It turns out the solipsists are right: we are all, each, at the centre of the universe. That includes Canberra’s small but internationally renowned Mount Stromlo Observatory, which on the cusp of the millennium demonstrated to astrophysicist Professor Brian Schmidt and his global team that the universe is expanding and furthermore that, to general astonishment, its diffusion is getting faster.
Using observations of red shift – a telltale emphasis on one end of the light spectrum – scientist Vesto Slipher established more than a hundred years ago that galaxies are moving away from us. Was Earth, as Brian Schmidt has written, the most special site in the entire universe?
In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason confirmed it was not: the entire universe is expanding, each bit of it growing further from every other. We and everything else are each the mobile point from which all else recedes. What occurred at the Big Bang was an inconceivably immense and abrupt commencing expansion. Then it slowed and, despite some implications of Einstein’s theories and other work, the assumption was that the universe was solemnly continuing to slow, its euphoria turning to fatigue, its engines very gradually running down.
Schmidt and his team couldn’t believe their findings when they suggested otherwise. Tracking Type 1a supernovae, especially bright, rare, ancient and reliable stars to observe, they found the red shift indicated they were moving out of frame at speed. They were accelerating.
It is now suggested that the universe did slow and then, about eight billion years ago, something changed in the relation of the known stuff of the universe with another presence: something presumed, drawing on Einstein’s insights, to be dark energy: unsuspected, immoderately mysterious, brilliantly pervasive.
It is now believed to constitute some 70 per cent of the substance of the universe. Meanwhile everything, from the cruising galaxies to the atoms forming our blood, is expanding towards infinity, gathering pace, hastening to a kind of ultimate diffusion. Extravagant, almost annihilatingly huge concepts have come from the little hill outside Canberra. Ideas sprinting towards us, even as they prove that everything is leaving.
The news broke in 1998. It continues to be questioned but still stuns. Elders from Lucretius to Martin Luther to Carl Sagan have reminded us of the titchiness of humanity, how the great emptiness both encloses and inhabits us, while a wholly new and utterly enigmatic presence seems to define the contours of reality. What does one make of this? A shrug, a scream, a song? Petrified awe, a flushed frisson at this intimation of cosmological mystery? “We have so long forgotten,” wrote the antiquarian Johann Burckhardt, “how to be intimate with immensity.”
“The universe does not care about humanity,” says Schmidt cheerfully in a phone call. “No. It does its own little thing and we exist in it and we observe it and we are the lucky beneficiaries of having the universe that allows us to exist. But that universe is reality for everyone.”
Schmidt has had nearly 30 years to come to terms with the discovery – earning with his colleagues Adam Riess and a different team’s leader, Saul Perlmutter, the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics and many other awards – so he sounds sanguine. Having concluded eight years as vice-chancellor at Australian National University in 2023, however, his appetite for research is undiminished. He is back at the observatory studying neutron stars and the southern sky, always in demand to explain the revelations and to share his enthusiasm for public science education.
Schmidt sees the 1998 discovery as an invitation. “It is an opportunity to reflect and to interact,” he says. “Science is ultimately a philosophy to understand the universe, and the universe can be beautiful; it can be ugly. Some of the details I love, other people may not. It’s tedious to some people, but I think understanding the universe is quite a beautiful thing.”
“How amazing it is, that we here, as puny little humans, on puny little Earth, have managed to understand the universe in such detail.”
Reactions to cosmic epiphanies, like the process of their scientific investigation, like the motive apparatus of physics, are dynamic. Uncertainty and flux are surely appropriate, as are enchantment and experiment and creativity. One reflection, coming to Hobart this month, is directly inspired by Schmidt’s discovery. Vast, composed and directed by Constantine Koukias, will immerse guests in a sensory evocation of universe ecstasy.
Koukias’s work, originally suggested and part-commissioned by former science minister Christopher Schacht, is an ambitious and original response to the concept of an infinitely spreading reality freighted with dark energy. Subtle lighting effects by Jason James and a deep collaboration with sound designer Willem van Erven Dorens throw more than a hundred sampled or live voices and dozens of instrumental lines around multiple speakers in Hobart’s wonderful vintage Theatre Royal. It will be part of Beaker Street Festival, the yearly celebration of science and culture that lights up the city’s cold streets with a neon glow of enthusiasm for knowledge.
Koukias, who grew up in Hobart but has long been based in the Netherlands, began work on the project during the Covid lockdown. In that unprecedented expanse of time, he discovered his own rich exploration in reflection on expanding time and space. He has been making performance artworks for nearly 40 years, often with IHOS Music Theatre and Opera, which he co-founded. “I had written quite a lot of religious music, because my background is Greek. Like works with prayer bells, which deal with different religious traditions from the Hebrew to the Greek to the Latin. Sometimes little elements of Byzantine music in my operas.” Mystical contemplation sits well with him.
Through decades of work that ranges from large opera events to mobile installations, he is no stranger to experiment and challenge. “But my gosh, at first it was completely overwhelming. I don’t have that scientific background and I was trying to get my head around something that the scientists know is there, but they don’t know how or why. So that concept of the intangible was really interesting to me. I did quite a lot of reading and spoke to friends. And I said, ‘Can you help me?!’ ”
He had several conversations with Brian Schmidt. “I was quite intimidated before I met him the first time, but he’s absolutely charming and made me feel very comfortable. I showed him my program notes and he was very happy with them. I thought, Phew, okay! It’s hard when you’ve got someone with a brain like that. He said, ‘Look, you’re thinking all the right things. You know as much as we know. This is what it is.’ And, you know, music deals with the intangible all the time. So there’s a lovely sort of synchronicity there.”
“Art is an interesting way to interact with the world,” says Schmidt. “Sometimes science does it directly, sometimes indirectly, but ultimately if you think about music and art, it is reflecting the Earth, the universe, in all sorts of weird ways. And ultimately, that connects to the science, because we use science to understand those things. And so they are connected.”
Like art, science, he says, is a universal language. “It is not actually that culturally specific. Some people would argue that point, but I would argue, it translates very well to every culture on the planet, and it’s not the only culture and the only philosophy, but it’s quite a universal philosophy that can bring people together.”
It was first music and then science that got Schmidt to Canberra. Long before marriage to an Australian brought him here after an American upbringing and education, Schmidt first visited Australia as a teen, playing French horn in a touring youth symphony orchestra before taking up physics and astronomy. He loves music. “Pretty much any type, at this point. Uh, not a real K-pop fan, to be honest, but maybe I’ll get across it. In art I try to be as open as I can. I’d describe myself as omnivorous when it comes to art and music.”
Originally Koukias planned a piano concerto with orchestra. Instead, he worked for years with long-time colleague van Erven Dorens and emerged with an iterative, overlapping, carefully sequenced and dazzling aural soundscape.
In Vast, tracks are mingled and evolving: three live performers are amplified, with delay and fader effects, and Koukias will be standing alertly by the sound engineers directing effects live for the show, each one varied from the previous. Plans for performing it in total darkness gave way to a synced light show that sketches the fleeting, vanishing, spangled universe without distracting from the engulfing power of the musical composition.
Each seat in the theatre will receive a different experience.
“It can’t use text,” Koukias explains, “because once you start using text, you’re going somewhere totally different. No, it is completely universal. It’s just about sound and colour, texture.”
With wordless vocals, braided instrumentals and poly-aural sound, the piece sits in the contemporary approach for immersive and intersectional work that combines forms and confounds expectations: apt for a response to scientific work that does the same.
Art, Schmidt affirms, is an important resistance to “being machines, us not being sociable worker ants. We are more than that.” It’s a way to think beyond the mechanical. And beyond, like the supernovae scooting away in all directions, to unexpected regions – “like kindness”, he says.
“Thinking beyond the mechanical is what we get our leaps of inspiration from, and to do new and different things beyond what we already know. Right? Things not yet imagined, beyond the bounds of knowledge. And personally, for me, I find art, music, it’s a catalyst for my creative self. For humanity to be happy and to thrive, it has to think in many different ways, and art and music are really important parts of that. I’m always very keen to work with artists. I see art as a really important part of what we do as humans.”
He has not had a chance to see Vast, which will be fully manifested for rehearsal in the couple of days before its world premiere at the festival this week, but he will be in Hobart for the event and to appear himself in an onstage conversation with Koukias and at a stargazing dinner outside Hobart at – happily for Schmidt, a part-time winemaker – a vineyard.
“I would hope [the show] gives people a chance to immerse themselves in the music but also reflect,” he says. “Reflect on the universe, our place in it. And I hope, reflect on how amazing it is, that we here, as puny little humans, on puny little Earth, have managed to understand the universe in such detail, and our place in it: that is a huge achievement of humanity.”
How does he sit with it, the implications of his discovery?
“I’m completely comfortable with it and I’m in awe at what humanity is able to do,” Schmidt says. “And it gives me optimism that we can overcome many of the issues we have here on planet Earth, it not being that big. But our ability to comprehend the universe is really stunning, as a collective of eight billion people. So, for me, it’s part of an optimism that we can really control our destiny if we put our minds to it.”
Human voices in a canticle of impassive cosmic mystery, 650 people seated together in a shared sensory and revelatory encounter, the colours and lights of Beaker Street Festival in the chill dark of Hobart’s winter nights: we are tiny and hurtling gradually apart, but we know how to come together and we know, under our magnificent night skies, how to make the smallest things shine.
“It is,” – Koukias searches for the right words – “it’s the most significant concert work I’ve ever done. It really is.”