 Here I am, three years, 11 months and four days, but I was not counting, days after I started my quest, my quest of my thesis, to measure the age of the universe. You see, in 1929, Edwin Hubble realized the universe was expanding. Like points on a balloon that's inflating, every galaxy is moving from every other. The further the separation, the faster the motion. The universe expands into the future and the big bang, well that's at the center, at the start of the inflation of the balloon. If I measure the universe's rate of expansion out, I can run it in reverse, figure out how old the universe is. To do this, to measure the expansion rate, I need to know two things. How far galaxies are away and how fast they're receding. Now, measuring the recession of a galaxy is easy, because its light will be stretched by the expanding universe, and I can measure that with incredible accuracy. But distances, they are hard. They're hard because galaxies are made up of billions of stars so far away that they form amorphous blobs of unpredictable size or shape. Since 1929, astronomers around the world have been attempting to bootstrap distances from the solar system, which we do understand, to these distant galaxies without much success. But I am doing it differently. I am using a form of exploding star known as a Type II supernovae. Stars that are eight times or larger than our sun die horrible deaths, where gravity takes their cores as they run out of nuclear fuel and collapses it, releasing huge amounts of energy, causing their outer bits to expand at tens of thousands of kilometers per second, and it heats their surface to hundreds of thousands of degrees. Supernovae are like light bulbs, and I can use physics to figure out their wattage. Like a light bulb, the hotter a supernova is, the brighter it will be, and the blower it will be. Like a light bulb, the larger the surface area, the brighter it will be. Now, I can measure how hot a supernova is by its color. But to measure its size, I need to use a trick that I can only use for supernovae, and that's the fact that they're expanding. I can measure their size by multiplying how long it's been since the time of explosion, times how fast they're expanding. That tells me their size. I know their temperature, I know their size, I can calculate their wattage. Then I can measure how bright they appear on Earth, and I can use that information to figure out their distance directly. The further the way they are, the fainter they will appear. In this diagram, I am showing the distances of galaxies versus their recession rate, and I have measured the age of the universe, 14 billion years old. But there's an issue. Einstein showed that gravity will slow the universe down, meaning my extrapolation into the past will be wrong. My number might be a little larger than what the correct answer is. So I'm moving to the Australian National University to use the world's largest telescopes to look at really distant objects, objects whose light takes billions of years to reach us. And I'm gonna measure how fast the universe is expanding in the past and see how much the universe has slowed down over the six billion years that I can measure. I don't know what I'm gonna find, but I do know that whatever I do will help humanity understand our place in the universe. How long does that take? I didn't find that. It's brilliant. Now, Brian, you've been, I think it's fair to say freaking out a little bit. Yeah. Just during the three minutes. Would you like to tell us about your process? Okay, so the first thing I did is I went out and I said, what slide am I gonna use? And I said, oh, this is a great one. I like this one. Because it really does capture my thesis and the excitement and the actual final chapter of my thesis there. So that was great. And I said, okay, let's tell the story. So you tell the story and you time yourself and you're like 11 minutes and 35 seconds. Okay. Excellent. So then I said, that's not gonna work. I normally would give a talk. I don't write my talks. I sort of do a little set of dot points and I do the narrative. So I said, I'm gonna have to write this one. So I sat down on a Sunday afternoon when I was not doing something else and wrote it and then I read it. Five minutes and 30 seconds. I was like, all right, so I need to take two and a half minutes out of this or I can just talk faster. I've seen both done, you need to not talk fast. So it's a matter of just editing it down and then talking through it each time until I have the essence as lean and mean as I can do it. So now I have that. I read it out. I go try my wife. She says, that's superb. And I'm like, and now I have eight hours to figure out how to memorize what's in this thing so that I can actually deliver it. So in that case, I have been trying to remember my eight dot points and I've been practicing everywhere I've driven in the last eight hours, starting from the airport last night till this morning. So if I nearly ran you over, that was because I was talking to you about what I just did and I thought I could sort of get it. And the amazing thing, which I was just telling Ari is that when I was a graduate student, I found speaking publicly very nerve wracking and now I don't, except for this was nerve wracking. And it was nerve wracking because when I'm practicing something, normally you don't have to be precise. And so if I screw up a little bit, I can say, well, let me re-explain that, but you don't have time in this. You gotta get it pretty well spot on. And when I practice in a car, it's different. And I make mistakes and I'm owing and awing and doing all those things. And I wasn't sure, because I just literally did my last practice five minutes between walking in here. I'm like, it wasn't going very well in the car, but I delivered much better than I've ever done in the car up here. So you never know how it's gonna go. We did a really brilliant job. And what would you think the value is for research students in learning these kind of skills? In your career now, you can look back and think we've got over that nervousness. So research is not just about learning about your little bit of the universe or humanity and keeping it secret. Maybe that's what it used to be, but it certainly is not now. Research and what this university about is learning and then communicating. And communicating is hard. It's a matter of being able to have a clear, concise narrative where you can get people to understand what's going in your mind. It doesn't matter if it's your research or just explaining people how to make a loaf of bread. You need to be able to tell people concisely what you're thinking. And research can be hard. It's very complex ideas. So you need to be able to distill it. The process of distillation, learning how to do a narrative, having the confidence to deliver, well, that makes you practice. And one thing since winning a Nobel Prize is I've had more opportunity to deliver speeches than normal people would have in a lifetime. And you learn, you get better. Practice makes you better. And I think doing something like a three minute thesis is a very concentrated effort where you're working on a skill that will last a lifetime. And it's that practice that makes you, maybe not perfect, but a lot better. So in my case, well, why did I get the job that I got at Mount Stromlo, because I gave my three minute thesis effectively to Professor Jeremy Mould, who was also using the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the same measurement himself. And I got him excited. And he knew what I was capable of doing, and he gave me a job. Why did I convince the world as a 27 year old to give me 20% of the world's large telescope time worth millions upon millions of dollars? Because I convinced a team of 19 people that this was a project we could do together. And this came not by doing a bad presentation, it caused by getting people excited. As vice chancellor, I cannot tell the university what to do. And I can, but they won't listen. All that I can do is convince people that we have a common goal, that we wanna do this together. And if I'm a bad communicator, you're gonna go to sleep and not come and see me. You're gonna go whatever you want. It's only if I inspire you that we have a chance to do something bigger together. So I've used it in every part of my life, and I cannot understate the importance of being a good communicator. It is almost impossible to succeed in academia, or quite frankly in most parts of life at a very high level without having those skills. Thank you. Well, thank you again, Brian, for the eight hours of practice. Amazing. Really amazing.