Then we decided to go really public and make a big splash and put the poster up at the January 9, 1998, American Astronomical Society meeting. We did a poster, a talk and a press conference. Then it became even more visible when the competing team came out with their results and used other terminology: "antigravity."
That other team was the High-Z Supernova Search team led by Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University. What was the sense of competition between your Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z team?
There were some advantages to both teams announcing so close to one another. I don't know of many times in science history where there was something that should have been a big surprise and that people should not have accepted. By the end of the year this was treated as a done deal in many circles. There are so many different things that happened that are relevant to this discovery. In the most parochial sense, members of my team feel we worked very hard to establish all the techniques that would make this thing work. Then the other team announced their results a month and a half later at a meeting at Marina del Rey where we also presented. It's a lot easier to present your results that are a real shock when you know another group has already got it. Our group would feel there's priority, that they established it. But it's also true that there's a final published paper that came out from the other group first.
Why didn't you publish in January of 1998, when you announced the finding?
We thought that establishing what the result was and getting that out to the community was the most important thing, and making sure that every last issue was checked and cross-checked. We didn't think there was an issue of priority.
I think most people feel that it plays as a simultaneous event. We could have been the winners if we had presented in a slightly different way. In the big picture, some days you get a little annoyed, but I can’t get too annoyed if everyone shares the credit. When you step back and ask, these kind of discoveries depend on so many things being put together. It took people spending years to understand different aspects. These results don't come about because one person did something, but because a community worked very hard to prove the result.
To what do you most attribute your scientific success?
I think the biggest thing is, first of all, being willing to learn things, being willing to pick up a new area, but also just being able to work with other people. Most of these jobs are too big for any one person. You end up trying to find a team of people who are as excited as you are and want to push the technique forward. I'm always struck by the fact that the image of the scientist is as a lone person wearing a lab jacket in the lab by themselves for hours, whereas my sense is that maybe the single most important thing for a scientist, aside from being able to think of good questions, is figuring out good people to work with and enjoying the process of inventing ideas together with other people.
Do you get excited in October, when the Nobel Prizes are announced?
These prizes are such a funny thing. The biggest concern is about taking credit. It's always nice to be someone that people thought did something nice. People can spend their whole lives waiting to see if they'll get the Nobel Prize, and it's not a very healthy psychological state.
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10 Comments
Add CommentCongratulations! Science without politics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince there is no proof of the hubble relationship (red shift v. distance), this research means nothing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat causes redshift?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have alot of rispect for this man.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is large part of universe beyond the part that sends us radiation and is observable. The remaining of the universe is unobservable by radiation but hits gravitation field fills our part of the universe. Angelo Mula via Plinio,87 Taranto Italy +39 3486047680
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisrcglinsk writes that there is no proof of the Hubble relation. There is actually ample proof, such as the Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGeorge
In the big bang model, redshift is caused by the stretching of light waves by cosmic expansion. See http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=misconceptions-about-the-2005-03
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is really a question. How can light or anything else travel from point A to point B, without consuming energy. Doesn't light traveling through space violate the conservation of energy?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was thinking that the cosmological constant (the dark energy) is a requirement to prevent light from violating the conservation of energy law. I thought only an expanding universe would keep light from violating this law by reducing its frequency and hence energy. Think of light as being embedded in space and stretched with it's expansion.
SUPERLUMINELLE
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-- James Ph. Kotsybar
The Universe is expanding,
Faster than the limit of light,
Beyond common understanding.
Cosmology is demanding.
Its study is by no means slight.
The Universe is expanding.
Physics’ heroes, quite outstanding,
Have applied their full mental might
Beyond common understanding.
There’s no point in reprimanding,
As we gaze out into the night,
The Universe is expanding.
The truth of fact is commanding.
Whatever is has to be right,
Beyond common understanding.
Einstein’s physics notwithstanding,
Much quicker than what we call bright,
The Universe is expanding
Beyond common understanding.
Dear Dr. Perlmutter, congratulation with the Nobel Prize 2011 and the tremendous Dark Energy (DE) discovery - the Problem Nr. 1 in the XXI century! Could you look in the “Gribov Periodical Multiverse” (GPM) concept, solving interrelated DE&DM&SUSY&Higgs problems. See: Gribov 2012. Dark Matter as Pico-Windows to physically equal Multiverse Worlds with Myriads Civilizations Around Us (in extra dimension). http://www2.hu-berlin.de/leibniz-sozietaet/journal/archive/13_12/01_gribov.pdf. Once we spooked about it by phone.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe GPM provides unifying physical alternative to the global Minkowski 4D-spacetime, it consists of elastic 3D-waveguides, periodically embedded into a global isotropic Euclidean 4D-hyperspace, filled by Diracian-like superfluid ghost medium - nongravitating, chargeless supersymmetric vacuum, which is built from Cooper-like (e-/e+) bosonic composites with elementary particles - holes-defects in it. Waveguided - orthogonal harmonics realize quantized rest mass, electrostatic and gravity charges creation mechanisms of elementary particles, being confined in the waveguides as the Einsteinian-like C4-quanta E4=hv4 via polygonal /\/\/\/\/\ C4-dynamics, kipping C4-gauge symmetry. This creates all the emergent SR & quantized Equivalence Principle - GR & QM & Kaluza’s cyclical condition, resulting of the same 3D-waveguided wave-interference. The GPM-period has waveguides thickness Lo~10(-10)cm = Compton length of electrons. There are physically equal coupled, periodical matter/antimatter (gravity/antigravity) Universes with enormous density ~10000000000 Universes/cm4.
The GPM design creates:
(1) the interconnected nature of DE&DM & flatness & accelerated bubble large-scale Universe structure expansion, (with estimated theoretical ratio DE/(DM + Ordinary Matter) ~74%/26% - very near to the latest observational data;
(2) string-like fermions / antifermions and black holes, all free of singularities;
(3) predicts antigravity in the antihydrogen - CERN / positronium - Mills lab gravity tests;
(4) the Cooper-like (e-/e+) composite - ghost SUSY, with zero vacuum energy density;
(5) absence of elementary Sparticles & Higgs bosons;
(6) explains the spin-nature of the Planck constant h and masslessness of bosonic Einsteinian C-photons - quasiparticles as spin waves in the cellular (e-/e+) vacuum medium;
(7) predicts physically equal periodical dark Universes, with enormous density of hyper-civilizations (placed proximally near 10 -100 light minutes in a R4-distance around us)!