A Curious Mind

Could this brilliant South Australian physicist be Australia's next Nobel Prize winner?

- By Bianca Nogrady. Photography by Randy Larcombe

Matthew Bailes returns to the road in suburban Adelaide where, as a six year-old, he first asked the questions that led to his "stellar" career in astrophysics.

SIX-YEAR-OLD MATTHEW BAILES waits on the edge of Adelaide’s Glynburn Road for a gap in the busy traffic. He sees an oncoming car and wonders why he can see it. Later he asks his parents, “Why can we see cars? Why can we see anything?” – deceptively simple questions that his parents’ high-school education hadn’t equipped them to answer. “It just made me wonder how the universe worked,” he now explains simply.

About a billion years before that suburban Adelaide scene, in a galaxy far, far away, a cataclysmic event occurs, releasing an unimaginably powerful burst of energy. It’s gone in the blink of an eye, but sends a blast of radiation that ripples out through the vast, cold vacuum of space. At some point in its billions-of-light-years journey, this wave washes over a small blue planet in one arm of a spiral galaxy, and its radio shriek is picked up by an antenna on a dry red continent. Yet again, Matthew Bailes – now working as an astrophysicist at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology – finds himself asking, “Why can we see this?”

The answer was so astounding, its cosmological implications so profound, that Matthew and his colleagues are now being whispered about as contenders for a Nobel Prize in Physics.