Scientists don’t normally make much money.

But Nobel Prize winners Perlmutter, Riess and Schmidt don’t need worry about being short of cash anymore. They can forget eating instant noodles and cobbling together loose change to keep the electricity meter running. Winning the highest accolade in science is more than luck. It wasn’t their lucky stars that bagged them the $1.5 million Prize this week; but their tenacity in studying celestial bodies.

Their discovery – that the Universe is expanding at an ever increasing speed – is simply profound. Although they first discovered it back in 1998, it still causes confusion amongst bespeckled star-gazers and flies in the face of the accepted notion that everything around us is simply the result of a Big Explosion.

No one has yet come up with a wholly convincing reason why stars are speeding away from each other at an increasing rate of knots. I have a little theory that’s been on my mind for a while – and I’d like to share it. Watch out, things are going to get rather theoretical… Read more