The Nobel Prize Winner Who Thinks We Have the Universe All Wrong
Cosmologists are fighting over everything.
Hasnain says:
“Whether the cracks—if they really are cracks—will widen remains to be seen. Many new observations will come, not just from DESI, but also from the new Vera Rubin Observatory in the Atacama Desert, and other new telescopes in space. On data-release days for years to come, the standard model’s champions and detractors will be feverishly refreshing their inboxes. For the moment, though, Riess believes that the theorists have become complacent. When he reaches out to them for help in making sense of his empirical results, their responses disappoint him. “They’re like, Yeah, that’s a really hard problem,” he said. “Sometimes, I feel like I am providing clues and killing time while we wait for the next Einstein to come along.”
When I talked to Riess for the last time, he was at a cosmology conference in Switzerland. He sounded something close to giddy. “When there’s no big problems and everything’s just kind of fitting, it’s boring,” he said. Now among his colleagues, he could feel a new buzz. The daggers are out. A fight is brewing. “The field is hot again,” he told me. A new universe suddenly seems possible.”