The Big Bang Breakthrough: a cosmological self-examination

“We are talking right now about a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, so we see the face of the Big Bang. It is an image of the gravitational waves which are purely quantum gravity feature of what was produced in the Big Bang.”

This is footage of Professor Andrei Linde being told there is evidence that supports his life’s work. Along with Alan Guth he proposed a theory of cosmological inflation, the expansion of space in the early universe. The original ideas were proposed in 1980 by Guth and have now been supported by this latest discovery from a team of American physicists.

“Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Kovac and his colleagues say, that Guth was correct.”

I don’t profess to understand the science behind what they were looking for or indeed how they could explore such evidence in the first place. What strikes me though about the film is how it signals the twilight of a period of time for those scientists involved. A prolonged time of theory, of uncertainty and exploration is, perhaps coming to an end. The evidence still needs to be corroborated, but the emotional moment when Linde was told of the emerging evidence is incredible.

There is much to admire in those people around us who choose to remain in a place of acute uncertainty, often in science, who become accustomed to working against orthodoxy or popular belief. Individuals who have the will and determination to stand by a theory and bide their time over decades are part of a select group of explorers.

It reminds me of the Higgs boson particle discovery from the work at CERN. This emerged from the theoretical work of François Englert and Peter Higgs fifty years ago. They proposed the mechanism that suggested the existence of the particle, leading to a forty year scientific search and of course the development of the Large Hadron Collider one of the largest and most complex experimental science facilities ever developed.

We can only wonder what it must be like to have wondered, theorised and developed ideas for such a protracted length of time. What must it have been like for Englert, Higgs, Guth, and Linde to have lived with unanswered questions for so long? How must it feel to be told that you were right all along? What defines the character of such a determined group of individuals? We owe a huge amount to these individuals who for many years wrestle and struggle with the unanswered questions of our world.

For Linde the emotion comes across clearly in the footage and his disbelief, even scepticism is apparent towards the end of the film. The dawn of certainty for Linde is captured beautifully on his doorstep – as monumental a discovery as it is for him and Guth, it is also a fascinating glimpse into our cosmological self-examination.

One blog commenter sums up the revelatory moment from the film perfectly: “the universe regarding itself, and being overwhelmed by what it learns.”