Space's Deepest Secrets

The theory of cosmic inflation, which...

On march 17, 2014,

a team of astronomers made an announcement

that triggered sensational headlines around the world.

They've detected gravitational waves, or ripples,

in what they believe is the oldest light in the sky.

It's being called one of the greatest discoveries in science.

By using a telescope at the south pole,

the researchers had detected a signal

indicating gravitational waves,

folds in the fabric of space and time

that were made just fractions of a second after the big bang.

This is the farthest back we will ever have seen

in the history of the universe.

This is the inside story of scientists who announced

one of the greatest discoveries of the century...

This would be one of the final confirmations

not only of inflationary theory

but also the general theory of relativity.

Only to have it called into doubt.

As happens in every scientific claim,

people begin to look more closely

and examine whether or not that claim is really justified.

It's been an emotional roller coaster for the team.

captions paid for by discovery communications

The south pole, nearly 10,000 feet above sea level,

one of the coldest and remotest places on earth.

Here can be found earth's clearest view of space

for the telescopes operated by astronomer John Kovac.

Well, welcome to the south pole.

Behind me, in these crates are parts of our latest telescope.

We're gonna spend the next few weeks

putting it together here at the south pole.

And then it's gonna begin scanning the skies,

looking at the oldest light in the universe.

The signals that we hope that we'll be searching for, though,

are from gravitational waves

that come from a period even earlier,

in the first tiny fraction of a second

of the universe's history.

Gravitational waves were first predicted by Albert Einstein

almost exactly a century ago.

Distortions of space and time

should propagate through the universe

like waves in the ocean.

The gravitational wave is really just what it sounds like.

It's a wave of gravity.

It's a ripple in space-time.

Gravitational waves can arise whenever you have

a rapid acceleration of mass in the universe.

So a classic example is colliding black holes

spiraling around each other.

If a gravitational wave much, much larger

than any one we could ever possibly imagine

were to pass right through this room,

it would look like the room would get squashed

and then expanded.

It would pull everything apart, squeeze it all together,

pull it apart again with a certain pattern.

So it would distort the space-time in the room.

Theoretically, gravitational waves

should be produced on a regular basis by any massive disturbance

such as colliding black holes or exploding stars.

LIGO is an experiment that uses lasers in an attempt to detect

these recently produced gravity waves.

But the gravitational waves

that John Kovac and his team hope to find

have a much more ancient origin.

The gravitational waves that we're searching for

come from the very first moments after the big bang.

The first tiny, tiny fraction of a second after the beginning.

Zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero

with 34 zeros and a one seconds.

The very first instance of time.

Every year, John Kovac and the team travel here

to the Amundsen-Scott south pole station,

where their telescopes are based.

It is one of the three

permanent U.S. research stations in Antarctica.

And to get here requires a ski-equipped LC-130 aircraft.

The air temperature

is about minus-30 centigrade in the summertime.

You step out of the aircraft,

and the cold hits you like a slap in the face.

You actually have to breathe very carefully

to avoid burning your lungs.

The south pole station can accommodate up to 150 people.

This is where the bicep team stays

when carrying out work on their telescopes.

So there's a big-sized station

with a cafeteria with all the rooms,

and a basketball court and a greenhouse.

And then about a mile from there is where our experiments are.

The team uses two telescopes to search for gravitational waves,

the Keck array and bicep.

The south pole is a great place

for us to put our microwave telescopes

because here at south pole, the air is the coldest on earth.

It's incredibly dry.

There's very little that gets in the way

of our microwave telescopes' observations.

It's almost like the telescopes being in space.

That's really important because the telescopes are searching

for exceedingly faint signals, signals that might arise from

gravitational waves in the early universe.

Doing astronomy at the bottom of the earth

brings its own unique challenges.

The team works on their telescopes

during the few months of the antarctic summer.

But it is in the antarctic winter

when most of the observations are done.

South pole station is only accessible

for about three months out of each year.

The temperatures are only warm enough to fly planes in and out

for that period of time.

So when we take one of these telescopes,

like Bicep1 or Bicep2, to the south pole,

we come in with a team,

and we work furiously for three months

to try to get everything to work,

to put it all together, to calibrate it, to tune it up,

to get it in pristine condition.

And then, all of us get on an airplane and leave,

except for one guy.

He watches the plane go

and knows there isn't going to be another one

for about nine months.

Engineer Steffen Richter was the one guy left

to operate the Bicep2 telescope over three antarctic winters,

when the sun doesn't rise for six months.

Back in those days, we had to top off the telescope

with liquid helium every three days.

And that had to happen no matter what the weather was.

The temperature can range anywhere

from minus-40 to minus-73 centigrade,

which is close to minus 100 in Fahrenheit.

There's a daily walk out to the telescope,

just to go to work...

There's no traffic.

There's beautiful stars out there,

and there's Aurora almost every day in the winter.

I personally think

it's one of the most beautiful commutes in the world.

It's akin to being in space.

You get an amazingly unique experience

when you spend a winter at south pole.

When the team first started hunting for gravitational waves,

the prospect for success seemed remote.

It's kind of a brave thing to devote years of your life

to going after the signal that may or may not be there.

A colleague of mine called this a wild goose chase.

A wild goose chase.

A wild goose chase.

It was described in those terms

by Andrew Lange, my mentor at Caltech.

He like to say, you know,

it's better to fail at something important

than to succeed at something unimportant.

So I think it's with this mind set

that we collectively started doing that back in 2003.

When John Kovac and his team

embarked on their epic challenge,

there was not a single observation

from any telescope in the world

indicating that gravitational waves actually exist.

What there was was one man and his theory,

the theory that started this entire wild goose chase.

Okay. We can get started now.

Good morning, everybody.

This is the man who inspires his colleagues

to spend their lives on a scientific goose chase.

Professor Alan Guth.

He's one of the world's most eminent cosmologists.

Back in the 1970s when Alan was at the beginning of his career,

he grew frustrated with what was known as the big bang model.

This is the idea that the entire observable universe

emerged from a tiny, hot, dense region of space

and has been expanding and cooling ever since.

The conventional big bang theory

described how the universe expanded, how it cooled,

how the matter coagulated to form galaxies and structures.

Oddly, though, in spite of its name,

it really said nothing about the bang itself.

I like to say that it didn't tell us what banged,

why it banged, or what happened before it banged.

In December 1979,

Alan came up with a revolutionary new idea

for what happened in the first fractions of a second

after the big bang.

He named his theory the theory of inflation,

and it was to have a profound effect on cosmology.

These, actually, are copies of the notebook pages

that I wrote in the night

that I came up with the idea that has become inflation.

I went home one night

to my rented house in Menlo park, California,

and wrote down the basic equations.

And I became very excited about it,

and I even made a comment here with a double box around it,

which is not the sort of thing I do very often.