Astrophysicist Alex Filippenko explains how the scientific method applies to entrepreneurship. He recounts the 1998 discovery that the universe's expansion is accelerating, a finding that won Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess the Nobel Prize, and uses analogies like ping-pong balls and raisin bread to show how entrepreneurs should balance big-picture thinking with attention to detail.
Chapters
I want to show you how many of the things that I talk about today will be applicable to your lives as entrepreneurs, in business and commerce and technology. I want to show you how the methods of science actually apply in so much of life, and especially in successful entrepreneurship. So let me just start by saying that the process of science is to gather and assimilate data and to come up with a better understanding, a better model of how the world works. How the universe works, how do things within the universe work, all right? And we do this by obtaining and analyzing data and by formulating testable hypotheses. And we test them with new observations, with experiments. And to the degree that the observations and experiments verify our predictions, we pat ourselves on the back and we say, okay, our model works so far. But there could always be some experiment or observation that does not conform with your predictions, and that would be then a chance to either revise one's hypothesis or, in some cases, come up with a completely different hypothesis, a revolutionary thing, kind of like Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which says that gravity is due to a curvature of space and time. You know, a wacky idea that, in fact, appears to be true. And Even the GPS system depends on physicists' and engineers' understanding of this weird curvature of space and time. All right? So this has broad applications. The scientific method is a model for strategic thinking and execution in business, technology, for entrepreneurs. So these are the kinds of things I hope that you will take away from this talk. I will show you specifically what we did, and I'll show you how the This can be applied more generally to other walks of life, especially the kinds of things you guys are interested in, because this whole process incorporates general principles that indeed can accelerate your career in the corporate world. All right? So, the thing I'm going to be talking about is this discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. We made this discovery in 1998, but it took about 13 years for it to be confirmed and verified to a sufficient degree by other scientists that the Nobel Committee decided to give the Nobel Prize in Physics to the discovery. It takes years to make sure something is correct. And although 51 people contributed to the 2 research papers that announced this discovery, the rules of the Nobel, other than the one in the Peace Prize, which can be given to corporations and even the European Union, I guess, The ones in science can only be given to 3 people, and so they are typically given to the leaders of the teams. And the 2 teams were led by Saul Perlmutter, a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. He led the Supernova Cosmology Project. He's in the middle there. And then Brian Schmidt, of the Australian National University, led this High Redshift Supernova Search Team. And then, my postdoctoral scholar, at left there, Adam Riess, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University, He led the analysis of Schmidt's team and correctly, in my opinion, was also recognized with the prize. So, you know, it was really great that they were so honored, but these gentlemen understood that without the rest of us working in the trenches, they wouldn't have made the discovery. And so they spent a good fraction of their prize money flying the rest of us out to Stockholm to participate in Nobel Week in December of 2011. And so that was really fun. Here's Schmidt's team right after the awarding of the Nobel Prize. I actually was the one person who was a member of both teams at one time or another, but I couldn't be at 2 places at the same time, so I couldn't be in both of the team photos. But anyway, here we are right after the prize, and we like to say that, you know, we participated in all the parties, all the celebrations, just about everything except receiving the gold medal and the million bucks. But oh well, you know, that's the way it goes. Thank you. So, the way one makes big discoveries, of course, is by focusing on the big picture. Think great thoughts. Be ambitious. And you guys already have a great start because you're attending Draper University. Details are crucial. You know, to get it right, the devil is in the details. But don't get lost in the minutiae. Keep the big picture. Keep the forest in mind at all times. And so, throughout the time that we were doing the research that led to this discovery, though we were embroiled in the various details of trying to get the measurements and the analysis right, we never lost sight of the big picture, our goal. And that was to determine, really, what the fate of the universe would be. Now, you might wonder, what do you mean by fate of the universe? Well, it turns out we've known for the better part of a century that the universe is expanding. And this was a discovery made by Edwin Hubble. In 1929, Hubble studied these giant collections of stars called galaxies. We live in one such galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy. This is not a picture of our galaxy, but it looks something like this. It's a couple of hundred billion stars gravitationally bound in a gigantic structure, like 100,000 light-years across. So, light travels at the speed of light, 6 trillion miles a year. And it's 100,000 of those 6 trillion miles across, this galaxy. These are giant structures, okay? Island universes, in a sense. And he noticed that they're all moving away from us. So, here we are. There we are, right here, the Milky Way Galaxy. And all these other galaxies are moving away from us. The Universe is expanding. And there's a— Something a bit strange before I move on. You know, what looks a bit strange in this diagram? The middle? Yeah, we're in the middle. Exactly right. You know, why would we be in the middle? You know, do all the other galaxies not like us? Is it something we said? Or do we smell? Or are all these other galaxies lactose intolerant? Get it? Milky Way Galaxy, lactose intolerant galaxies. When I talk to my students in my introductory class on astronomy, when I tell them about the expanding Universe and I show them this diagram, I say, what is it? Are we from Stanford or something? A fine institution, but, you know, in fact, a truly outstanding institution, but not quite as outstanding as Cal. Okay? So anyway, major rivals. No, we don't think that we're in any special privileged place. We actually think that the Universe is a uniformly expanding Universe, and that no matter which— galaxy we happen to be in, we would see all the others moving away. And let me give you a simple analogy. Here's a 1-dimensional Universe with a bunch of ping-pong balls. Those are the galaxies. They don't expand, they're gravitationally bound. But the space between them expands. And so, if we're on this orange one, and we look out, we see all the others moving away. And we call up our friend over here and we say, hey, we're in the middle of the Universe. But this friend says, well— I'm in the middle of the Universe. I see everyone going away, too, so I'm the middle. And to break the tie, we call up our friend in some other galaxy, and they say, well, no, we're in the middle. So which one is right? None of them are right. None of them are at the unique center. They all think they're at the center, but there is no unique center, at least not in the dimensions that are physically accessible, okay? So this is a nice analogy, alright, for an expanding Universe with no unique center. And don't worry about the finite rubber band. The Universe is either infinite or it wraps around itself. But this, I think, is something that allows you to wrap your mind around this expansion. A 3-dimensional version of this, a 2-dimensional representation of which is shown here, is an expanding loaf of raisin bread. The yeast uniformly fills the dough. You let it bake for an hour. Let's say it doubles in size. That raisin there, marked, sees all the others moving away. So it thinks it's at the center, but all the other raisins see all the others moving away as well, right? So there is no unique center. Our Universe is kind of like that. And again, it's either an infinite loaf of bread or it wraps around itself. Alright? So in astrophysics, we deal with some pretty abstract concepts. We need ways to explain them to people and to wrap our own minds around them. And this is a good lesson for life and business overall. Clarify with analogies and examples. You know, you might be discussing something brand new, you've got some hot idea, and your colleagues don't understand what the hell you're talking about. So you might have to clarify with examples and analogies. Simple analogies can illustrate difficult concepts. Okay? Give familiar examples from real life. I tell my students they can go home and make one of these things for their parents and explain to them About how, in an expanding Universe, each galaxy thinks it's at the center. All right?
