This is a story about the universe. But more than that, it's a story about how we came to know the universe. For nearly fifty years, one man, J. Richard Dick Bond, has shaped the way scientists see reality itself. He helped build the standard model of cosmology, not in isolation, but in friendship.

Friendship is what actually drives great science. But now,

as teams grow more massive, theories get stranger, and a new generation loses sight of the why behind the what. Thichbon fears that we're losing something deeper.

You have to maintain your technical chops, but you also have to be able to see the big picture.

In this conversation, we'll cover everything. Entropy, coherence, then the quantum universe, dark energy, the Hubble tension, and what comes next, but never forgetting the forgotten power of scientific friendship. This isn't a story just about physics. It's about the people who dared to ask, what is the universe really made of? And who are we? Those that try to understand and wrestle with it. This is professor Dick Bond, and this is Into the Impossible.

Dick, it's lovely to have you here at UC San Diego. Thanks so much for coming out and making the trip. I know it's hard to come from Toronto to San Diego in the winter.

It's a tough call, although you haven't made it, absolutely sunshiny

when I've been Well, I've got a lot of questions for you. But the first one I have is this talk that you're gonna grace us with later. Tell us about that. Tell us about this wide ranging talk.

What it is that made what you might call the golden age of cosmology, which I have been privileged to be apart from from the emergence in the seventies. It actually emerged in the sixties and even earlier as you'll hear. But the thing that made all of the work happen and all of the great discoveries is not just an intellectual game. It's the friendships that underlie the interactions of scientists, which, caused the creation of this great thing. It was essentially a movable feast of friends going from place to place, all interacting together and developing things. And as we were developing the basic ideas, which have become the standard model of cosmology, which, dark matter plays an extremely important role, and after that, dark energy. But I think I won't be able to get to it in the meeting today, in the talk today, but I organized, a conference that was seminal in the subject of the cosmic microwave background near and dear to you. Back at '19.

It was '87. It's how I'm gonna be before me. It was called delta t over t, which was a play on the fractional temperature that we're trying to get to in those days and have gotten to extreme precision. But the second t was spelled t e a because I was in Canada, and it was, a t thing. But what it did and why it was so interesting is that it I used it as a vehicle to bring together, for the first time actually, theorists and experimentalists. Because in those days, the people that were into the cosmic microwave background experiment were deep in their labs, and they weren't really connecting That's right. To the astro aspects, which have now become, you know, totally taken over, but they were into the devices and all of that. And so this was the great day, and I had the wisdom of getting, Dave Wilkinson of the realtor.

I didn't. That's right. Yeah. He he and I basically choreographed this, and so the drawing power of the experimentalist and the theorist was perfect. And to this day, it's remembered as one of the great events. And in fact, I was just at Hopkins a short while ago, and, Chuck Bennett comes up and he says, it was the greatest, meeting he's ever been at. And it was bay mainly because it was creating a field and a coherence that hadn't been created before. I mean, there were kind of random associations with the microwave background before, but it was never done as if it was a subject on its own, which is what we made.

You reified it and you made it in reality.

But what it also signaled is that we were trying to tightly couple the theory and the experiment, which is a new phenomenon because usually the experimentalists or observers would deliver information, and then the theorists would play around with the information, but it wasn't tightly coupled.

That's right.