Considering perfect order of the universe, there must have been extremely sensitive values
in motion during the expansion of the Big Bang. Can you tell us about the order that
began with the Big Bang, such as the cosmological constant and others, and how precise these
numbers are?
Yes. About 100 years ago, right now is 2018, so 103 years ago was 2015. In 2015, Albert
Einstein published his work on general relativity, theory of relativity. One of the predictions
of his own theory was that the universe's state is dynamic, and that it's a solution
to Einstein's equation is that the universe is dynamic. And that means that the universe
could be expanding or it could be contracting.
This wasn't immediately obvious when Einstein came up with it. It was Alexander Friedman,
who actually, he was, I believe, a Russian, a young Russian mathematician, who first solved
Einstein's equations because they were very difficult to solve. And he sent a letter to
Einstein and said, Dr. Einstein, I have made an attempt under certain conditions to solve
your equations and what I find is a dynamic universe. Einstein didn't like that answer.
Einstein actually didn't even answer Friedman. He didn't like the answer because Einstein,
like many of his colleagues at the time, believed in a universe that was static. They believed that
the universe has eternally been here. And if it's eternally been here, then there's no need to talk
about a creator. It's just the universe is the only thing there is. You know, Carl Sagan famously used
to start his TV show called Cosmos. He would say, the cosmos is all there is and all there was and all
there will ever be. And that totally reflects the attitude of the scientists at that time relative to
the origin of the universe. And so the reason I mention this story is that the very fact that the
universe is dynamic was already something totally unexpected. It was one of those situations where
science progresses and the scientist always has a bias, but sometimes his finding doesn't match his bias.
So in this case, what they found was that the universe is dynamic and one of the first implications of
that was that the universe must have had a beginning. And the fact that the universe had a beginning in a
finite amount of time was actually a very surprising result for them and very unpleasant. Einstein,
by the way, Einstein's theory was demonstrated to be true in a solar eclipse in 1919 led by an experiment,
led by Arthur Eddington. Eddington was Einstein's friend and he actually was a very big advocate
of general relativity. He would go around giving lectures on Einstein's relativity theory. And then
he came up with a brilliant experiment in which he was measuring how much does the angle at which the
star appears change if the star comes near the sun. Well, that is very difficult to look for a star near
the sun because the sun is so bright. But the moon is so fantastically matched to the sun in the sky.
Something very surprising, most people don't appreciate this, that the moon on the sky is the
same size as the sun on the sky. The moon is 400 times smaller and it's 400 times closer. It's a very
strange coincidence. But what the moon being that size allows us to do is to do an experiment in which we
can test general relativity because the moon completely makes a perfect eclipse that allows
me to see the sun, the star. And now I can see that the star looks like it's coming from a bigger angle
due to the Einstein relativity theory. That experiment was done in 1919 and that was the experiment that
made Einstein famous and the whole world became excited about relativity. But a consequence of
relativity was that the universe is expanding. And Eddington, the man who actually made the discovery,
so disliked the answer that he said that he found the idea of a beginning to the universe as
philosophically repugnant. It's very interesting. You know, scientists, you think of the picture of
the scientists as, you know, they're very logic driven. They don't have any bias. They just follow the
evidence where it leads. Well, most don't. And Eddington was very frank about it. You know,
he finds it philosophically, why philosophically repugnant, that the universe would have it.
But I think they had an atheistic bias. They didn't want a beginning to the universe because the
beginning would point to a creator. So this is all the story of a beginning to the universe that was,
that was, and that now we associate with the Big Bang. So not only was there a beginning,
by the way, the word Big Bang itself is a derogatory term. It was a way of mocking this
theory by people who didn't want there to be a beginning to the universe. And it was Fred Hoyle
who came up with this in a radio program. At any rate, so not only now we recognize that beginning
as when we call it the Big Bang, but we now see that the properties of the Big Bang are very fine-tuned.
So the, for example, the universe appears to have a level of orderliness in the, or distribution of
matter in space that is very hard to explain. It seems like the level of orderliness or the entropy
is a very improbable level. Roger Pendrose, who is a very famous physicist,
computed that probability as being of the order of one to the, one over 10 to the 123rd power,
very exceedingly, unbelievably small number. So there is some, some very special things going on
in the, in the, in the way the universe is set up just in terms of matter and energy and its condition.
Uh, for example, in a universe that's dynamic, you could have a situation where the, uh, there is so
much matter and so little energy that the matter basically, uh, at first there is this expansion
and then there's this collapse. Um, or you could have it that there is so much energy that there is
expansion and there is no collapse ever. It goes forever, you know, farther away. Where we find
ourselves is we are exactly at the boundary of very close to the boundary where at infinity, uh, there
is zero energy or zero, uh, motion. Uh, except now in the, since 1998, there is a possibility that we are
just a tiny bit more energetic than that. Uh, and this is this thing that they call dark energy and it's
still completely un-understood, not understood. So, uh, all of this kind of points to the fact that,
first of all, there is a lot more to learn and the other that the universe, far from being something
that could fit in a standard, simple, static, uh, self-existent narrative, it's very contingent on a
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