DR. RONALD MALLETT: It's gotta be somethinga little bit more sophisticated than a DeLorean, but the possibility of travelling to the futureis real. DR. RONALD MALLETT: [Laughs] You got it. DR. RONALD MALLETT: I had to keep my passionfor time travel a secret for decades because I wanted to build up my credentials as a legitimatephysicist and the thing is is that any legitimate physicist who was talking about it was riskingprofessional suicide to talk about it. It's been a rocky road because you're not gettingthe support that you need because you're not telling people who might help you what itis you're trying to achieve, even those closest to you. And I can remember feeling very depressedbecause I felt like I was getting nowhere in trying to understand how to build a timemachine. And there would be times in which I would just sit in a dark room listeningto Simon & Garfunkel pondering whether all of my life had been a waste ...
The search for a single number, the Hubble constant,... ...the rate of expansion of our universe,... ...has consumed astronomers for generations. Finally, two powerful and independent methods... ...have refined its measurement to unprecedented precision. The only problem... is that they don't agree,... ...and it's causing to question... ...some of the most basic assumptions about the universe. In 1929, Edwin Hubble... discovered the universe. He gave us our first incontrovertible proof... ...that there are galaxies outside the Milky Way,... ...by measuring the distances to the spiral nebulae They were many millions of light years from us,... ...far outside the Milky Way, and so must be galaxies in their own right. Combined with the Doppler shift velocity measurements of Vesto Slipher,... ...Hubble revealed that the galaxies are not only receding from us,... ...but they are receding at a rate proportional to their distance. An impossibly vast universe had been discovered beyond...