• Question: What got you interested in the Big Bang and do you think you will ever get right to the beginning of it?

    Asked by to Laurence on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      That is a very good question, and I really like how you put it ‘right to the beginning of it’. It’s very nice, and it really tells what we are trying to do 🙂

      For the first part of your question, since I was very small, I always liked to ask ‘why?’ ‘how does this work?’ and questions like that. I really liked to look at things and feel I was understanding them. You know, a bit like a detective. I liked to get clues and figure out what the whole story was. Later I realized that in physics, that’s exactly what people are trying to do. They are the detective of nature. So I wanted to become a physicist. And when I learnt about cosmology, I thought that this was awesome, because there are not a lot of mysteries deeper than the origin of the Universe and how it all began. I just found that completely fascinating, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it! So I decided to learn more, and then I ended up doing what I do today!

      For the second part of your question, I think we are definitely making progress toward getting closer to the beginning. But it is a very complicated questions, because as we get closer and closer, the universe becomes so hot and dense that our current theories that we use to describe physics (general relativity and quantum mechanics) seem to break down. What that means is that if I try to calculate something, I get infinity everywhere, which makes no sense. Everything just go KABOUM! and stops working…

      To solve this problem, we need to come up with a new theory of nature, that is more fundamental than the theories we have already (these are fancy words to mean it’s more general, that it englobes both general relativity and quantum mechanics). That theory is called ‘quantum gravity’, but no one know what it is exactly yet. (String theory is could be that theory, but we are not sure yet.) Once we know what that theory is and once we understand it well, we will be able to say precisely what happened at the exact moment of the Big Bang.

      However, that doesn’t mean that all questions will be answer. I have a feeling that understanding the very moment of the big bang will open many more questions (although it’s hard to know which questions yet!).

Comments

  • sarahhedley commented on :

    That’s really interesting and I hope that you do manage to get to the beginning of it if it is possible! One more question, how would you use the prize money if you don’t mind me asking?

    • Photo: Laurence

      Laurence commented on :

      Thanks for your nice comment! And of course I don’t mind!
      Before this all started on Monday, what I thought is that I would really like to send every student who took part in this zone either a copy of ‘A brief history of time’ by Stephen Hawking, , or ‘The evolution of physics: the growth of ideas from early concepts to relativity and quanta’ by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld. I read those books when I was still in school myself. They were given to me when I was in school, and they fascinated me so much I am still doing physics today. For me it’s sort of a ‘pass it on’.

      I also want to save some of the money so send a number of copies of Chinese-translated versions to the university I visited in China back in 2012, in order to make small, modest steps in giving students the resources to learn by themselves, to be inspired to pursue their science passion further, to understand how science works and is done.

      But now, after almost a week of this, I think there has been so many amazing questions asked by the students that it would be amazing to publish a series of books with the questions and answers (that’s just an idea!). I started thinking of this because when I was a kid there was a show on the radio where every week a kid asked a question, and expert answered. After few years they published a series of 10 books, and they were instant best-sellers! I read them all and learnt a LOT from those about general science!

      What do you think?