NOBEL PRIZE WINNER JAMES PEEBLES: “WHY I REINVENTED SPACE AND TIME”

All About Space chats to the 2019 Nobel laureate in physics about his involvement in many groundbreaking discoveries and how our theories have evolved since he first began studying the universe

- Lee Cavendish

It takes a brilliant mind to imagine what the universe was like from its inception and try and model it over roughly 14 billion years. How have you been able to attempt this and be so confident in your results?

You should bear in mind that people were talking about this expansion of the universe from what used to be called a ‘primaeval atom’ since the 1930s. There was nothing new in this concept. It was not imagination so much; it was just inertia. People had no other ideas. What’s happened since then is an accumulation of an enormous amount of experimental evidence.

The Big Bang theory is widely accepted now, even by the general public. How was the theory received when you first came into the field of cosmology? Was it as widely accepted then as it is today?

Oh, no. It was widely known in the physics community. I think you could say it was not taken very seriously. It was doubted and not believed. Instead it was an idea that had very little basis in hard empirical evidence.

What can you tell us about your part in the discovery of the cosmic microwave background?

Let’s just consider the situation after World War II; there was an immense release of energy in science and technology. It gave us automobiles and it gave us particle accelerators. I guess it was natural that scientists turned to cosmology. The idea of an early, dense universe expanding into the present state was around, as I said, since the late 1920s and early 1930s.