We are all made of stars: Nobel winner urges Frostburg State audience to think its way across space and time.

Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist John C. Mather spoke to a standing-room-only crowd May 12 in Compton Science Center at Frostburg State University, but anyone expecting the visiting dignitary to utter cosmic certainties was certainly disappointed.

 (Rob Forsythe, FSU assistant professor of mathematics (left), talks to Nobel winner John C. Mather about non-Euclidean geometry.)

Instead, the senior project scientist for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, who works at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., emphasized uncertainty throughout his talk, titled “From the Big Bang to the Nobel Prize and the End of the Universe.”

Illustrated by some of the slides that were part of Mather’s Nobel lecture in 2006, his talk was punctuated by qualifiers: “probably true,” “possibly right,” “could have happened,” “might be,” “probably about right.” He repeatedly reminded his audience that even the best and most current scientific knowledge is provisional, to be superseded as better knowledge comes along.

FSU mathematics major Rachel Skipper admires the autograph of Nobel winner John C. Mather.

Mather recalled that in 1956, his teacher demonstrated to the satisfaction of a classroom of 10-year-olds that the continents obviously had been sliding around through the years, given how well South America and Africa could fit together like jigsaw-puzzle pieces. She then added, “Scientists don’t believe this.”

At the time, Mather explained, most scientists rejected the centuries-old notion of continental drift, because the mechanism that could cause such movement was unknown. The theory of plate tectonics wasn’t developed until the 1960s, as deep-sea explorations helped bring about a revolution in the Earth sciences.

That’s why mere confirmation of our theories, Mather said, is the second best hope for the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, the world’s biggest man-made particle accelerator. “It would be most interesting if the theory we’ve got is wrong.”

“Merely” confirming a theory, however, was good enough to earn Mather and his colleague George Smoot the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics. They were the first to measure and map the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe, the all-pervasive remnant of the Big Bang discovered at Bell Labs in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in their own Nobel-winning work.

“That’s what we do,” Mather said, his “we” meaning all scientists. “We draw straight lines to fit the data.”

Mather and Smoot’s measurements, using NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), perfectly matched those predicted by Big Bang theory. Mather called the achievement “one of the most persuasive proofs we have that the Big Bang is a good story.” The Nobel committee went further, calling Mather and Smoot’s work “the starting point for cosmology as a precision science.”

The biggest compliment of all, however, came from the world’s most famous scientist, when he saw the COBE-generated spectrograph showing the radiation was unevenly distributed. “When Stephen Hawking saw this picture,” Mather told the audience, “he said it was the most important scientific discovery of the century, if not of all time. I thought it was very sweet of him to say that about our work.”

People with older television sets can see the evidence for themselves, Mather noted. “If you tune your TV up between channels, you see a snowy pattern. About 1 percent of that is background radiation from the Big Bang.”

In fact, Mather pointed out, every human being on Earth is composed of particles blown from distant stars, matter the late Carl Sagan famously called “star stuff.” “We are recycled many times over,” Mather said. “Our material likely came from thousands, possibly millions, of stars.”

Or, in the words of Mather’s slide: “Your chin is made of exploded stars!”

Mather was introduced by Kelly Seaton, president of FSU’s chapter of mathematics honors society Kappa Mu Epsilon, who herself had invited him to campus.

For all the progress made in his lifetime, Mather said, astrophysicists and cosmologists today face a host of big questions: What’s dark matter? What’s dark energy? Why is there matter, but no antimatter? Was Einstein right about relativity? How were chemical elements, stars, galaxies, planets formed? Are we alone in the universe? (“Probably not,” Mather said.) How did Earth become habitable?

“This all tells us we need a new telescope,” Mather said.

He explained that Earth-bound radio telescopes already are sensitive enough to detect the infrared output of a single astronaut standing on the lunar surface – assuming, of course, that humans ever go there again. Mather’s current project, NASA’s Webb Space Telescope, will allow humans to see deep into the infrared, picking up heat radiation from the earliest stars and galaxies. It will orbit far beyond the Moon at a point where interfering light from the sun, Earth and moon can be minimized.

An international project, the telescope will be launched from French Guiana no earlier than 2014. The Webb is designed to work for at least five years but will carry fuel for a decade, and the researchers hope for the best, Mather said. Thanks in part to repairs carried out by Space Shuttle astronauts, Mather noted, the Hubble Space Telescope is still working 20 years after launch.

Such repair jobs will be out of the question for the Hubble’s successor, as the Webb will be too far away for humans to reach directly. Fortunately, much maintenance can be done remotely, Mather said. “We’ve learned from Hubble how to do the math when we have a problem,” he said. “We’re now making lemonade from those lemons.”

Scientists hope the Webb will provide insights into the Big Bang, the abrupt initial (and ongoing) expansion of the universe. Mather pithily summarized Edwin Hubble’s momentous 1929 discovery that the universe is expanding: “Almost everything is going away.”

To Mather, the term “Big Bang” reinforces the popular misconception that the universe originated in an explosion. Mather prefers “Horrendous Space Kablooey,” the term used in Bill Watterson’s “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip, because in fact there was nothing to explode; what happened was far weirder, and far more difficult to describe.

Of course, the universe is hard to describe, too, Mather noted. “There’s no center, and there’s no edge that we can find. That also means it’s impossible for me to draw a picture of it.” Any illustration purporting to show the shape of the universe employs a lot of artistic license, he said.

He added that scientists don’t even have a satisfactory definition for such commonplace terms as space and time. “We don’t know what space is, but we don’t know what time is, either. We measure both of them, but we don’t know what they are. Maybe one of you students will figure out what space and time are.”

An unlikely prospect? Not to Mather.

“You can get awfully far by thinking,” he said. “You can’t get everywhere, but you can get awfully far.”

Quotes from John C. Mather’s May 12 talk at Frostburg State University:

• “The universe is almost completely empty.”
• “All life that we know of shares the same genetic code. When you’re having dinner, whether you’re a vegetarian or not, you’re eating your cousins.”
• “What’s at the bottom of a black hole? Some people say it might be an opening into another universe. That’s speculative, of course. … Stephen Hawking told us, and I think that it’s true, that if you wait around for zillions and zillions of years – which is much more than trillions – the black hole will actually evaporate. It’s hard to measure these things, though.”
• “The Andromeda nebula is heading toward us. We’ve got about five billion years to wait. Most of the stars will just go past each other, like raindrops.” The galactic gas clouds of Andromeda and the Milky Way, on the other hand, will intermingle and react in countless interesting ways. “It will be dramatic. We ought to stick around and watch.”
• On the far distant future, after the Earth has been incinerated and the galaxy rent asunder: “It’ll be a difficult time to be an astronomer: nowhere to live and nothing to see.”
• On the possibility of life beneath the surface of the frozen seas of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon: “It’s probably not dolphins. It could be pond scum.”
• On the science-fiction books he devoured as a New Jersey farm boy: “Even then I could tell they weren’t really about science, but they were wonderfully inspirational, getting us to think about space travel and so on. It turned out to be harder than they wrote in the books.”
• On paranoid fears of the Large Hadron Collider: “Nature’s already done this experiment. Cosmic rays naturally collide with one another at energies far greater than those artificially generated by the LHC, yet no black hole has swallowed the Earth yet.”
• On the “2012 prophecy” hoax: “If the Mayan astronomers were alive today, they’d just add another digit to the calendar.”

Andy Duncan is an assistant professor of English at Frostburg State University, where he teaches journalism classes that draw upon his 12 years as a full-time writer and editor for newspapers and magazines, in print and online.