UNSW team wins Eureka Prize for Research and Innovation

Five researchers from UNSW, working in a team including ACA members, has won the 2012 Eureka Prize for Research and Innovation.

Please join us in congratulating Professor John Webb, Professor Victor Flambaum, Dr Julian King and Dr Julian Berengut, University of New South Wales, and Associate Professor Michael Murphy, Swinburne University of Technology.

        The four laws of physics - electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak forces - are constant for space and time: that's what makes them laws.

But what if these forces weren't constant across the universe? Textbooks physics would be turned on its head and the implications for science would be profound.

That is precisely what a team of scientists from the University of New South Wales and Swinburne University of Technology has discovered. By probing physics in 300 places in the universe they have discovered something extraordinary: the strength of one of the four forces, electromagnetism, changes gradually from one side of the universe to another.

This pioneering research which challenges the conventional view that the universe is homogeneous and measurable in any direction without variation - at least in relation to the fundamental laws of nature - has been undertaken by Professor John Webb, Professor Victor Flambaum, Dr Julian King and Dr Julian Berengut, from the School of Physics at the University of New South Wales, and Associate Professor Michael Murphy from the Centre of Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology.

For their work, which has generated a huge amount of new international research and sparked widespread interest in fundamental science, the team has won the 2012 University of New South Wales Eureka Prize for Scientific Research.

The prize is part of the most comprehensive and prestigious national science awards, the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes. Last night at this supernova of science awards, in a room of distinguished and illustrious guests, the winners were announced and science's brightest new stars blazed their names into Eureka history.

This is Australian science at its best. For more than 20 years, the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes have recognised the role of science in our community and rewarded the excellence of scientists, educators and communicators who continue to shape our society. Being awarded an Australian Museum Eureka Prize is a life-changing moment for the winner.

"Beneath the mind-boggling complexity of the cosmos there has always been a solid foundation: confidence that the laws of nature are always and everywhere the same. Thanks to the work of Professor Webb and the team, that cherished notion might have to be discarded," says Frank Howarth, Director of the Australian Museum.

The team's astronomical research was enabled by an earlier breakthrough by Professors Flambaum and Webb more than a decade ago which immediately allowed them to improve the precision for measuring physical laws elsewhere in the universe by a factor of 10. Their new method, the ‘Many Multiplet (MM) method, is now used by most university research groups around the world.

Over the past few years, the team has applied the MM method to astronomical observations of quasars, which are regions at the centre of distant galaxies. The time it takes light to travel to the most distant quasars is more than 90% of the age of the universe and the information contained in the quasar light remains frozen in time, providing a snapshot of the universe.

Using the large optical and radio telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, the team studied the trace of gas clouds in the early universe and compared them with the same elements measured in laboratories on earth. They observed very slight but significant differences.

They explain these by using the analogy of a supermarket barcode. The relative positions of the strips in the barcode form a unique identity for each item. Similarly, in distant gas clouds, there are distinct lines caused by various chemical elements. Just like the barcode, the relative positions of these lines can be measured with high precision and the result is amazing: the unique patterns of lines for the same elements in the laboratory measurements today are slightly different from those seen in distant galaxy halos.

For decades scientists have puzzled over the fact that the laws of physics seem to be finely tuned to favour our existence. Some have chosen to explain this mystery as ‘the hand of God'; others have put our good fortune down to mere chance.

The team's results provide some new light on the ‘fine-tuning' problem: if the laws of physics gradually change from one region of the universe to another, then it may simply be that we reside in that part of the universe where the local ‘by-laws' are perfect for life as we know it. Elsewhere, that may not be the case, and the universe may be radically different, with a different periodic table, different chemistry and biology, or even no biology at all.

Professor Webb has gone to incredible lengths to persuade colleagues that his discoveries shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, and he has done more than anyone to try to prove himself wrong. If he and his team are right, their findings will trigger a revolution in both physics and cosmology. Professor Paul Davies has described the work as, "nothing short of a tour-de-force."

The $10,000 University of New South Wales Eureka Prize for Scientific Research is awarded to a researcher for outstanding curiosity-driven scientific research.

More information can be found at www.australianmuseum.net.au/eureka