So we can walk and chew gum at the same time- at least some people can… I’m sure I can.
[00:38:18] Jacinta: So can you explain to our audience- now listeners, a bit more about how does this relate to dark energy and what is dark energy? Do we know yet what it means?
[00:38:28] Brian: So dark, dark energy is the catchall phrase to be whatever is accelerating the universe, whatever’s making gravity push rather than pull. Now it might be Einstein’s very simple, cosmological constant and the cosmological constant you can think of as being energy that is spread perfectly smoothly. When I mean perfectly, I mean perfectly smoothly across the universe and as the universe expands, it just gets created as the universe expands.
That is the stuff that you need, something like it, that that’s the stuff that Einstein’s theory of general relativity makes gravity push rather than pull. But we’re not sure Einstein was correct and so some of the other ideas of which there are many thousands of papers of ideas about what dark energy might be, other than the cosmological constant, that’s the catchall for all those other ideas, including Einstein’s.
[00:39:30] Jacinta: What do you think it is?
[00:39:32] Brian: Honestly, I, thik it’s probably some form of the cosmological constant would be my best guess, but I don’t really know and at some level, you know, we forget a scientist, our job is not to believe our job’s to test and try things out. So at this point. Just from a pure, most likely candidate? Cosmological constant.
But I don’t have a vested interest in it, I would love for it not to be the cosmological constant ’cause that would be a lot more interesting and allow us to, you know, learn a lot more things about maybe how quantum mechanics and gravity come together in some interesting way.
[00:40:14] Jacinta: And you mentioned, if I could jump in for a minute. You mentioned that at the same time we’ve got the SKA, we’ve got JWST and all of these things. And of course the way that astronomy and science in general in the world is going now is moving much further away from individual people doing it to teams, including, you know, for example, your team that worked on the type-1a supernova.
What do you see as the future of, sort of collaboration in order to answer these big questions in terms of South Africa for example, is now collaborating with kind of the whole world for the SKA. How do you see this as important for the future?
[00:40:53] Brian: So I think the giant collaborations we’re doing are necessary to answer some of the big questions but I’m not convinced they’re sufficient for a healthy astronomy community. So I really like the fact that we can get together and we can, you know, get a whole bunch of people in different continents, use different techniques, and simulate the universe incredibly well, better than we could ever do in a single place. I like the fact we can have huge surveys on the Square Kilometer Array, or many countries come together to build the Square Kilometer Array, but I also think we need to make sure we keep avenues for small groups to go through and be creative, because revolutionary ideas still seem to bubble up usually from fairly small groups. But then when you wanna solve the revolution, then you tend to need the big groups to do that. So I think getting a healthy ecosystem where we all work together one of the great benefits of having these global collaborations is when you wanna work on small things, you can pick the right person in the world to work with. It’s not just the person sitting in the office next to you. You get to choose whoever in the world you wanna work with ’cause we’re all connected now. So that’s one of the big benefits of these giant programs.
[00:42:07] Tshia: Just following on that, I just wanna ask you this one question and answer honestly.
[00:42:13] Brian: Okay, uh, this sounds dangerous.
[laughs]
[00:42:16] Tshia: Um, so what is it going to take to see an African Nobel Prize in physics?
[00:42:22] Brian: Yeah. the answer is it always takes the first one. There will always be a little bit of luck, because you gotta be at the right place at the right time, right? You know, Nobel prizes do not go to the smartest person in the room very often that that’s a very rare occurrence.
It’s normally someone doing good work somewhere who has chances upon a discovery in some way. So there’s a lot of being at the right place at the right time. Certainly, you know, that was what I was part of, and for Africa, I think what I see South Africa doing, which is investing in places where you have, as we would say, a comparative advantage.
So astronomy, you have a comparative advantage. I looked on and saw how much influence Africa had in Covid in doing the evolution of the Covid vaccine. There’s a whole- or the actual covid virus and there are some huge advantages you have there as well, just due to the nature of Africa.
So being able to invest in those things and really support them and support them well then at some point you will win a Nobel Prize and it’s, just doing it, having the patience, doing great stuff. The Nobel Prize is a symptom of doing good stuff, it’s not why we’re doing it. There’s all these other great “spillovers” as we would say, things that come from doing SKA and doing astronomy here that actually will help make, over a 25 year period, South Africa and Africa more prosperous. So it’s really important to do for reasons, and if you do it, you get a better economy, you get better wellbeing, more health of your population and occasionally you win a Nobel Prize. So it’s a win-win, but you have to have patience and you know, politicians often do not have patience and it’s been really impressive to see the patience that South African politicians have had to invest in astronomy and some other areas of science to lead be leading figures in the world.
[00:44:38] Dan: Yeah, absolutely. I think that we’re very, very lucky here in South Africa. I mean we’ve said it many times before, but the investment that the government has made over the last 25 or 30 years has shown, I mean, we have the general assembly here for the first time in Africa. We have hundreds of PhD graduates over the last 20 years who’ve come, come out of South Africa and Africa and I think it’s something we can really, really be proud of. You say the Nobel Prize isn’t the goal and it shouldn’t be, good physics is the goal and then the Nobel Prize may come at some point. But for young students who are here, who are watching online, do you have any advice for them?
I mean, the first advice is don’t aim to win a Nobel Prize, but a little bit of advice on how they should pursue their career.
[00:45:29] Brian: Well, the advice is to do astronomy because you love it and know that astronomy trains you to do engineering, computing, math, artificial inteintelligence. All the things that turn out, are useful no matter what you do, even if you decide not to be an astronomer. So go forth, if you love it, have confidence to do it and I should say we’ve got facilities in this country and people in this country who are perfectly capable of winning the Nobel Prize.
So that could happen, someone could make a discovery tomorrow that will win the Nobel Prize already. Where as a country, South Africa is already positioned to allow that to happen in astronomy and a few other fields. So, I think it’s great. That would not have been true 20 years ago.
It’s true now, so it’s great. But for the young people just have confidence to go out and do something that’s hard that you enjoy, because one way or another that’s gonna lead to opportunities, whether it be doing astronomy or if you decide you wanna use your brains to do high frequency trading on the stock market and steal other people’s money, that’s fine too.
[00:46:44] Dan: I mean, I don’t think it’s gonna happen tomorrow because I think after this everyone’s taking the day off after the general assembly, but maybe next week.
[laughs]
[00:46:55] Jacinta: So Brian, how has your life changed since you got the Nobel Prize? Obviously it can have a big impact on your career and your life and I know that you sort of recently, since the last time I saw you were vice chancellor of the Australian National University. How was that? What does the Vice Chancellor actually do?
[00:47:17] Brian: Ah, running a university you have 4,000 staff members and try to keep 25,000 students happy and as you’ve seen here in Cape Town, it’s a very challenging job, as I’ve known many of your vice chancellors. I always tell people, “be nice to your vice chancellors. It’s a really hard job.
Winning a Nobel Prize it’s kind of weird. It’s not- it’s really, really interesting. It doesn’t make you happy, it makes your life interesting, but it comes with a lot of opportunities and responsibilities. So it kind of upends your world. I kind of described it at some level, it’s like me going and saying, “I like chocolate”, and then suddenly a dump truck with 10 tons of chocolate dumps it on top of me and you kind of get crushed by all the opportunities. So it’s a little, it’s a little like that. So I think you have to, in my case, I knew I was just gonna have to do some new things and make the most of the opportunities, but that meant giving up some things I really enjoyed doing because they were not practical for a few years.
So after running a university for eight years as vice chancellor, I’m now back to doing astronomy again and I love it. I’m really glad I was vice chancellor, but I’m also really glad I’m no longer vice chancellor.
[laughs]
[00:48:43] Jacinta: So what are you doing now?
[00:48:44] Brian: So I am back to being a professor at a NU and I have taken sort of several months off and I will be going back to my love of supanovae and trying to understand how all the atoms that make up the earth and the world, the universe came to be the way they are. You know, we were started with hydrogen and helium, a little bit of lithium now we have these very complex places that have everything up to uranium and trying to understand exactly how that came through supernova and other massive stars is something that I wanted to do when I was doing my PhD thesis and right now it looks to me like it’s a great time to go back and do that given the modern technology.
[00:49:32] Jacinta: Sounds very exciting. We’ll be looking out for those papers. Sort of one of our last questions before we go is that, obviously we know that you’ve been very successful in your career, but success doesn’t come without failure. Would you care to share it? Have you, have you ever failed Brian?
[00:49:51] Brian: Well, I mean, I guess so. I’ve been asked this all the time, and I fail, so I always tell people to fail quickly. I fail every day, I just try to move on quickly by heart. So what have I done? You make the best out of a bad situation.
So I was a french horn player and I worked really, really hard at playing the french horn and I was okay but you did not know how many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, thousands of hours. I played the french horn and the reality is, eh, I was okay. At some point you have to realize. You’re just not gonna be a great french horn player, and so I’m not sure I failed at it, but I did not excel. So life is like that, but I do encourage people to, before they actually fall off the cliff, to go through and maybe change directions before they completely fail and accept the fact that you fail in different ways every, every day. So, yeah.
[00:50:58] Jacinta: I have one more question for you. Do you have to be the best at something to succeed at something?
[00:51:05] Brian: I guess one of the gifts that I had is I was never, I was not the best student in high school. Up in the middle of Alaska I had two friends, my best friends, who were both better students than me. Now it turns out those two were exceptional students, still two of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I didn’t know that, but that, just knowing I was never gonna be the best at something always made me just keep plugging away and enjoy how much, how I could contribute. And no, you, you shouldn’t, you don’t worry about being the best.
That’s not something you can control. You can be the best you can be that you can control so always work to be the best you can be and don’t worry about everyone else.
[00:51:49] Jacinta: Do you ever experience imposter syndrome?
[00:51:52] Brian: All the time.
[00:51:53] Jacinta: Really?
[00:51:53] Brian: Yep, when I won the Nobel Prize I was like “there must be some horrible mistake” it’s just like, “this is not right”. So I feel that all the time because we all- I mean there are people who do not feel imposter syndrome, some of whom are pretty normal, some of whom are not. But most of us do have self-confidence issues. Where things are hard, you feel in over your head.
I’ve had that my entire life and I’m having it right now, trying to get back into doing research and just realizing, wow, this is all really, really hard. Am I gonna be able to do it? Am I gonna make myself into an idiot by not being able to do it? Yeah, absolutely.
[00:52:44] Jacinta: Thank you very much for sharing that, Brian.
[00:52:46] Dan: Yeah, yeah. Thank you Brian and thank you very much for joining us. A another thing I know you do, and I dunno if you fail or not, is make your own wine, and we won’t get into an argument over wine, but we did get you a very nice South African bottle, which we hope you’ll enjoy.
[00:53:05] Brian: Okay, thank you.
[00:53:06] Dan: And yeah, thank you very much again for joining us. Thank you. [audience applauds] And that brings us to the end of today’s show. Thank you very much to our live audience tonight and for those watching online and if you’re listening to this as a podcast episode, thank you too. We hope you’ll join us for more episodes of The Cosmic Savannah.
[00:53:36] Jacinta: So special thanks today to Dr. Nicole Thomas and Professor Brian Schmidt for speaking with us. We have some gifts for you that are somewhere that are coming up to the stage.
[marimba band plays theme music]
[00:54:19] Nicole: Thank you.
[audience applauds]
[00:54:57] Jacinta: We’d also, we’d also like to give a huge thank you to our behind the scenes team, so please can they come on stage for a round of applause when we call your name. First of all, our podcast manager Francois Campher, who never complains even though we ask the most ridiculous things of him. Thank you very much. We have a gift for you as well…
[00:55:37] Dan: We didn’t even ask you to buy it!
[audience applauds]
[00:55:49] Jacinta: Next up our social media manager, Sumari Hattingh who’s been volunteering with us for almost four years
[00:56:01] Dan: She even flew all the way from Johannesburg to be with us tonight, thank you.
[audience applauds]
[00:56:18] Tshia: another particular shout out to hardworking, long suffering audio editor Jacob, Jacob Fine who is unfortunately unable to join us today, but he’ll be listening to this audio as he will be editing it for us. Sorry, Jacob!
[audience applauds]
[00:56:48] Jacinta: Thanks also to Mark Wahlnut for music production and Mija Wojcik for photography and also to Susie Carris for graphic design.
[audience applauds]
[00:57:01] Dan: Next up we’d like to thank a couple of my interns, Abigail Thambiran her transcription. Shamin for website management. Brian Masemola for his photography Emil Meintjies for Video Creation.
[00:57:15] Jacinta: You can come on stage if you’re here.
[audience applauds]
[00:57:35] Jacinta: And we’d also like to introduce our new newest official team members, podcast assistant manager Karabo Rantwane, digital presence assistant Kaashifa Saloojee and transcription and content assistant Sisa Shibane. Where are they? Come on stage please.
[audience applauds] some of us are meeting for the first time today.
[00:58:20] Tshia:
And an enormous thanks to all our many other volunteers past, present, who have supported The Cosmic Savannah over the past few years many of them are here today and we invite them all to come up to stage for a round of applause.
[00:58:38] Jacinta: Is there anyone here? Oh, they’re here. They’re just shy. Come on. Anyone who made our mini episodes? Come on. I know you’re here. Come on, Rika!
[audience applauds]
[00:58:58] Dan: We’d also like to thank the CTICC staff, the AV folks up there, the sound guys who’ve done a fab job. Thank you very much, and of course, the Rainbow Sounds Marimba Ensemble.
[audience applauds]
[00:59:21] Jacinta: We gratefully acknowledge support from the South African National Research Foundation and the Square Kilometer Array Observatory, who have co-sponsored the show tonight. Also, to the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement, the South African Astronomical Observatory and the University of Cape Town astronomy department for sponsoring the podcast.
[00:59:42] Tshia: You can subscribe-
[00:59:44] Jacinta: Give a round of applause!
[00:59:45] Tshia: [audience applauds] Sorry, Jacob. You can subscribe to The Cosmic Savannah podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. You can also listen to our website- you can also listen via our website on thecosmicsavannah.com and follow us on X. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at Cosmic Savannah. And we’ll speak to you next time on The Cosmic Savannah, yay!
[audience applauds and marimba band plays theme music]
[01:00:53] Dan: Thank you! [audience applauds and marimba band plays theme music]
