MSU professor draws universal recognition
BOZEMAN — A Montana State University professor is getting international recognition for measuring the width of the universe and, in the process, ruling out earlier theories about its creation.
Neil Cornish, an Australian-born astrophysicist, shrugs off the discovery, calling it a byproduct of his original study to prove the universe was limited in size.
While that study failed, Cornish did discover in the process that the universe measures 78 billion light years in diameter and shows no evidence of being finite in size.
The revelation, which made Discovery magazine’s list of the top 100 science discoveries of 2004, also ruled out earlier models that suggested the universe was created from nothing and came with a particular curvature.
The universe, Cornish said, has no “center.”
“People ask where the Big Bang happened,” he said. “Well, it happened right here. It happened all around us. It’s just space uniformly expanding in all directions.”
In determining the dimensions of the universe, Cornish and his team looked for matching patterns called “circles in the sky” in microwave background radiation maps — images of the universe 13.5 billion years ago when it was 200 million years old.
On Earth, if a person set out walking east, they would return to where they started. Thus, Cornish explained, if the universe were finite, light should ultimately return to the point from which it started, making it visible from different directions.
The team, however, found no evidence of such wrapping light. Because the universe is still rapidly expanding, they aren’t likely to see evidence of it anytime soon either, Cornish said.
“The space between galaxies is growing,” he said. “Because the expansion is accelerating, and because the distance between galaxies is growing, we’re actually going to see less and less as time goes on.”
Right now, Cornish said, humanity is seeing as much of the universe as it ever will get to.
What the universe is expanding into is a hard concept to grasp.
“The universe isn’t expanding into anything,” Cornish said. “Space itself grows. Space makes space. There isn’t any ‘outside the universe.’ It’s a very difficult thing to picture.”
As a boy in rural Australia, Cornish spent many nights looking at the stars. After graduating from Melbourne University, he took a job as a NASA research fellow to study astrophysics at Princeton University. It wasn’t until Cornish went to Cambridge University to work with Stephen Hawking, the author of “A Brief History in Time,” that his vision of the abstract began to change.
“Hawking taught me to not rely so much on the algebra and the equations when solving problems,” Cornish said. “He said to work in terms of pictures. He visualizes these things, these geometries in space and time. That kind of technique is a powerful way to solve problems.”