Like most people studying the birth of the universe, David Schramm knew he was working in a golden age for his field–a historical moment when the science is bounding forward rather than creeping.
More than most, though, he helped make it so.
When Schramm, 52, was killed Friday in the crash of his private plane in Colorado, the University of Chicago lost a star so large he had drawn in other big thinkers, as if by gravity, making the school one of the world’s centers for studying the origins of the universe.
As 20th Century physics moves into its end game, marshaling answers to cosmological questions about how the universe was born and whether it will ever die, the school and the field are left without one of the scientists who helped bring it there.
“He had, for the last 25 years, been a real driving force in cosmology and not only made great advances of his own, but was a great stimulus and tireless advocate for the whole field,” said Sir Martin Rees, Royal Society Professor at Cambridge University in England.
Hunkered down in offices and laboratories, scientists increasingly feel confident they are unraveling fundamental mysteries of the cosmos. While some recognize that as one of the arch achievements of 20th Century science, most everyone else on the planet goes about their daily lives oblivious to the triumph.
By looking at Schramm’s contributions to cosmology, though, the rest of us can get at least an inkling of the collective accomplishments scientists have made in a field once the sole domain of creation myths.
The questions are as big as they come: What is the universe made of? How big is it? Will it ever end?
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Schramm helped show that the universe is much stranger than scientists ever had dreamed, made mostly of material they cannot even recognize.
Sitting on a couch in his University of Chicago office last spring, he grinned as he explained one of the most fundamental, yet perplexing, properties of the universe. Scientists, he said, do not know what the bulk of the universe is made of.
He tapped the blue fabric of the couch.
“This stuff is not the bulk of the universe,” he said. “It is something else.”
Most astrophysicists now say that no more than 10 percent of the mass of the universe consists of what we would consider normal matter, the everyday variety of stuff that makes up stars and planets and everything on them.
The other 90 percent is matter that cannot be seen, felt or touched, matter scientists call exotic or dark.
“Weird stuff,” Schramm called it, smiling slyly.
And it was his work, started as a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, that helped make it clear to scientists most of the universe is made of material invisible and unknown.
This was Schramm’s idea: If, when the universe was born, it was in a colossal thermonuclear reaction, then it would have produced certain elements in set proportions. So, if one can measure these particular elements, it will reveal how much of the other stuff was produced, as well.
“It is a cosmic inventory of the stuff in the universe,” said Rocky Kolb, a professor at the University of Chicago and a theoretical astrophysicist at Fermilab near Batavia.
The key, Schramm theorized, is determining how much deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, exists in the cosmos. He argued that from Day One, no new deuterium has been produced; the lot of it was made in the crucible of the Big Bang.
Importantly, the deuterium must exist in a certain proportion to everything else.
“By using that argument, you can put an upper bound to the amount of ordinary matter,” said Michael Turner, chairman of the U. of C.’s department of astronomy and astrophysics.
By sizing up the amount of deuterium floating around, Schramm postulated that no more than 10 percent of the universe could be made of normal matter.
“This is the linchpin in the case for the fact that most of the matter in the universe is something other than what we are made of,” Turner said.
Just as Copernicus in the 16th Century showed the Earth was not the center of the universe, 20th Century science is showing that our heavens are but a small part of what really lies out there.
“It is the ultimate expression of the Copernican principle,” Turner said.
Schramm’s thinking, colleagues say, helped bring together scientists who once appeared to dwell in different universes: the astrophysicists, working on problems on the largest scale; and particle physicists, looking for forces at work on the smallest scale.
He did this in an arcane field of study called Big Bang nucleosynthesis, studying the primordial factory that created elements.
In the 1970s and ’80s, particle physicists were working to discover new families of subatomic particles called quarks.
“He wrote an influential paper that showed if there were too many families of quarks, primordial nucleosynthesis would be all screwy,” Kolb said. “Now we know there are three. He was proven right.
“Many people thought Dave was going to win the Nobel Prize for that.”
Schramm’s field was a collaborative one; advances often resulted from the work of many around the globe.
“Very few operate in the isolation of Einstein,” said Jim Peebles, the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University. “Nonetheless, there are leaders, people who push. These are the people who are taking the lead in getting science done. I would place Schramm among the natural leaders.”
The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the crash that killed Schramm. Representatives for the agencies could not be reached Sunday.
But Arapahoe County Sheriff Pat Sullivan Jr. said suspicions about the cause of the crash are focusing on icing or engine problems. It was about 25 degrees and foggy at the time of the crash, he said.
Schramm left Midway Airport Friday afternoon and stopped at Front Range Airport, just east of Denver, about 7:30 p.m. to refuel his twin-engine Swearingen SW-3, a plane he dubbed Big Bang Aviation.
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At 7:55 p.m., after calling ahead to his family, Schramm took off into the foggy, sub-freezing night, headed for Aspen about 150 miles away.
A few minutes later, Schramm radioed the air traffic controller and reported trouble with a stalling engine.
“They had him at 10,000 feet during the first sweep of the radar. The next sweep put him at 7,500 feet,” Sullivan said. “The (ground) here is at 5,000 feet.”
At 8:17 p.m., Sullivan’s phones began to ring. Fourteen people called, many of them motorists on Interstate Highway 70 who could see a wall of flame rising from a flat, stubbly field just north of the highway. Several people living in the area called to report an explosion.
The debris from Schramm’s plane spread over an area 200 feet wide and about a quarter-mile long, indicating he may have tried to land, Sullivan said. The plane’s left wing apparently gouged the snow-covered ground, catapulting the plane, he said.