The 4-Percent Universe by Richard Panek

Author:Richard Panek
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Dark Matter (Astronomy), Science, Cosmology, General, Astrophysics, Astrophysics & Space Science, Dark Energy (Astronomy), Astronomy, Physics
ISBN: 9780618982448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2011-01-10T08:00:00+00:00

8. Hello, Lambda

ON JANUARY 8, 1998, four astronomers sat at a table at the front of a conference room at the Washington Hilton to deliver the verdict of science. Ruth Daly was there with her radio-galaxy data, and Neta Bahcall was there with her galaxy-cluster data, and representatives from the two supernova teams were there—Peter Garnavich for the High-z collaboration, and Saul Perlmutter for the SCP. The press re-leases from the various institutions had done their job. A couple of dozen journalists filled the seats, including reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post, and cameras on tripods lined the back of the room, their metal lamps throwing light and heat. The four astronomers represented four independent collaborations, but they spoke with one voice: The universe would expand forever.

One voice, however, was a little stronger than the rest. Perlmutter had flown to D.C. from an observing run in Hawaii. On the plane from Honolulu to San Francisco he had used a seatback phone for the first time, calling his colleagues in Berkeley and dictating the new data he'd collected in recent days at the Keck Telescope, atop Mauna Kea. Then he stopped in Berkeley just long enough to print out a poster incorporating that data. So far the SCP had made seven supernovae public, in a paper that had appeared in Nature a week earlier. But the team had more than forty other supernovae in the pipeline—a quantity that in itself was important. It communicated to the community that the system was working, and that the SCP had mastered it.

But for Perlmutter these results also represented the realization of his dream of using physics to solve the big mysteries. "For the first time," he announced at the AAS press conference, "we're going to actually have data, so that you will go to an experimentalist to find out what the cosmology of the universe is, not to a philosopher." Afterward, he had stayed at a table in the room for an hour, conducting a mini-seminar for the members of the press. They surrounded him, and he held forth. Later, when they played back their cassette tapes, they might think they'd inadvertently hit fast-forward. But no, it was just Saul Perlmutter at regular speed, hyperkinetically trying to convince them that the headline here wasn't just the fate of the universe. It was that we could now know that fate—empirically, scientifically.

The following day Michael Turner paid Perlmutter a visit in the exhibit hall. The SCP team was part of the AAS meeting's poster sessions that day—dozens of presentations tacked to freestanding corkboards in long lanes, hard by the trade-show booths where representatives from weapons manufacturers sat at white-linen-covered tables and explained why the telescopes on their drawing boards were the best. Perlmutter wanted to show Turner something in the data, something he hadn't mentioned at the press conference.

Turner liked Perlmutter, and he liked the project; he didn't need to be convinced that the supernova survey was a worthy effort that deserved

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