Hey Bill Nye, 'Is the Expansion of the Universe Gaining Speed?' #TuesdaysWithBill | Big Think

Bill. How are you doing? My name is Marty Behsman. I'm from Boston, Massachusetts, New England.

My question for you is: do you believe that as space expands, it starts moving at a faster and less controlled rate? I've always wondered this, given our ancestors had such a closer view of time and space than we have now, and it seems to have been moving pretty much faster away from us than as they had said, a huge view of galaxies and what they originally mapped out.

Thank you very much.

Marty.

Marty.

Marty. So you're asking a great question. Keep in mind that in my grandfather's time, it was believed by a great many people that the universe was static, that it just is the way it's always been. It's big, some extraordinarily huge size and it had always been that way.

Then, in my father's time, relativity was discovered and furthermore, the expanding universe was discovered. It was discovered nominally or largely credited to Edwin Hubble and that's what we named the space telescope after Hubble because he was looking at the stars; he was an astronomer studying various types of stars, and he could identify different types of stars and then realized that all of them of a certain type were moving farther away at a very high speed.

And you determine this through this famous expiration, the red shift. He noticed that the stars were slightly redder than he would have expected. And this he attributed to their speed stretching the wavelength of light out. It's amazing.

And this was around 1927, 1928/29. Hubble realized the universe was expanding and this was consistent with certain aspects of relativity of Einstein's postulations or theories.

All right, well then, in your lifetime, Marty, people discovered that the universe is not only expanding – in fact, after Hubble made the discovery, everybody presumed or questioned or tried to figure out at what rate the universe would slow down. In other words, everybody figured there's gravity, there's a big - if everything is expanding, it expanded from a place.

And keep in mind the big insight is not just that the matter that you and I are made of and the sun is made of, that space itself is expanding. It's a hard idea. If you're not troubled by this idea, you're odd, but that space itself is expanding.

And furthermore, it was presumed that it would slow down, that gravity would make things slow down in their expansion, and people were trying to figure out that rate. But what they discovered around the year 2000, Nobel Prize I think was awarded in 2004, what they discovered is the universe is accelerating.

And do you know why it's exhilarating? Nobody knows why, Marty, and this is the fascination. This is a source that just makes us all crazy in a good way.

And so in this mix, now it's been discovered that there is about five times as much matter or whatever it is that we can't see that has come to be called dark matter. And it's about five times as much of that as there is of the stuff that you and I are made of.

And you know why? Nobody knows why, but its gravitational influence is of great significance when you start to study the cosmos.

So you, Marty, are living at a time where the next great discovery about the expansion of the universe, the nature of space and time is understood. You may be here when the next amazing world-changing insight in astrophysics or physics or science is made.

So when you go to vote, Marty, vote to support basic research because these discoveries are important to us. That's how we have nuclear power plants. It's how we have the Internet, is understanding this physics of subatomic particles and how they relate to the physics of the cosmos, our place in space.

And so who knows what the next great discovery will lead to, but it's worth pursuing because we all want to know where we came from. We want to know where we fit in the cosmos, our place in space.

Cool question. Carry on...