Adam Riess

Adam Guy Riess (born December 16, 1969) is an American astrophysicist. Celebrated for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes, he received in the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and in 2011 the Nobel Prize in Physics.

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Quotes

I think one of the most amazing facts about the universe is that it is expanding. I never would have guessed it. Even as an undergraduate, once I’d learned a little physics, I would have thought that the universe was eternal, static, and always in equilibrium. So in graduate school when I found out that the universe was expanding, I was awestruck. Then I learned if we could measure the expanding universe, the way we record the growth of a child with marks on a doorframe ... , we could determine the age of the universe and predict its ultimate fate. This was staggering! I knew this is what I wanted to do. Since that time, charting the expanding universe to determine its nature has been my passion. Though I have to add: knowing what I know now, that the universe is not only expanding but also accelerating, I feel like King Alfonso X of Castile who saw Ptolemy’s theory of the Cosmos and reportedly said “If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on creation thus, I should have recommended something simpler.”
- My Path to the Accelerating Universe. Nobel Prize Lecture (nobelprize.org) (December 8, 2011).

Today we are able to make very precise measurements of the expansion rate of the universe by measuring the distances and redshifts of supernova explosions of Type Ia. The shift in a supernova’s spectrum due to the expansion of space gives its redshift (z) and the relation between redshift and distance is used to determine the expansion rate of the universe. Supernovae with greater redshifts, lying at greater distances, reveal the past expansion rate as their light was emitted at an epoch when the universe was younger.
Supernovae Type Ia were the suitable candidate for these measurements as you need objects that are very luminous (thus can be observed even when they are very far) and highly uniform (so that intrinsic scatter doesn't blur the signal). Supernovae Type Ia are the most luminous of the common supernova types, peaking at 4 billion solar luminosities, and thus allowing us to look at extreme large distances.
- An interview with Nobel Laureate Adam Riess. EP (Experimental Physics) Department News, CERN (16 September 2019). (interview conducted by Panos Charitos of CERN)

Dark energy is about the gravity of empty space, the gravity of the vacuum. And the vacuum is a concept that we address in quantum theory and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is physics on microscopic scales, while Einstein's theory of general relativity ... is physics on macroscopic scales. These two theories are both great, but they don't work together. We don't have what's called a quantum theory of gravity, the way the two are united. However, dark energy actually requires you to use both of these branches of physics. So our hope is that by observing how the universe actually does physics at that interface, we will learn how to unify those.
- „I'm interested in things that don't fit” – interview with Nobel laureate astrophysicist Adam Riess. MTA (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia; Hungarian Academy of Sciences) (9 June 2023).