Brian Cox
speaker
1,719 appearances
13 recordings
8 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard 16 Jun
Brian Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
So because that can see things from which the light has been traveling for over 13 billion years, then you're seeing things as they were in the first billion years or a few hundred thousand years in the history of the universe, right, essentially. So, well, a few hundred million years, sorry, I should have said.
So you're seeing the first galaxies form with that telescope, which is one of the reasons it was built. And the reason we wanted to see is because we don't fully understand that process. As I mentioned before, we don't really fully understand why they have black holes in them, and it's something to do with their formation, but we don't understand it very well.
So it's not surprising to me that when you build that instrument and collect light from the early universe, you see an early universe that's behaving in a different way to the way that you thought it behaved. And so indeed, yeah, we're seeing... galaxies that you formed earlier than you would have predicted.
But that means that your model of the way the universe evolved is not quite right, and that's not a surprise, because we wouldn't have built the thing if we'd known everything. Right, of course. So I think it's fair to say there's nothing there that's absolutely... completely destroys our picture of how the universe evolved from the cosmic microwave background that you saw in those images earlier.
Yeah, I would say so. And I'm not an expert in that field, but my understanding is that it's interesting because we're having to refine and develop new models of the way that the galaxy is formed. And indeed, you said that it looks like the stars and the galaxies...
present in the universe earlier than we might have expected so it might be it might be that you're seeing a hint of something really profound that we didn't understand or it might be that just the models need a bit of a tweak mmm so galaxies form quicker than we expected yeah that early stages of the universe what are those red dots the red dots that were observed
In the images, the James Webb images of the early universe. Yeah, they're distant.
I don't know.
I don't know. It says there that we don't know. So I'm going to go with that. I mean, I think just speed reading that. It says a class of galaxies that... So I suppose we're looking at a kind of galaxy. It seems we're looking at a kind of galaxy that we don't see today in the universe. Red and compact, visible only during about one billion years of cosmic history.
So that would be, as I said, because we don't really understand the formation of the galaxies and these supermassive black holes, that's interesting because what you're seeing in the data is a kind of almost proto-galaxy, I suppose, these little tiny galaxies. That's what it seems to suggest. That's the first time I've seen that.
But just so, yeah, I think what we're seeing is that we don't understand how structures formed in the universe. We have a reasonable idea, but we don't understand the detail. And the more things like that you find, the more information you have to build models of how stuff formed.
I mean, there are several sort of proposed observatories. And also, by the way, gravitational wave detectors. So we've got LIGO, which is on the ground. There are proposals to put one in space, which is called LISA. One of the proposals is called LISA, which is lasers between satellites. So you can have much bigger things.
And the reason that's interesting is because there'll be gravitational waves from the Big Bang, right? So, you know, as you mentioned, neutrinos, you've got neutrino observatories, which can observe neutrinos from the early universe. And you can see things. It's just like light in a way. But it gives you a different view. You mentioned earlier, it's a different way of looking at the universe.
So the neutrinos will have information. Gravitational waves will have detailed information about the Big Bang itself. But we can't detect them at the moment because we can't detect those really tiny little ripples in space and time.
And we want to know. It's like you said earlier. We're asking very deep questions about why the universe is the way it is. And maybe why there's a universe at all in the sense that did it have a beginning? Right. And if so, what does that mean? What does it mean for something like this to begin? Yeah, I really... I find it... And the most exciting thing of all is that we don't know.
And that's so important, by the way. And just to reiterate, I think it's often missed when you're talking about the beauty of science and the value of science. It's almost not the knowledge. It's almost like the opposite of the knowledge. It's just this idea that... I think... It goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
I haven't really thought about this connection before, but it's that... I was pushing back on you saying, I don't know I'd like... What would it mean to know everything? I don't think I'd like that. And you were saying maybe you would. Maybe that's what it means. Nirvana, you know, maybe achieving enlightenment.
That's what it means. But I find... The most human I feel, I think, is when I'm on the edge of the known. Sure. So it's the fact that there are mysteries in the universe, profound mysteries, to me is one of the things that makes life worth living.
Yeah.
I'm sure you're right. What if we get past this little blip?
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