There’s something weird out there in the universe ... Something we can’t see is pulling the strings of the universe. The alien stuff, if it exists, needs to fill a very big hole because 96% of our universe is unaccounted for. Horizon: Most of Our Universe is Missing, BBC 2006
[Fritz] Zwicky was a difficult man to get along with. So his scientific work had sometimes been overlooked. But his forgotten ideas about Dark Matter were a godsend for Ostriker and Peebles. ibid.
Science had uncovered a puzzle. There was something missing. There wasn’t enough mass in the universe to provide the gravity to hold it together. And yet there the universe was – obviously not falling apart. But science had also provided an answer. Peebles and Ostriker’s Dark Matter made everything work. And thanks to Vera [Rubin] it was suddenly very popular. ibid.
Dark Matter was headline news. There was only one small problem – no-one had actually found any Dark Matter. ibid.
The gas was orbiting just as fast as the stars. Even the hydrogen gas was being manipulated by a mysterious force. It seemed that Dark Matter would have to exist as a huge all-pervading halo surrounding a galaxy and everything in it including us here on Earth. All the evidence pointed towards one slightly unsettling thing: Dark Matter is not made of atoms like us and everything we know. ibid.
The amount of energy needed to cause the acceleration was hugely significant. Because energy is proportional to mass it accounted exactly for the missing 75% of the universe. ibid.
Finally none of the universe was missing. It was made of 4% atoms, the stuff we’re familiar with, 21% Dark Matter that no-one could find, and a whopping 75% made from brand-new whizzy Dark Energy that nobody could understand. Cosmology’s standard model was born. ibid.
The shape of this universe is actually a doughnut. Horizon: Alan and Marcus Go Forth and Multiply, BBC 2009
We’re living on the surface of that four-dimensional doughnut. ibid.
Is the universe infinite? Might every event repeat again and again and again? ... Is the Earth just one of uncountable copies tumbling through an unending void? Horizon: To Infinity & Beyond, BBC 2010
A google-plex has so many zeros that there is not enough space in the observable universe just to write the number down. ibid.
Graham’s number is so big it even made it into the Guinness Book of Records. ibid.
In an infinite universe anything that is possible has to happen. ibid.
While no-one likes the idea of space coming to an end, the consequences of an infinite universe are even more bewildering. ibid.
A new generation of Cosmologists are questioning our basic understanding of the universe. They are beginning to wonder if there is a greater reality. Could it be that everything we think we know about our universe is wrong? Horizon: Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong? BBC 2010
Somewhere out in the universe there seems to be a disturbing force that we can’t explain. A force of astonishing power that appears to have bent trillions of stars to its will. Gripping not just galaxies but whole clusters of galaxies spanning billions of light years’ of space. And it’s dragging everything to a single point. This mysterious phenomenon is known as Dark Flow. And it shouldn’t be happening. ibid.
The Big Bang: The most violent explosion there has ever been brought everything into existence. This early universe was hot – so hot it contained only raging energy. After just one second some energy was transformed into the seeds of matter, and the universe filled with a dense fog. 400,000 years passed as the universe grew, and eventually the fog settled to form atoms. ibid.
For all its intricate mathematics the standard model has flaws. Built into it are a series of theories designed to explain observations that don’t make any sense. Theories that are incomplete and unproven. ibid.
Big Bang theory says that the universe was created in an explosion. But an explosion would produce a universe that was lumpy and messy. With patches that were at vastly different temperatures from one area to another. The real universe is nothing like this. In all directions the temperature appears to be almost exactly the same. ibid.
Alan Guth, Professor of Particle Physics, and his creation was the Theory of Inflation ... Out of the blue our fledgling universe dramatically increased in size. Inflation says the universe started small, allowing the temperature to become the same everywhere. Then it an instant it underwent a massive expansion, but left everything perfectly smooth and uniform. ibid.
The explosion hasn’t stopped. The Big Bang is still banging. ibid.
Guth thinks our universe is part of a bigger structure; we’re in a small piece of it. A bubble created by Inflation. It could mean that Dark Flow is evidence our universe is not alone. ibid.
For thousands of years science has tried to understand the mysteries of the night sky. Horizon: What Happened Before the Big Bang? BBC 2010
The Big Bang is an elegant answer to the biggest question that science can ever ask. It’s a startling idea. It gives us a sense of origin. ibid.
The Big Bang doesn’t quite work. So much so that people are now starting to think the unthinkable ... It’s all effect and no cause. ibid.
The mathematical objection is that as the clock is wound back and Hubble’s zero hour is approached all the stuff of the universe is crammed into a smaller and smaller space. Eventually, that space will become infinitely small. And in mathematics invoking infinity is the same as giving up. Or cheating. ibid.
Dr [Laura] Mersini-Houghton’s idea was to manipulate the mechanics of that wave form with a branch of mathematics called String Theory. It seemed to provide an elegant solution as to why our universe emerged in the first place. ibid.
Out there hidden from the naked eye is a universe we barely understand. There are stars being born, black holes, perhaps even new forms of life. But now astronomers are able to see the cosmos as never before. They are creating a new breed of super-telescope of unprecedented power and clarity. Horizon: Seeing Stars, BBC 2011
The Atacama Desert, Chile ... To locate this black hole astronomers will be using one of the most powerful telescopes ever built: the VLT, the Very Large Telescope. ibid.
The VLT can capture vast amounts of infra-red from space. ibid.
Meet SOFIA ... The world’s largest mobile astronomical observatory with an infra-red telescope beneath the bulge. ibid.
SOFIA and her seventeen-ton telescope is heading for the stratosphere. ibid.
They are working on one of the most advanced telescopes ever – the James Webb Telescope. Possibly the ultimate exploration machine. ibid.
The latest infra-red telescopes are ushering in a golden age of astronomy. ibid.
This is extreme astronomy. ibid.
A giant array known as ALMA. When it is finished sixty-six dishes will operate as one, the equivalent of an antenna ten-miles across. ibid.
Nobody knows which objects in the universe produce cosmic rays. ibid.
The Holographic Principle – which says that all three dimensional objects can be encoded in only two dimensions. Horizon: What is Reality? BBC 2011
But Lenny [Susskind] didn’t stop there. He and other physicists made a truly shocking leap of the imagination: they asked what if the whole of reality is a hologram, projected from our own event horizon, the far edges of the universe. ibid.
It seems utterly bizarre that the ultimate nature of reality might be holographic. That at the edge of our universe there might be a shimmering sheet of information that describes the entire universe within ... We are about to put this theory to the test. ibid.
If Max [Tegmark] is right, Maths isn’t a language we’ve invented, but a deep structure we are gradually uncovering like archaeologists. An abstract unchanging entity that has no beginning and no end. As we peel back the layers we are discovering the code. Strange as it seems it’s a comforting theory because if the reality is a mathematical object, understanding it might be within our reach. ibid.
These two grand visions of Reality – the mathematical structure and the cosmic hologram – represent theoretical thinking at its most imaginative and beautiful. ibid.
The most ambitious map in history is taking shape before our eyes. And scientists are heading for the edge. It may be the strangest map you will ever see. And it’s bigger than you can believe. It’s a map of the entire universe. Horizon: How Big is the Universe? BBC 2012
The universe is so big we may never find the edge. ibid.
It’s called the Observable Universe. We can only map what’s inside ... The light hasn’t had time to reach us yet. ibid.
In the observable universe there are 170 billion galaxies just like it. ibid.
Dark matters outweighs it six to one. ibid.
A supernova only burns brightly for three weeks. ibid.
He [Perlmutter] was finally ready to measure the deceleration of the universe. But late in 1997 the team was getting some very weird results. ibid.
One of the biggest shocks in modern cosmology. This is a runaway universe. ibid.
The entire universe is defying gravity. ibid.
Cosmologists don’t know what Dark Energy is, they only know what it does. When gravity pulls, Dark Energy pushes. ibid.
Dark Matter is fighting a losing battle. ibid.
The entire observable universe is saturated in Dark Energy. ibid.
The universe is infinite. ibid.
Inflation may have started out as a mathematical theory but it has gained acceptance after successful testing against the evidence from the Cosmic Microwave Background. ibid.