Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
Brian Schmidt was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with his colleagues for discovering that the universe’s expansion is picking up speed.
Up to that point, cosmologists had assumed that the expansion of the universe would eventually slow down. The work of Schmidt and his collaborators had profound implications. It meant that something – some unknown force – was driving the universe’s expansion.
Physicists still don’t know what it is. The working theory is that there is an as yet unobserved “dark energy” which opposes gravity, driving the universe’s expansion at the largest scales.
If the theory is correct, dark energy would account for about three-quarters of the total mass-energy density of the universe.
Schmidt’s discoveries sent shockwaves around the world.
The discovery that the universe’s expansion is accelerating was made possible by a new generation of advanced astronomical instruments. Schmidt and other astronomers had at their disposal the most powerful telescopes ever made, allowing them to peer further back in cosmic time with greater precision than ever before.
Schmidt and his colleagues, Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess, used observations of distant exploding stars called type Ia supernovae to measure the speed of the universe’s expansion. Measuring slight changes in the frequency of the light emitted from the supernovae shows more recent supernovae are moving apart faster than more ancient ones.
Making waves
“I came to Australia and work at cutting edge of astronomy because Australia has invested in astronomy since World War II,” Schmidt tells Cosmos. “I and other astronomers, we have to build instruments and we’re always looking what the next best thing is.”
“I became involved with the group doing detection of gravitational waves which, at that time, were not yet detected. Among them is Dan Shaddock, someone years younger than me, who’s in there doing a lot of really important work.”
Gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime predicted by Einstein – were first observed in 2015 by the new instrument LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) in the US.
Schmidt says while he was Vice Chancellor at the Australian National University (ANU) from 2016 to 2024, his interest in astronomy and scientific discovery led him to think about new ways to drive the Australian tech industry to support research.
“One of the groups that came out of this process, though not directly involved, included Dan Shaddock,” Schmidt says.
He recounts that Shaddock, also a professor at ANU, told him: “I have an idea of creating measurement and test equipment where we use the ideas of how we did measurement in LIGO to create a whole new software-enabled measure and test device unlike anything anyone’s ever built before.”
A device to make better devices
Shaddock co-founded the company Liquid Instruments Pty Ltd in 2014 to produce such devices. In April, Schmidt was appointed as a board member of the company. The company’s devices have already been sold to major institutions such as CERN, Google and universities around the world.
“It’s going to be a ubiquitous piece of kit because measurement and test is how you know the thing you built, or are trying to build, is working as per design,” Schmidt adds. “Normally, measurement test equipment has a bunch of analogue and digital parts that are put together for a specific purpose.”
The Liquid Instruments devices are based on a type of versatile integrated circuit called Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Unlike traditional integrated circuits, FGPAs can be reprogrammed for different tasks.
“You can do this instrument, you can do that instrument,” Schmidt says. “And you can, in the computer, create the same type of signal chain that used to require a bunch of individual parts.”
Not only does this mean the device can be used to test and perform measurements for a virtually infinite number of different instruments, Schmidt says “it also allows you to do something interesting, to daisy chain them and program them and put them together in a way that’s all in the box”.
The old way, Schmidt explains, requires that “you take this box which did its thing, this box that did its thing, you plug it in together, you do your test, and then you’d need to plug this into this box and do the next test”.
Smart analogy
He likens the development to the emergence of smartphones.
“I saw the iPhone coming as a piece of kit, a phone that basically had, you know, a computer on it and did all these things. I didn’t think about it as a platform for apps. The thing that really made the iPhone amazing was apps where people could design their own,” Schmidt says. “This type of equipment has that ability for it not just to be pre-cooked, but for people in their own environment to create things.”
“Some of it could be simple, like your phone suddenly becoming a flashlight, a torch,” Schmidt laughs. “You may say, well, that’s kind of stupid. But does anyone carry around a torch anymore? No, we all just carry our phones. Stupidest, simplest app ever. It’s actually quite a revolutionary change.”
Schmidt says there are virtually no limits to what such a test and measurement device can do.
“It’s like saying what is a circuit board going to do for you?” he says. “It will be used to develop the instruments on telescopes. It could be used to create consumer electronics.
“It doesn’t discover planets, but it helps you build instruments that do. It doesn’t build a new high-performing Tesla car, but it provides the test and measurement equipment that allows you to layer new things on.
“It’s a real foundational thing, and that’s why it’s exciting, because it can be used everywhere in the economy. One of the things I know Dan really wants to make sure is that this company grows and remains a big part of Australia. It’s easy for it to go overseas, and given how much of the effort’s gone in and IP is here, it would be great if we can keep a big hunk of it here in Australia.”
Reward for effort in basic science
Schmidt says that global economic conditions are “a little bumpy” but he is confident that there is enough interest for new FPGA-based devices to make waves on international markets.
He stresses that the development of measurement and test equipment highlights the importance of theoretical research which may not appear to have any immediate practical purpose.
“It is a classic example about how innovation actually occurs,” Schmidt says. “You need to have the whole thing from basic science looking at black holes, frictionless ways to encourage people like Dan Shaddock, people with a range of expertise from the basic sciences like me to people in Silicon Valley – experience coming together to create an ecosystem and then producing products that are sold on the global market that do new and cool things.
“There’s no shortcuts. Ministers always say, don’t do all that astronomy stuff. Just do the good stuff. Well, the good stuff only happens because you’ve been doing stuff that’s good all along. This is what the ecosystem looks like, and it’s a storybook example of it.”
