 Yuma, what a well-behaved audience, this is terrific, the hubbub settling down. I agree too in the language of deep time in this place, the language of the Not-A-Wall and Nambru people of Canberra, and we begin as we do in this country by honouring that long tradition of skilled scientific stewardship of country and paying our deepest respects to the people who have kept the old knowledge of this country strong to the present day, and whose knowledge systems, intricate knowledge systems are the song lines of this ancient continent, constantly renewing, constantly evolving. Thank you so much, Canberra, for joining us tonight for Planets, Plagues and the Power of Science. I'm Misha Shuvit, I'm the CEO of Science and Technology Australia and it's my very great honour to have been asked to facilitate a compelling conversation between two of the greats of Australian science. Just a quick housekeeping thing to begin, for some of you who are along the edges of the rows, if you wanted to move into the middle it'll make it feel cozier and more inviting, like we're sitting around in our lounge rooms having a lovely chit-chat with two brilliant planet-sized intellects, so can I encourage anyone who might want to creep in to do so? Trust me, trust me it will make it feel, thank you, thank you so much, it'll make it feel like a much more intimate conversation, and what a treat we have in store for you. Congratulations Canberrans on making it out tonight on a cold rainy Canberra night, this is probably the last time we'll all be out for about a month while we all get over the rude shock of Canberra turning on a cold snap and then realising that actually if we're going to behave that way we won't get out of our houses again until September, so it's best to just press on and keep going out to important public events, but it's a delight to see so many of you here tonight. So tonight I'm reliably informed that you can call two stars a constellation, we have a constellation of Australian science stars to share some ideas with you, to reflect on what it is like to win a Nobel Prize, the Oscars for thinking as I like to call them, and to share some observations about where we're at in the long sweep of human progress and history, the project that is the contemporary practice of science and where to from here. So let's jump right on in and I want you to give a very warm and rousing welcome to Nobel Laureate Professor Brian Schmidt. Yeah, so good. Welcome Brian. Good to see you Misha. Brian of course, we're not going to delve too much into Brian's biography at the outset because I wanted to actually have him retell parts of his story to you, but of course won the Nobel in 2011 for some really important research about the nature of the galaxy. He's of course on the National Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology on the Learned Academies of a Gazillionty Countries It Feels Like and a regular commentator on many media outlets and on Twitter. And joining us now with the power of the interwebs and contemporary technology should also be Laureate Professor Peter Doherty from Melbourne. Welcome Professor Doherty. It worked, yes. Professor Doherty of course won his Nobel 26 years ago now and is a living national treasure as well and we're going to have a really terrific conversation between these two stars and preeminent thinkers about some of the big issues that we're wrestling with as a society. So welcome to both of you. Thank you so much. Peter's like a hyperversion of himself so I feel kind of double size. I'm a bit intimidated looking at it from here. So good. So look the official kind of theme or organizing thought behind tonight's event was to do a couple of things to bring together these two evident thinkers to have a chat but in so doing as well to essentially mark the 10th anniversary of Brian winning his Nobel and the 75th anniversary the founding of the Australian National University. Now those of you who'll pay close attention to dates and are numerous will realize that the 10th anniversary and the 75th anniversary of these events happened last year but pandemic so here we are slightly behind timetable but nonetheless pressing on with contemporary life which feels like a bit of an allegory doesn't it? Very good. So let's delve right into a conversation and I wanted if we could start perhaps thinking about the power of science in the age of COVID. So perhaps Brian let's invite you to kick off by talking to us a little about the role of science. What what do you think its role is in helping us to tackle major crises the big challenges that come our way as a as a species and as humanity not just COVID but things like climate change and antibiotic resistance. Well if we really think about humanity and the thing that probably most distinguishes us from other species on the planet is we have the ability to write things down and learn from the past and one of that things that that allows is science to grow and magnify you're able to take knowledge share it learn not have to reinvent the wheel each time and it gives us this amazing power to go out understand how things work predict what might happen if we do something predict what might happen if we don't do something and take action and hopefully that action usually is in our collective benefit although I think Peter and I can tell you that sometimes humanity takes really stupid decisions based on all the information available. So science is our secret weapon to essentially predict things and from that prediction comes its power it is something you can test you learn from you iterate and it's not a hundred percent good it's not a hundred percent right but it is the most effective way of making predictions and therefore thereby you know changing the world based on what happens for the better and that's why it is so powerful and it is what distinguishes it from really any other philosophy if you want to think that humanity has ever derived it's it's essentially something you can test and keep improving. Peter do you have further thoughts to add to that? Yeah well as Brian said modern science really begins in the 17th century when we had printing and we could publish books and publish journal articles so it really began with the thinking of a former chancellor of the British Exchequer Francis Bacon who who formulated the idea that if you want to understand something you've actually got to look at it and examine it you just don't think about it make pontificating statements and say this is the way it is you actually have to do the work and find out how it is and that's that's what science is about modern science is that you you do experiments and you you publish them you write them up and it goes under peer reviewed scrutiny and then other people can repeat your observations and see if they're right it's a very very very simple set of rules but it's actually transformed our civilization our society but as Brian said it's had its upsides and its downsides if we're still back in the 16th century and we were working the way we were then when large numbers of people died quite young we wouldn't have a problem with climate change for instance so basically as science has changed the world and transformed the world we absolutely need science to deal with the issues that result and allow us to enjoy the extraordinary lives we live today where we travel across the planet where we connect immediately by the internet or by a telephone and we we live longer and healthier lives than any time in human history so science has made enormous changes to us but it's also been part of the issue of creating the problems that are now really quite compelling with climate change being the most the most obvious and of course what happened with COVID being a very good example of our interconnected interdependent and complex world I'm interested in what both of you have just said there about sort of science being this sort of set of tools to guide us through complex issues and to help us sort of illuminate some of the challenges how important do you both think the role of sort of public trust and buy-in in science is for whether we you know apply those tools and put them into the service of humanity well um if you're going to be effective at using science to make the world better people do mostly have to trust you if they burn you at the stake as a witch uh you're not going to get very far so the trust science doesn't need community trust to occur and indeed I think the first scientist often their labs didn't have any community trust at all they just went out and kind of had a little their own little cult and moved things forward but if we're going to go through and take the major problems that society has whether it is COVID and how do we have public health responses and vaccines and deal with that there has to be some sort of trust for us to work collectively towards solutions which are ultimately global in scale right and what happens on the other side of the planet actually affects us so there has to be this sort of collective agreement that we're going to work together and that's true with climate change as well so trust is important to effectively counter global problems but if it's local to this room I can probably do it right now and you may not like what I'm doing the audience may be amused so the science itself doesn't need the trust but it's effective implementation does yeah Peter is this the highest level of public trust that you've felt coming off the you know the height of the first two years of the pandemic well in my particular field it's by the very high level of public trust but also a certain amount of hostility which as as I'm active on Twitter I do do encounter because you know that's a discussion format and it's open to everybody so you have all these conspiracy theories and so forth but I mean people we our world has been transformed I mean look at the internet and what's that what that's done to communication to to the role of the journalists to the role of the scientist and and so forth and it's transformed our world but it's happened in a kind of a background sense of incremental change where you just buy a new gadget or you log on to a new program now people don't necessarily connect to that with science but of course it's all a product of science it wouldn't be there if there wasn't the work of the physical scientists and the engineers and so forth going on in the background but we don't think of that as science we just think of that as oh something just happens so when people think of the role of science in society some people who are absolutely hostile to science actually use an iPhone they get on a plane they get treated when they get sick and so forth so so trying to get that that communication about the role of science and what science does in society is not necessarily all that easy part of it is because the language can often be very complex now with COVID we've got all sorts of people speaking language that I never thought I'd hear you in general use I mean just words like epidemiologists we all we all know them I mean there are so many of them and not quite sure where they all come from but they're great and we love them we got it we got an online qualification like an epidemiologist now too very good from all cats university I believe the issuing institution very good so let's turn to the pandemic then and think about that as a kind of case study in the power of science and that sort of effective guide Peter I'm particularly interested in your thoughts as well about what the next couple of years might look like so what we know from history and what we have observed in the first two years of this pandemic about what we're likely to kind of have to navigate because it's not over yet is it well we don't really know me sure and you know I've worked on viruses and immunity for more than 50 years almost 60 years and this virus is quite different and it's behaved very differently and and it's given us a lot of surprises and some of the things we we thought we knew we we don't necessarily know I mean there's this kind of reinfection that's happening now because I've worked with virus infections I've been aware that there are viruses that infect us over and over unlike influenza the virus has to change a lot before we get reinfected again but um we've never really put that much effort into them because the amount of money there is limited the numbers of people are limited and and basically it's it's only now that we've been forced to focus on this particular type of virus where where is it going to go is is omicron that circulating now with this various variants the last stage of this where we see these things come back again where we we'd be hit with another variant that we just comes out of nowhere we we don't really know the answer we've learned an enormous amount I can tell you we now over these last two years we have a much much better understanding of the human immune system than we ever did because of the resources that have been poured into it but what do you get out of science and what a country gets out of science is directly related to the resources you put into it human resources financial resources and Australia is not doing all that well on that front that we've done well through through COVID because we've got we've had a strongly established scientific community in the right area and we have very good institutions but Australia has not but been putting the investment into science and technology that it should be and it's not ranking very high on the OECD list now Brian will be much more up on that than I am he's running a university so he's very conscious of these sorts of issues Brian would you like to see a deeper investment in science and technology in our country I do think it's it is something that Australia needs to get its head around Australia has really over the last 10 to 15 years become very in the now inward facing we've had a huge commodity boom that's made it quite easy but one of the things I'm trying to get people to think about is the next 50 years so if you think 50 years ago 1972 so that was Gough Whitlam so it's not that long ago for you know people but there were some major changes made around that time not all by the Whitlam government but there was a lot of changes and Australia has actually prospered from 50 years ago due to a large number of decisions made by all sides of government we are looking very much at the time scale of thought right now is very short sciences is is not a three month three year thing it's a 50 year thing and some things are absolutely never really stand the test of time you wouldn't think to spend money but many things do and that science needs to be invested in people's education so that we can ensure that Australia is prosperous in the future or you know we will just fade away because at some point the rents that we get from the resources will become less over time than they are right now and that means our lives will be less prosperous and so we do need to invest in that and not just ask the question which can I say politicians always ask in every country but here they really follow through on which is give me a national interest test that says why what you are doing right now is useful for the Australian people right now and that that turns out that is commercialization that is not science that's commercialization and translation it's important but you need to have the foundation bits of knowledge that underpin them so that you have the ideas to translate so you know we're in the middle right here at ANU of actually putting a lot of effort into making sure our scientists when they have the good ideas are able to translate them so that's room computer room temperature quantum computers well that comes from basic science that had no national interest to it when you did it we have people developing the technology to essentially break down plastics into monomers their their the constituent parts again really basic research no commercialization in that and you can go on and on we can talk Peter can talk around the mRNA vaccines and that was basic research again Peter's own work on on T cells which don't seem to be doing a very good job right now since we keep on getting reinfected that's right but it's really important and understanding vaccines and and health more generally so you do need to invest in this we seem to have very clear an idea are in our in our head how much we should be investing as a government in defense we seem to have a much less good idea of how much we should be investing in research and research has been declining it reached a peak total investment across the sector of about 2.3 percent of our GDP within a year that compares to the US which is three in a bit Korea which is five Israel which is five and it's dropped now to about 1.7 percent of GDP and it's falling and should I say if you're worried about strategic issues during that time China has passed us and is now up to 2.3 2.4 percent having when I started as vice chancellor been down at 1.6 or 1.7 my home country the United States bipartisan support for research because they see it very much as essential to the future of the United States I would love for people here to realize it's actually for the future of us too such an important point about that yes yes yes yes such an important point about that role of what we every time I hear the term basic research or basic science I always feel like we need to rebrand it to discovery because it sort of feels like basic is sort of underselling it but you're right that's that frontier non-applied research that's led to some of those bigger seismic breakthroughs in the course of history I'm going to invite you both in a minute to sort of start unpacking a little bit about the research for which you were both for you which we were each awarded your no bells but I just wanted to just quickly before we close off on the pandemic hear from you both a little bit about risk mitigation and how you approach managing risk so Peter you know part of the challenge I think of kind of two years and a bit into the pandemic is about those calculations each of us feel we're making every day about risk mitigation talk to us about the kinds of calculations you are making with the wealth of knowledge you have around immunology about your own health and safety and community health and safety and how you sort of navigate that yeah there are sort of very basic things to the scientific life and and basically particularly medicine you think in terms of probability and relative risk I mean that's what it's all about we know it you know the vaccine sometimes can give you some bad consequences but the relative risk of where the vaccines compared with catching the infection is vastly skewed in the favor of being vaccinated this is not thinking that pervades the general community but it's though it has much more I think since the pandemic started so I think this is where we need to be really firming things up in schools and so but this getting this sort of consciousness of everything is a relative risk equation embedded in people's minds now I'm 80 plus years old so I'm at relative risk at a higher relative risk from bad consequences than from COVID than someone who's 20 or 30 years old which is the reason I'm actually not in Canberra and still sitting in Melbourne because I'm a chronocirculating out there and even though I'm heavily vaccinated you can still get quite sick from it so I think for a lot of us the COVID experience has changed those perceptions but whether those perceptions stick or not is another matter. I mean science does make you think in very particular ways that aren't necessarily the ways that the general people in the general community approach life and that's part of the problem with science communication as we we tend to think everybody thinks like us but they don't of course. Brian you're you know making some of those calculations that we're all making every day similarly around you know where our risk tolerances are but you're also the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University where you're responsible for the health and safety of you know a very large number of people who come into this institution and are educated here tell us a little bit about how you've approached managing risk you know as the head of an institution like this armed with your science knowledge through this pandemic. Yeah and so I basically apply the same probabilistic way of thinking of things that Peter talks about the first thing for me is to make sure I have access to the best information and Peter and I have chatted several times over the last couple years I've called him up and said all right Peter tell me what you think and I do that because Peter has access to a whole world of information and he can synthesize it into a language that I as a physicist can understand in terms of into probabilities and stuff and I can literally rely on Peter probably more than he realizes for for some of that information especially in the first year when I was trying to figure out what how this was going to track. You have to then overlay that with A and U as an institution and the people in it so I have professors like Peter who have you know 80 80 plus year old immune systems and Peter tells me very clearly that an 80 year old immune system really sucks compared to what even a 50 year old immune system does and you should not treat people who are 80 the same as 50 because the the relative risk is not a factor of a couple it's it's it's orders of magnitude higher so you know back in November I was trying to figure out what was happening and we made the decision I made the decision that for the well-being of my students and my staff I needed to do everything I could to have classes and a community on on that and that was a decision I said I want to try to achieve but I have to do I have to keep people safe what do I need to do to keep people safe immunization has to be really high but I also know that people react badly when you say you must be immunized and you actually get lower immunization rates than if you just strongly encourage them and give them lollipops afterwards so that's a piece of public public health advice right I also know that high quality masks and in 95 mask which if you're at A and U you've got five of them you can go get five more and I distributed them for free so no one had an excuse and it also said an in 95 mask is what everyone's wearing maybe you should wear one as well and I know that that if you have two people everyone wearing in 95 masks that you can really knock down the transmission finally I knew ventilation was serious so here we're in a in a venue that turns the air over completely within about an hour that's a very ventilated room so you are in actually a surprisingly safe space here relative to the average place in in Australia and we opened up and we went through and reprogrammed all the ventilation and then I gave away free rats to everyone and said no excuse for not having a rat if you think you're sick take one and stay away if you you think you have so we tried to go through and say all those are all the things I had control of and at the end of that I knew that I will have made A and U a much safer place than any place else in people's lives so that I can't stop people from getting COVID and transmitting it but it was very much more likely for people to transmit and catch COVID off campus probably like an order of a hundred higher than on campus and we've seen that there's almost no transmission on campus I won't say it's zero but it's close enough to zero it is you know and it's a buy the numbers thing and you add all these numbers up and you eventually get something where you can actually slow the transmission down on campus and that means our staff and our students feel safe and we're able to go with the painfulness of having a mask I hate them but on the other hand if it can keep people like Peter safe when they're up teaching then that's important to me terrific and one of the special things about the Australian National University is that in addition to these two distinguished stars who were Nobel laureate what are their novels at the time that they were at A and U there are four others if any of you can name them there will be a prize that's one of the chubber chops that Brian has identified as a key motivational technique uh Lord Howard Flory for the discovery of penicillin in 1945 Sir John Eccles in 1963 free for his discovery about how electrical pulses control nerves Professor John Hassani who won a laureate in 1994 for his pioneering work on economic game theory and Professor Ralph Martin Zinconagle who in 1996 shared the Nobel Prize with Peter for their revolutionary work in immunology so I just wanted if I could get both of you to just refresh us pretend we aren't all over the full details of exactly what the research was for which each of you were awarded a Nobel and remind us about what was known in the field of knowledge in your area at the time before your work was recognised as well. Peter do you want to go first? Well I guess our work was done earlier I mean Ralph Zinconagle and I were a couple of young guys in a small lab in the old John Curtin School of Medical Research I'd been in Britain and I'd been working I'm a veterinarian by basic training I've been working on virus infections in sheep disease called lopping on cephalitis I got very interested in the inflammatory cells that go into tissues when we get an infection and everybody now knows about inflammation I mean you you wouldn't have got a very good discussion on that a few years back so I got very interesting what these cells were and I was looking at the cells out of the at ANU where the first time I'd been in a really first-class academic research environment we were looking at the cells we were getting out of the brains of mice infected with a virus called lymphocytic corium meningitis virus are we looking at what we call killer T cells and we could we found that the cells I found the cells I could get out of these brains really killed the hell out of virus infected cells in a lab dish rough rough turned up and we started to work together and we did what was called a cytotoxic T cell assay and and we discovered that killer T cells from one strain of mouse wouldn't kill virus infected cells from another strain and and what we discovered out of that after a lot of experiments they're very complicated but drew on the mouse genetics that have been developed to discover to understand transplantation by people over the last 30 years before that uh that the killer T cells were working through what we call the transplantation system the the transplantation proteins on the surface of our cells so so what what it told us is how these cells were focused and targeted onto virus infected cells and their job viruses can only grow in living cells right so their job was to destroy these virus infected cell factories within us so what we actually discovered was how these things work and we discovered why is we have this transplant system and it's there for the what we call the immune surveillance of cells now this this six these experiments were done with very very primitive systems in a tiny lab two little two guys working together uh with one technician in labs that were only meant to hold four or five people now i'm in a research a minimal size research group for biomedical sciences probably about six to eight people it's totally different world totally transformed i'm part of the living fossil record of my subject you know i plugged away at it for a number of years and and as smart young people came in the lab we changed the technologies we did more sophisticated experiments and basically the type of thing we kicked off back in 1972 73 74 at the ANU has now really defined how the cellular immune response is working in COVID and and there's a lot of fantastically good science been done some have been done by people who work with me early on in their careers so i'm really proud of that awesome i love the cheeky upstart culture yes yes i love the the size of that achievement but also the cheeky upstart culture of two blokes in a lab just doing revolutionary frontier science so good um brian you came to australia in 94 as a newly minted postdoc and you came here because you wanted to work on exciting frontier research tell us about where your research led you and and the research that actually uh was the subject of your citation for your novel so yeah in 1994 i had just recently finished my phd and my phd was on uh measuring how fast the universe was expanding so the universe is getting bigger in all directions and the question is how fast is it getting bigger and if you know that you can run the universe reverse and figure out how old it is so i was helping measure the age of the universe and so my answer was 14 billion years which turns out to be just about right uh although it took a lot of other people working on it as well so we got a consensus on the value it was a very uh heated topic from 1929 when edwin hobble first had the concept of it so my pitch to come to an you and i want you to so i was at harvard and you'd say why would you come to an you from harvard well because an you at the time was considered to be a better astronomy department than harvard so for me it was a very good job and my pitch to get my job here is i was going to use the new technology to do the measurement in the nearby universe and look to further and further and further objects and measure how fast the universe was expanding back in time why would i want to do that because as the universe expands gravity slows it down and i could weigh the universe uh by measuring how fast the universe slowed down in uh over time and hopefully figure out whether or not the universe was going to slow down stop and go in reverse and have the ganab gib the big bang backwards or whether or not it was just going to expand forever so that was my pitch okay uh and unlike peter who had the pure luxury of two people in the lab i was it so good even exactly luxury so i uh but i did have a team of colleagues from around the world so there were roughly 20 of us and i as a 27 year old was given the freedom to work on this program we decided collectively as a team with a few ins and outs along the way that even though i was like the second youngest person on this 20 person team since it was my idea and started i could run it and i was given eight thousand dollars to for some international travel and that's basically what i then did three years worth of work with a lot of help from people around the world and we made our measurement back in time and what we found is in the past the universe was expanding slower than the present not faster and it had not slowed down it had in fact sped up and that speeding up of the universe indicated that gravity for whatever reason was pushing rather than pulling and you say well that's crazy yeah that's what i thought i figured i must have made a mistake but we've checked our work many many times and it turns out in 1917 einstein as he always did had come up with the solution for this which is that if energy is spread evenly and i mean absolutely evenly across the cosmos in his equations of general relativity the universe will be pushed by gravity rather than pulled and so our discovery meant that 70 percent of the universe had to be something we did not know about dark energy we still don't really know what it is except for it's energy everywhere but interestingly enough it means that the universe is speeding up like a epsilon uh covid outbreak except for unlike covid it doesn't stop it just keeps exponentially growing and that means the universe is not going to end with the ganad give it is going to get bigger and bigger faster and faster and end in a whimper kind of puffs out where it just becomes all dark and incredibly boring trillions of years in the future amazing right just to be clear peters nobel prize may save your life mine assures that you will not live forever you also save someone's life eventually yeah no no it all it assures that everyone does yes you did great so good i'm also interested in hearing a bit more about what the mechanics of this thing are so you've done this bit of incredibly brilliant frontier research and you know you think it's pretty important you think it might have set this sort of new um you know established knowledge now for peers around the world to build off of how do you know on that you've been considered for a nobel and uh what's what's that moment like how does it actually what's the transaction when someone lets you know that this has actually happened to you tell us take us and take us back into that into time i'm curious to find out how it worked for you peter because i don't think i've ever heard this story yeah well i mean yeah basically we're going way back in biology i mean brian's brian's a physicist and you know they're very smart people and alfred nobel puts them first on the stage because they are the smartest people in the universe and they clearly are and um so so but basically biology is different and biology has changed incredibly since we made that discovery and and that's because of the pervasive changes that have been induced by molecular science and and and and we we're just doing things now we couldn't have possibly contemplated doing years before now that's certainly true true of physics too i guess i mean with improved measurement systems and the rest of it but just our whole approach to biology has been transformed and when we made that discovery we we came up with a kind of theoretical interpretation for it and suggested what was happening and basically we couldn't prove it because the technology wasn't there within 10 years the technology was there the results came through and we'd made some really good guesses so we we made a discovery we described a new phenomenon we convinced people that something very different was going on but a lot of people didn't believe our explanation and then other people came along and showed yeah these guys basically got it right their explanations right so um so we waited for the Nobel Prize i didn't we didn't think we'd get it actually because we'd really discovered what the transplant system was for and there was a Nobel Prize in 1980 some five or six years after we'd done our basic work and put forward this theory which which was for his compatibility and for one of the guys actually claimed our work as sort of as part of his his grand design so we thought you know we're out of this league and we didn't think about it anyway you don't do science because you want to win Nobel prizes you do science because you're driven by it you're driven by curiosity uh the sort of this sort of science and and you you're really trying to understand what's going on and with biology that's very complex and very messy messy biology is messy i mean physics isn't it's clear it's clean it's very nice it's nice here the biology is a mess and it's a mess because it's driven by evolution so it doesn't the the basic laws of physics are there right at the very basics of the chemistry of it but really you can't really predict what's going to happen because biological systems evolve and they build on earlier systems because that's where their starting point is so it's not not the optimum solution it's the solution that's possible it's as though you you build all your new buildings on old foundations with to some extent your the design of your building been defined by those foundations so so biology keeps throwing up new things all the time because they're specific to a particular biological system so anyway our sort of thinking became more and more pervasive and and really what happens as you're thinking becomes more and more pervasive in a subject you get forgotten because you become what's called incorporate that is you become part of the general story that everyone knows so we i didn't think we were going to win another prize and i never thought much about them anyway i didn't know much about them really and then we we picked up a prize called the laska award in 1995 the laska basic science award award in the United States it's their most prestigious medical research prize and i was made aware at that time when we got the laska that half the people who win the basic laska award then go on to win a Nobel prize well you know i'm from Queensland and i started as a vet so my natural interpretation was well half the people who win the laska award don't win a Nobel Prize and the next year at four o'clock in the morning we're living in Memphis Tennessee of all places working in a wonderful wonderful place so of course in june children's research hospital we got a call four o'clock in the morning and my wife penny picked up the phone we thought that something had gone wrong with all the family back in Australia she picked up the phone and a boy said this is meals from the Nobel foundation and she said this is for you so good excellent very good brian what was that like for you were there people sort of making surreptitious inquiries about situating your work in the suite of knowledge and then was there a call in the middle of the night uh so i mean we knew when we made this discovery that it was probably wrong so i was where i started right and then over time you realize it's not going to go away and after the first couple years you know it starts becoming real and and but the problem i had with my discovery is we just how how are we going to understand this stuff we call dark energy there's no way of testing it or so it's a real it's a really an enigmatic result that was a huge mystery but it just seemed a little airy fairy to me to worry about prizes of this magnitude so yeah some people talked about it but i will be honest it was not something i paid much attention to uh i grew up in montana and alaska you know winning a Nobel prize was never on my radar and like peter didn't know that much about i met a couple Nobel prize winners that was kind of cool i was pretty excited when i met them including him uh when i remember i was giving a talk at the academy when i won my first academy prize and peter was in the audience came and had a chat with me and uh grilled me a little bit on a couple of of the points at the time and that was a big deal to me that peter already had that conversation with me uh so wasn't really expecting too much uh if i can be honest and while i won some astronomy prizes and things astronomy is the biology of physics right it's message uh-huh it's not it's not it's very rarely something you keep repeating the experiment you get you get one go which is whatever you know the universe gives you and so it is quite challenging to to to get the really clear results that physicists love uh but in my case uh in 2011 on you know in october at conveniently at eight uh 39 p.m because i remember it well we're in a better time zone than peter was uh uh we were in my wife jenny answered the phone and she looked very puzzled and i'm like what's going on she's like i don't know i think it may be a crank call uh so good and and this young woman with a swedish accent said is this brian schmidt and i said yes this is brian schmidt and then she said are you sure this is brian schmidt because this is a very important call from stockholm from from sweden and i'm sitting there uh i said is my phd student who some of you will know brad tucker uh is he playing a practical joke on me because he had had a conversation with me earlier that day when he gave me his wedding invite which was the 10th of december they said when they call you up today tell them you're busy and so i was sure this was a practical joke and so i said as one does uh but they said you know uh is this uh uh you know is this really brian schmidt i said i i i'm sure that it is an important call from stockholm uh and then a physicist got on who i actually knew and then i'm like oh my god this is getting serious uh and yeah they just kind of said well we're gonna announce it in it was now probably 41 841 and four minutes it was announced at 845 and bam it just happens and you don't really know what's gonna happen and your life is rather upended as peter can tell you it's kind of hits you like a freight train and peter had the grace of being a few years older than me i was 44 when i got the call i love everything about that story especially brad tuckers epic role in trolling you through the whole thing yeah yeah i think we should applaud that so good i did have to get a get told brian as well it's in a in a whole mark of your humility that when the first of the a new staff reached you that evening to say let's get you prepped for media interviews um and i have promised him uh i won't reveal his identity so let's just call him martin pierce uh said that they said you know this is amazing you know incredible incredible uh and your response was yeah it's it's very nice what he's supposed to say i don't catch you on unaware love it so good so um in terms of how it does upend your life but also open doors to opportunity or give you a platform then to use your public voice for good how is it how is the winning the nobel done that for each of you in your respective fields of endeavor well i think peter should answer first because when i won mine i called him up about two days later and said how on earth did you use your nobel prize so effectively because i have no idea how to cut through in this country on science so i think peter you i think you were the master of it back then well well well we tried and and it was a time how i did john howard had just one one government just coming to government he was he was delighted by it and uh we were after the announcement the announcement was always made on the first monday on october for the medicine prize and the physics is actually announced a bit later medicines first um we were just here to come out to australia for my uh my son and daughter-in-law's wedding in fact so so we were out in australia before december 10 when the prize was awarded it's always awarded on the anniversary of helter and nobel's death so when i got out here and uh i was talking at the australian academy of science and all the rest of it and uh living in memphis tennessee and uh john howard arranged for an event on the floor of the new parliament house which is very gracious of him and uh and i think and the and and so it was a kind of good for them you know he'd just gone under government here's a nobel prize from australian science and um basically then uh um the nobel was coming up but what happened was uh in early december after the prize i got a call from australia saying you've just been made the australian of the year and i said what the hell is that and uh basically it was different a different mechanism then there was a committee that sat in sydney and uh they had a few good bottles of grains or something like that because wine wine making brine wasn't into wine making at that stage and uh they had to choose someone and then they could get on with the drinking and if you want a nobel prize they always chose you the very first one was fallen bernette who won the nobel prize back in 1960 and i said yeah well that that's great but i've got a very busy year ahead you know the year after you win the nobel is is intense to say the least and i said can i put it off for a year and they said well well no if you want to ever come back to australia you better do this and so so i did i mean we we came out to australia three or four times and we're speaking all across the country and i was suddenly finding that as i'd won a nobel prize i knew everything and uh and i'd been asked about everything from climate change to to herbal medicines and now i'm crying out of the deep end totally an experience make a complete fool of myself at times but i actually caught on fairly quickly and how it was great how it actually doubled the medical research budget twice i think through his tenure and uh and also the australia research council so how i'd really like science so he's a great friend of science and and really cared about it uh but it's fallen on someone harder time scene so that started me off on public communication speaking to large groups of people very diverse and understanding the where i was coming from wasn't where they were coming from and quickly adapting uh to what um to what they uh they needed they needed to try and get from me and that started me off on science communication so even though i was heavily involved in the research side for another decade or more i i'd got more and more into the public communication stuff and uh and that's led to a number of articles and things and um now eight books the eighth one will be coming out in in um august though it's not on science actually yeah and uh and activity you now on twitter which is another another whole story and way of life so how effective i've been i was another matter i mean our science budgets haven't been increasing they've been falling in relative terms so so it's a very difficult call and um but one tries indeed one does try uh and um we'll come back to twitter in the public square in just a minute because it's an excellent uh exhortation uh light of light of further conversation but brian for you as well you also had an audience with a p.m and you insisted on going and giving you a lecture the next day which miraculously tripled its enrollment size like other um and what was that sort of what was your thinking about how you wanted to use that prize to essentially do some important things for the public good yeah so uh as i said i did call up uh peter to try to understand how he managed to get in and he said you you had a uh a good connection with john howard and one of his advisors is very key so trying to figure out how to to do that in australia and i did get a chance to have discussions um as i said with the prime minister today was julia gillard um her tenure didn't last that long afterwards so it came a little the politics became a little messier than uh you know 10 years of stability but uh i did want to make sure that we highlighted science young australians as something that was both worthwhile to do interesting uh great career choice if that's what you want to do uh so i worked on things like primary connections was a program to teach science in uh kindergarten through sixth grade that the academy did and it was about to be axed so i went through and i donated my uh 50 000 of my prize to it thereby making the minister of the day unwilling to ax it uh so that was a very tactical move i don't think uh yes uh the minister of the day has completely forgiven me based on he's one of my alums a very famous singer peter garrett uh he anyway so that was that was uh he had to cough up another four million so my 50 000 got multiplied by four million uh but it was a good thing because primary connections is still used today it's still a great program uh i did a lot of talks i mean i did like 200 talks in that first year uh my talks were not just here in australia they were around the world and i used that as an opportunity to try to highlight australian the global stage as best as i could amazing um the just peter's exploitation as well about twitter makes me want to just quickly delve into a little bit about the role of science communication in the public square in an era that feels increasingly shouty and uncivil perhaps sometimes in the public discourse and i wonder um both of you are active on twitter and you don't just it's not a we don't view it as a one-way broadcast platform you are actually out there engaging and commenting and answering questions from the public why do you do that why do you feel such a responsibility to do that interview well it's interesting because peter and i work on twitter almost this most he's the most similar person than i know of and we sort of did it on our own separately uh and i guess for me i want to go and not just get on the podium and shout at people i am trying to have a conversation with the people who really don't get science and trying to to get at least a little foot in the door for some enlightenment and that means not telling people they're idiots but rather having a real conversation with people who disagree with you now uh it's it's a little intense out there sometimes and some people are just disrespectful and we just have to you know mute is great because then they just shout into the ether and they don't know it's great everyone can watch them but you have no idea that's going on so a great feature mute on twitter uh and peter is near as i can tell just observing you you you have a fairly similar way of doing things as near as i could tell yeah yeah you've got to treat everyone with respect i mean if people are outright abusive i i tried early on to engage with them and try and talk to them but if you know if they continue being abusive you just block them and get rid of them out of your consciousness but twitter is a bit of a problem with twitter is is you you become a bit of an echo chamber and you talk more and more to like-minded people i was using it very much before covet started i had 18 000 twitter followers i think i now have 110 000 no there are several reasons for that including an inappropriate tweet of mine very early on but basically it passed me in one day i was the twitter king in australia of nobel prize winners and peter talked about man murphy's and bam he was past me in 24 hours yeah exactly i you know i had google and twitter open and my email all open on the computer at the same time i got confused and i asked for down at murphy's opening hours in twitter and and i think that that kind of humanized me because unfortunately the my publisher who'd set me up with the twitter account had put prof in front of my name and i hadn't thought about it i should have tweeted as you know without that but but there i was and and so but basically it's very useful to i was able to reassure people about vaccination and answer some of the questions about covet and and and try and generally try to answer questions and and the people came in and i hostile i i try to gauge really whether you know maybe i can just give them a better view of this and you try to do that it's it's different though i mean in science we get a very good idea of where we stand as far as communicating because our our papers are referenced that's all recorded we even know the numbers of people who reference our papers and all the rest of it so there's all sorts of metrics but in public communication you never know where things go you do know how many times it's retweeted or whatever on twitter but you never quite know where things go and what impact it has but what i've been doing over the last five or six days is tweeting very strongly about make sure you're enrolled to vote because the voter rolls changed closed at 8 p.m last night and i just read a thing online saying they've had the highest enrollment uh yesterday any time in australian history of people enrolling to vote so if i had any influence on that i'm good yeah yeah so good yeah and peter again can i say i was watching peter do this and peter was of course attacked for doing this by various people on there but i almost went to your defense and i decided you could bend yourself here yeah yeah we we've got to do a different act brian we should never be never be together on this so we can pick up different things and so forth so but you know we we've got very much very common interest i mean i'm very interested in climate change so is brian and brian brian's expertise comes from the physical sciences which is all about the causes of climate change and why we're seeing this and my expertise all comes from the the the other the effect of climate change the effect of climate change on us and because that's what matters uh really to all of us i mean you know there's a lot of geologists for instance saying climate change is not important because the rocks will do fine but we're all dead that's not very satisfying yep so good so we are really running out of time but i just wanted to quickly get you both to just expand a little more on the urgent challenges of climate change um you know how you how you see the challenges ahead and what you're most worried about before we kind of come back out of the happy pinnacle of something else a bit we're uplifting to to finish us off on peter do you want to pick up on on that how worried are you and what what are you most worried about yeah i'm very concerned i mean covet has shown us how well an australian governments including a you know a pretty conservative government who's not really into a lot of governing actually quite frankly i mean they don't they want to have government so they don't have to govern but basically uh they responded well to this and they responded and they have Keynesian economic solutions to it and and they really did a pretty good job and i'm talking about federal government and all the state governments as well and people bought into it and they did a good job so and it gave me a much better sense of australia being the australia i grew up in which was the australia after world war two when there was a very much a sense of shared faiths and collective responsibility i thought we'd lost a lot of it but it came back again with coven and and it came back to a greater extent in this country than so did in the united states which has a very different cultural hit tradition and history so i'm really pleased by that but at the same time this was going on the government was legislating and making initiatives that actually make us more dependent on fossil fuels and expanding fossil fuel exports and expanding fossil fuel discovery and and so that's been deeply depressing and it's a really good indication of the way the human condition works we're really good at responding to acute challenges we can pull together uh like a wartime footing when there's an acute challenge we have to tackle tackling something long term and difficult and complex is very difficult for us and i'm just not sure how how are we going to go with this we just have to do our best and we have to just keep trying and keep trying no matter what the reversals and so forth because i think it can technology can do a lot but what it's going to take if we're really going to change tackle climate change is a lot of us changing what we value and how we do things and changing values changing behavior is something that Australians or people in general really don't like doing whereas in science we live with change all the time we know we know things are changing we know things are evolving we know we can't stick with a set set of attitudes but again that's not pervasive in the society brian did you have some additional thoughts on the challenges where we're going to start to see and live through so yeah i mean i find uh climate change and the whole basic idea of sustainability on a planet that you know has a size that it has not getting any bigger i'm afraid due to my discovery it stays very much the same size so we have this race we have a race of you know population increase on the planet and we know that if you get people rich enough fast enough their fertility will drop you can also get rid of people by everyone dying in cataclysm events so those are sort of a and b i i prefer a which is not the cataclysm but it's a real race because right now of course the wealthier you are the more you know you consume and this is particularly true when it comes to greenhouse gases and things that are causing climate change the fact that Australia which i would judge to probably have the most resources in terms of renewable energy so if if when the transition occurs Australia is probably the country that is going to benefit economically the most of any advanced economy in the world we have the richest resources the fact that we are the big laggard simply because we happen to have certain resources of gas and coal right now i just find bewildering but there is a political solution which is you got to bring people along you need to invest in the technological solutions where the change is going to occur so you know if you're going to have a big new hydrogen plants and green steel and stuff you need to put them in places like why ala and new castle and wollongong in places that are affected and they're not absolutely the most economic perfect solution for that but they make sense because they are allowed to politically occur but what i think people fail to think about is what happens if this does not occur if we do not occur yeah Australia will you know have more floods more fires and our life will slowly decay but the billions of people around us will have their lives collapse and instead of having a million refugees you're going to have a billion refugees and we will not survive that we will be overrun and our lives will be destroyed and this thinking that we somehow are going to be it's not going to affect us is just crazy the entire planet is on this together and it's a big system we need to think about and as peter says we got to keep trying it because you know the question to my mind is i'd love to keep things below two degrees i'm more worried about i'm going to four five six and you know you want to use a lot of greenhouse gases get into a war then you really use greenhouse gases very quickly because that's how it's going to be done so that's another you know feature as things become unstable the whole thing is going to crumble with war with you know all sorts of other things if we let it go that way so we must work on it we must work on it now and australia is a lucky country we're going to become possibly the richest country on the planet if we actually achieve that goal so we should be working faster than anyone on it and it just amazes me we don't we are over time but i've been finding this conversation so terrifically enjoyable but i wanted to just finish on a on a high note and perhaps invite you both to share some thoughts about what we need to do to safeguard science and technology and their capabilities for humanity for the long haul and what your advice might be to brilliant young minds who are aspiring to make their own noble worthy discoveries about the things they should be doing to put themselves in the path of big breakthroughs and opportunities that will help the planet send humanity kata well i mean you know if we want this to happen in australia it will happen it will happen in china or will happen in north america where they as brian said there's bipartisan support for funding science and funding strong science because they've had enormous opportunity economic development from it so it will happen if it's going to happen in australia we've got to invest a lot more money we've got to invest a lot more in universities got a lot invest a lot more in the idea of positive change i mean you it's not conservative to sit still and refuse to act in the face of a major threat it's stupid and basically that's why this coming election is massively important and the decisions we make now are going to have very long term ramifications so quite frankly we have to act we have to be prepared to act and stand up and be counted and we do the best we can so to me education is paramount and it's education for everyone so that you get in and you try to levelize so everyone gets a great education i want people to reflect on education in this country it's actually quite uneven at the you know one-year-old to year 12 universities actually level education in this country that has become quite um uh unleveled during uh you know k through 12 so we got to get the education right because education ultimately gives everyone uh the opportunities they need in this rapidly changing world undertaking you know a degree in science or or our trade that's technologically advanced that is something that is going to give you the most options for this ever-changing world uh and it's not just science it's it's it's actually thought so anything where you learn to to think and and understand uh through what i would say rational and critical thinking those are going to be really important skills so it doesn't mean you're going to be one thing it means you have a whole host of things you can be and we need a world full of those types of people to solve these problems to make sensible decisions within our democracy but we have to get through and make sure that that early stage the first 18 years people's life we get as many people leveled with education as we can and those people i always say this is an amazing opportunity for you to ensure no matter what happens you're going to have a good opportunity and a good job going forth and uh the amazing thing is that if you're better educated you live longer for quite remarkable reasons that i'm not sure i completely understand but these things are all uh highly related to each other so it's a great way to to be but we do really need to intervene i think in those first 18 years better than we are absolutely i'm going to now hand back to brian to do a formal vote of thanks but before we do i just wanted to share a couple of the tips that brian had about how to win your own noble prize professor doities of course written a famous book about this but essentially it was you know go do the basics and do them really well follow your passions you know tap into the expertise of others and then to quote duff punk get lucky uh was i believe brian's sort of rules for success peter's book is going to be on on sale up on the um fourth level four i believe after this if you want to pick up his book on uh the year of plague living uh the pandemic um but would you please join me in just thanking quickly uh professor brian schmitt and laureate professor pedagology so before everyone goes i as the vice chancellor of a and you would really like to thank everyone for coming out today and supporting the university uh in its 75th year this is uh been certainly one of our hardest years but i could not think of anyone more important to me than uh peter doughty uh who has joined us uh a mentor for me and certainly one of the many outstanding people that we have had at the university in our first 75 years uh and so i don't know if peter can hear us but we can give him one more class so since he's kind of zoomed out and finally misha uh it is always a pleasure to have you involved in any of our events uh misha has a real become a real stalwart of i would say the science community making sure that we are recognized throughout australian society for the good that we can bring and i appreciate as always your efforts thank you misha thank you all again and we hope to see you around the 75th year still has a few more months to run uh since why celebrate something in a day when you can spend 365 days like good have a great night thank you everyone