“T
he irst thing I did when I won the Nobel Prize
was to sit my wife down. I told her I was sorry. I
knew everything was about to change.”
It’s not every day you meet a Nobel Prize winner, and while
Brian P. Schmidt appears, at irst glance, no different than the
average guy you’d bump into at a bus stop, the reality couldn’t
be further from the truth.
Schmidt is 48. Born in Montana, he married an Australian
and emigrated here in 1994. Described by some as a militant
agnostic, his tagline of “I don’t know and neither do you” often
raises a smile. He believes in global warming, and has even
placed a $10,000 bet on temperatures rising with the chairman
of the Prime Minister’s Business Council.
We meet in the ruins of Mount Stromlo observatory, which
was burnt to the ground by bushire in 2003. As his voice echoes
off the walls, I quickly determine that behind his disarming
charm and piercing blue eyes, a brain pulsates as powerful as
the supernovae he’s studied.
“You see, I’m just an ordinary guy,” he continues with a
wry smile, casually leaning up against the stone ledge in front
of me. “Even my old teacher’s reaction to my win was like,
‘You?’ It’s a bit surprising, really. I just worked hard and was
enthusiastic.”
I nodded but I didn’t buy it for a second, for Schmidt seemed
to glow, like the anointed ones do, and I was well aware that,
as one of only 15 Australian Nobel Laureates, he could leave me
in his intellectual wake at any moment of his choosing. In truth,
I barely understood the title of his 2011 Nobel Prize-winning
citation: “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the
universe through observations of distant supernovae”.
Thankfully I wasn’t there to ask about things I would never
understand. I was there to pose “layman” questions, seeking
simple answers to complicated matters. I began naively: “Knowing
what you do about space, when you get to the edge of space...”
“There is no edge of space,” he interjects. “It either keeps
going and going, or wraps onto itself like the Earth. If you think
of space, the edge of space is time and the universe is expanding.
It’s 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, and each second we are
moving to a new edge.”
“I see,” I answer but I’m lying, drowning in a sea of concep-
tual ininities so I move on to the next pub question. “Do you
think life exists elsewhere in space?”
“I have every reason to believe that we’re going to be able to
look at planets in the next 10–20 years and start asking: ‘Is
there life out there?’ But I will say we haven’t gotten anything
that we don’t understand at this point.MAY 2016|| 27AAbout
Schmidt
Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt discusses global warming, exploding stars, politics and Star
Warswith JAY FURBY.
Credit: ANU