16 May
Australia Pavilion, World Expo Osaka
Professor Brian Schmidt
Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, Australian National University
2011 Nobel Laureate in Physics
Ladies and Gentlemen it is a honour and delight to be here tonight in the Australia Pavilion at Expo 2025 to celebrate Japanese and Australian science, and specifically the 45th anniversary of Australia Japan Science and Technology Treaty.
This evening, I would like to reflect about the past, but also to focus on the future.
The story for me starts with my Wife – Jenny Gordon – who spent a year in Japan in 1979 as a Rotary exchange student just after high school, in Yamanashi Prefecture. She arrived with no Japanese, but an understanding that Japan was important to Australia.
She left 12 months later with a country dialect of Japanese that never fails to amuse our Japanese friends.
When we met at Harvard a decade later – that Japanese experience she described was so different than what I could imagine as an American – Japan was a collaborator who you visited, whose culture and language you learned – it wasn’t transactional.
There is a reason that on a per capita basis, Australian’s learn the Japanese language more than almost any other country outside of Japan (Korea is just ahead of us – the USA for example is 20-times behind).
So when we moved to Australia and in 1999 I got the chance of taking up a JSPS fellowship to visit Japan for a few months – I took opportunity, and the whole family came along. It was an experience that has connected me to Japan for my entire career, orchestrated by Professor Kenichi Nomoto – who I will be going up to visit tomorrow before I fly home.
Professor Nomoto is an expert on the explosions of exploding stars – the same ones I have used to measure the expansion of the Universe back in time. By working together we have been able to help improve the measurements I make, and enabled him to make better simulations of these stellar explosions.
We know from Ken Nomoto’s work, that these objects make about 200,000 times the mass of the Earth in iron each time one explodes as a giant thermonuclear bomb. And that nuclear energy makes them 5 billion times brighter than our sun, and that power enables us to see them at great distances across the Universe
My job was to look for these objects billions of light years in the past and measure their distance and expansion rate away from us (this is because the Universe is expanding – the further away - the faster the expansion away), and thereby measure how the Universe’s expansion changed over time. The fact that the Universe unexpectedly was speeding up over time was the big surprise that eventually led to my trip to Stockholm in 2011.
Now for some people, it might seem silly that we would spend so much time and energy working on exploding stars that are literally at the edge of the visible universe.
But it is by pushing the boundaries of knowledge - doing this fundamental research that we make the discoveries that underpin the technology we so rely on today.
Take for example the Iphone – my area of fundamental Astro-particle physics helped make the Touch Screen, the WiFi, the GPS, the World Wide Web, and the Digital Camera possible – those pictures I have just showed you in Japan were taken on the first consumer digital camera with a 2 Megapixel camera - I bought it in Akihabra in 1999 on that JSPS fellowship – I was first person I know with such a device.
And the sensor that made it (and all current digital cameras) possible was invented by Astronomers for the Jupiter Mission Galileo. There are many different fundamental science discoveries that went into making the Iphone possible.
That is how science works – and that is why it is important we continue to do it. If we only try to invent from what we already know – our progress is going to become muted – more and more incremental over time.
Let’s remember that Science and Technology is done by people (and yes we will be helped by AI, but don’t expect it to take over the role of scientists anytime soon). It is by bringing people together and sharing ideas that we are able to make progress in Science. And this science creates the sea of knowledge from which technology can fish for the ideas to emerge as tangible things that drive prosperity.
In the fast paced world we are all now used to – it is good to remind ourselves that science is a team sport - and is a marathon, not a sprint. In the 45 years of the Treaty signing, we have seen Japan gift Australia our national science museum, Questacon (where my Nobel Prize is on permanent loan).
And Australia host the highly successful Japanese sample return missions of Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 in our desert near Woomera.
So we actually do a lot with Japan right now – Australia is Japan’s 7th highest co-publisher of scientific research – with the largest areas of collaboration in Life Science, Physics, Chemistry, Agriculture, and the Environment
But I do think it would make a lot of sense to do more in the future. After all, Japan is Australia’s 2nd largest two-way trading partner, and Australia is in Japan’s top-5.
Given the Geopolitical state that we find ourselves – our mutual interests are increasing, becoming more distinct, and more important.
I cannot understate the importance of just getting people working together. The JSPS program is a model program internationally. It brings many people to Japan on extended visits, and runs events like the HOPE Meeting for very early-stage researchers, which I had the privilege to attend in March in Yokohama.
I am pleased to see Australia has recently created the Global Science and Technology Diplomacy Fund which can help fund Australian-Japanese research. But if we want to really raise the temperature (and I mean in a good way!) – then I think a bilateral program of exchange would be particularly important, where dozens of researchers are exchanged each year.
And this is because we have a lot of things we should be doing together. In my area of Astronomy we are already co-developing instruments, telescopes, and science programs, and I cannot tell you how easy it is to collaborate with Japan because we are in the same time zone.
But it is not just the time zone making things convenient – it is indicative of our shared interests. Whether it be geology, the Pacific Ocean, or shared species. But it can also be strategic. Australia is Japan’s largest supplier of energy and raw materials – we have been uncomplicated partners for more than 50 years.
But the world is rapidly changing, and we can work together to pivot away from Australia’s coal and natural gas as an energy source, to our even more abundant sun and wind.
The scale of what is required is enormous – and it is not just producing and shipping hydrogen (which we can do), but imagine using joint technology and capital that undertakes the energy intensive part of processing of minerals in Australia so they can be transported to Japan ready for advanced manufacturing.
In addition, the world is crying out for an alternate safe supply of critical minerals – Australia cannot do this on its own – but in combination with Japan, we could. We could mine, refine, and create products together.
The biggest elephant in the room is that we are both going to need to become more self-reliant on our security, and here our common interests and threats are aligned extremely closely.
While neither of us should walk-away from the current status quo, our respective strengths in the science and technology useful in defence is highly complementary, but with our collective research and development in these areas severely under-done – the reality is, that we are playing each in our own sand-pit.
There is a whole range of new things that will be important to our respective self-defence involving AI, quantum, laser-communications, advanced imaging, robots and drones that we are both very good at, and which we could imagine scaling up our respective efforts, together. We certainly need to diversify our efforts on this front, and Japan, at least to me, is clearly stop number one as this train leaves the station.
Australia and Japan have a great relationship, but there remain so many things that Japan and Australia can and should be doing in science and technology together, that we are leaving on the table at present.
Our capitals are separated by 8000km – so new relationships will need to be nurtured at the beginning, they are not just spontaneously going to happen. But once they get started, the time-zone, our mutual cultural awareness, and the values and issues we share – will make it far easier to build further activities – just like my visit 26 years ago has catalysed a life-time of activity.
So as we celebrate 45 years of formal technological cooperation -my ask tonight is for all of us to think bigger, for our respective governments to further seed these aspirations, and for the rest of us to do our respective parts of working together for our common good.
You can count on me to be part of it – and I hope many of you will join me.
Thank you.