Exploring the Mysteries of the Expanding Universe with Adam Riess

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What is the Hubble tension? How does it challenge our current understanding of the universe? Why do different methods of measuring the universe’s expansion yield different results? And does our cosmological model need a complete overhaul?

I had the honor of discussing all this and more with none other than Adam Riess. Riess is a renowned astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking research on the expansion of the universe. Through extensive measurements and collaborations with other scientists, Riess discovered an intriguing tension in the size of the expansion of the universe, which has been steadily increasing over the last decade. These results, which have reached a significant level of more than 5 sigma, have revealed an unexpected phenomenon: the universe's expansion rate seems to vary depending on whether we start from the beginning shortly after the Big Bang or from the present.

In this episode of Into the Impossible, Riess and I explore the challenges of measuring distances in the universe, the possible role of dark energy, and how this challenges the concept of the cosmological principle.

Tune in!

Key Takeaways:

00:00 Intro

01:03 Proving Einstein wrong

06:38 Struggling with experiment results

08:57 What is the Hubble tension?

18:45 Can curiosity be cultivated and sustained?

24:05 Measuring distances in the universe using parallax

32:54 The Hubble tension persists

38:56 Revising the cosmological principle

42:47 Gravitational lensing

51:03 Surprising JWST findings

54:33 Theoretical implications of the Hubble Tension measurements

56:47 Outro

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Additional resources:

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Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known.

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