The Cosmic Microwave Background and Winning the Nobel Prize | John Mather

Robinson’s Podcast #150 - John Mather: The Big Bang and the Cosmic Microwave Background

John Mather is a Senior Astrophysicist in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He was the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for his role as Principle Investigator for the Far IR Absolute Spectrophotometer on COBE, which observed the cosmic microwave background and helped support the big bang theory of the origin of the universe. John has also worked on many other projects for NASA, including the James Webb Space Telescope. In this episode, Robinson and John discuss the big bang and the cosmic microwave background before detailing the COBE satellite, its extraordinary findings, and the work that led to winning the Nobel Prize.

Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.

[ravichanana]

My equation says dE/E = dm/m for the Universe. Since the total energy of the Universe is constant, the change in energy from the above formula is zero. So the change in mass is also zero. This means that the mass is constant. This shows that the Universe is static.

[thomaswascher]

🤨Still the Equivalence Principle (EP) is valid: Expansion is not measured directly, but only by redshift and that is subject to two interpretations: Either accelerated motion of the space ("Big Bang") or a constant gravitational field in space ("Static Universe"), -
both reveil redshift and have equal elegibility or justification, because in principle both interpretations are not distinguishible in their measurement results from each other. E.g. the CMB would also occur at redshift of ~1, 200 in a static universe.