Category Archives: Astronomy

Desciphering Webb Telescope Images

Astronomers can look at images of celestial objects like planets, nebulae and galaxies and immediately see their significance, but for the average person seeing them on the Evening News the pictures are, of course, beautiful but at the same time, generally mysterious. My recent book The Hidden Universe takes 68 images you might have encountered, shows you how they were created, and what interesting story lurks beneith their gorgeous countenences. This blog will describe one of these.

By now you have seen the spectacular images provided by the Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and boy are they breath-taking even for an astronomer! I have been waiting all my professional life for HD-quality images of objects in the mid-infrared spectrum (wavelength: 1 to 28 microns), and JWST has not dissappointed. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope also produced high-quality infrared images to be sure (wavelength: 3 to 160 microns), but JWST is a much-larger telescope (50-times larger than Spitzer) with decades-more-modern sensors!

For a full array of Webb’s first images and spectra, please visit: https://esawebb.org/initiatives/webbs-first-images/

Selecting Your Color Pallet

The first thing to remember when looking at JWST images at wavelengths between 0.6 and 28-microns is that they are not colorized the way your eye would see the light. Human eyes end their color sensitivity to visible light at around 0.6-microns, so the idea that something seen by JWST would ‘look green or red’ is completely incorrect. JWST, in fact many astronomical images used in research, are colorized to help the astronomer detect differences in how objects emit light at different wavelengths.

Our brain has evolved our color vision to be a sophisticated pattern-recognizer, so all you have to do is put your data into ‘RGB’ form, and BANG! you can use the image processing power of the wet-ware in your brain to quickly survey a new subject.

The particular color pallet an astronomer uses is all about their artistic sensibility and what they want to emphasize, so it is not unreasonable for a bright red color to be used to represent hot dust and bright blue colors for cooler dust, etc. Ironically, in the electromagnetic spectrum, red wavelengths are cooler objects and blue wavelengths are hotter objects, but humans feel that blue is a cooler color than red, so our interpretation of color is backwards! For astronomers, you can even colorize the speeds of gas clouds (ie Doppler shift) so that blue colors represent clouds moving towards you and red clouds are clouds moving away from you, irrespective of the wavelength being used.

Image Analysis 101.

To analyze JWST images, let’s start with an image that has become an astronomical and even world-wide ‘classic’: The Pillars of Creation.

Vital Statistics: The ‘Pillars’ are actually a small part of the Eagle Nebula, also called Messier 16. This is a beautiful star-forming region in the constellation  Serpens located 7,000 light years from Earth. With a size of about 60 light years, the region contains 8,000 stars  of which the brightest of these, HD-168076, is 80 times the mass of our sun and only a few million years old. Its intense ultraviolet light illuminates the nebular gas and causes the atoms to emit the colorful patina of light that we see in optical photographs. Here is what the entire nebula looks like with ‘true color’ RGB filters in the visible spectrum:

        This three-color composite optical image was obtained with the Wide-Field Imager camera on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory. At the center of the nebula you can see the Pillars silhouetted against the bright nebular gases, which makes these ‘dark nebulae’ really stand out. The cluster of bright stars to the upper right is called NGC 6611, which the Pillars are pointing at, and are the home to the massive and hot stars that illuminate the Pillars.

Ionizing Radiation: The intense ultraviolet radiation from the massive stars in the cluster at the upper-right is actively eating away at the dense interstellar cloud that gave birth to them at the lower-left. These are what astronomers classify as O and B-type stars or just ‘OB’ stars. Each is more than 5 times as massive as our sun, and with surface temperatures above 20,000o C they emit most of their light at ultraviolet wavelengths. Astronomers can detect this ionized gas at radio-wavelengths too. They are called ‘HII’ (H-two) regions because HI is the symbol for ordinary ‘neutral’ hydrogen and ‘II’ means that the neutral hydrogen atoms have lost one electron to make them ionized, hence ‘HII’. This ultraviolet radiation streaming through the hydrogen HI gas to ionize it into HII results in many unusual wind-swept shapes including what astronomers call ‘elephant trunks’ such as the Pillars. Their shapes act like ‘wind socks’ and point towards the main source of the ionizing gas flow, which is expanding outwards from the OB star cluster at speeds up to 10 km/s….. that’s about 22,000 mph. At this pace, the ionzation front can travel 4 light years in 100,000 years, which is enough to cross the space of most star-forming regions.

What you also notice is that the optical image shows the Pillars as dark and obscurring the background nebula which we call ‘dark nebulae’, while the JWST image shows the Pillars being very bright as ’emission nebulae’. The bright emission nebula produced by the stars is also missing in the JWST image, and instead you see thousands of stars in the background. The reason this happens is your first exposure to astrophysics!


Here is a side-by-side comparison of the Hubble (left) and Webb images (right).

Interstellar Dust: Interstellar gas clouds would be entirely invisible were it not for the fact that for about every trillion atoms of gas you have one dust grain. These dust grains are about 1-micron in diameter and were formed in the cool atmospheres of ancient red super giant stars like rain condensing out of a storm cloud on Earth. The dust grains do two things. First they scatter light at optical wavelengths, just like the dust in our atmosphere does, making the sky (or a nebula) appear blue. Secondly, they are very cold, but even so they emit their own ‘heat radiation’ in the infrared spectrum. If a cloud contains lots of dust grains, it will obscure the light from background stars, but at the same time emit infrared radiation making them appear bright at infrared wavelengths. This is what we see in the Pillars.

These linear Pillar clouds are about 2 to 4 light years in length and are rich in dust grains, so they block optical light in the famous Hubble images making them look dark, but emit their own radiation making them look bright at infrared wavelengths in the JWST images. For the first time, astronomers can study just how lumpy the surfaces of these interstellar clouds are by looking at the infrared light they are emitting directly. Taking a closer look at the Pillars gives even more information.

Close up of the Pillars dust cloud showing stars being born – red dots and color near center of image.

Star-forming regions: Zoom in a little more, until you see red dots springing into view. There are dozens of them. Each of those red dots covers an area larger than our solar system. The finger-like protrusions are also larger than our solar system, and are made visible by the shadows of evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs), which shield the gas behind them from intense UV flux. EGGs are themselves incubators of new stars. The stars then emerge from the EGGs, which then are evaporated.

So there you have it! One picture rendered into ‘a thousand words’. To be sure, this one image will easily form the basis for someone’s PhD thesis because it is so rich in detail missing from even the best Hubble images. When combined with spectroscopic data from JWST and data from radio astronomy, we will have a detailed understanding of just ONE star-forming region in our Milky Way. We are definitely living in exciting times for astronomical research!

If you want to see more astronomical images analyzed this way, have a look at my new book ‘The Hidden Universe’ available at Amazon.

Check back here for my next blog!

The Last Total Solar Eclipse…Ever!

Credit  Luc Viatour  https://Lucnix.be….An email to Viatour Luc would be appreciated too.

Well…The answer is 700 million years from now, but the details are interesting!

Since the dawn of recorded history, humans have had a love-hate relationship with total solar eclipses. For most of human history, these events were feared and taken as omens of the downfall of empires or the end of the world. Only in the last thousand years or so have people settled down and viewed them as the beautiful and bizarre events that they are. By the 19th Century, scientists and artists traveled the world over to capture them with sketches at the telescope eyepiece. Among the first images taken by primitive cameras were those of total solar eclipses.

Predicting total solar eclipses

Today, the physics and mathematics of these events are known with such detail that they can be predicted to within minutes from 2000 BCE to 3000 CE [1]. They can even be used to track the slowing down of earth’s rotation by comparing the predicted time and place with historical observations [2]. But total solar eclipses require a precise geometric circumstance to exist. Our moon has a diameter of 3,475 km at a perigee distance of 363,300 km, while the sun has a diameter of 1.4 million km at a distance of 150 million km. This means that, although the sun has a diameter that is 403 times the moon, it is 412 times farther away so that the apparent size of the dark lunar disk completely covers the blinding disk of the sun in the sky. Depending on the exact timing of the moon in its orbit, this ratio of 403/412 can be made to be exactly equal to 1.00 so that the disk of the moon exactly covers the sun to give the classic total solar eclipse shown in the picture above. But this precise geometric circumstance is not written in stone. In fact, to get a proper prediction far into the fiuture you need a supercomputer!

Earth orbit evolution

Currently the distance from earth to the sun has an average value of 150 million km, but because Earth’s orbit is an ellipse, it varies from 152 million km in July to 147 million km in January. This leads to the ironic circumstance that in the Northern Hemisphere, the sun is actually farthest away from the sun in the summer and closest in the winter! Only the Southern Hemisphere with its reversed seasons gets it right!

For many decades, researchers have modeled the evolution of the orbit of the Moon and Earth with supercomputers and pretty much nailed down what we can expect to happen for the next few billion years. As it turns out, this is a fiendishly difficult calculation because it depends on an exact knowledge of the interiors of the moon and earth, the location of the continents, and the influences of the other planets. The inner solar system is dynamically unstable and displays a chaotic behavior over times of 100 million years or longer. A consequence of this is that even changing the location of Mercury in its orbit by 1 meter today causes a variety of different outcomes in a billion years including its collision with Venus and ejection from the solar system. Earth, however, seems to exist in a remarkably stable gravitational balance such that its orbit changes only insignificantly from what we see today. [3] It will drift outwards from the sun by a few thousand kilometers due to the sun itself losing mass. The sun converts 4 million tons of mass into radiant energy every second and added up over millions of years, this causes the sun’s gravitational hold on Earth to weaken and its orbit to drift outwards by 1.5 cm/year [4].

The outward drift of Earth in its orbit is entirely negligable so we won’t bother including it. We will assume that the average perihelion and aphelion distances will still remain close to 147 and 152 million km. This means that from Earth the angular diameter of the sun from the surface will vary between 1,964 seconds of arc at perihelion to 1,900 seconds of arc at aphelion, where 3600 seconds of arc equals 1 angular degree.

Lunar orbit evolution.

The moon raises ocean and solid-body tides in Earth. The tidal bulge accelerates the moon in its orbit and the orbit of the moon increases over time. The tidal bulge also slows down Earth’s rotation and lengthens the length of its ‘day’.

We know from geologic data that our moon was formed some 4.4 billion years ago and orbited Earth at a distance of only about 30 Earth Radii ( 190,000 km) causing Earth to have a rotation period of about 12 hours in a ‘day’. [5]. Since its formation, it has drifted out to its present distance at a current rate of about 3.8 cm/year based on lunar laser metrology [6]. But this outward drift continues today so that in the future the moon will be even farther from Earth. This means that at some time in the future, the ratio of lunar:solar size and lunar:solar distance will fall below the magic 1.000 needed for a total solar eclipse. The moon will simply be too small in apparent size to perfectly cover the disk of the sun. We can’t predict the exact date when we will see the very, very, very last total solar eclipse from Earths surface, but we can get a pretty good idea what timescales are involved.

Simple Linear Model

Suppose we just used the current perihelion and aphelion distances and then assumed that the moon is moving away from Earth at a constant rate of 3.8 cm/year. If we calculate the angular sizes of the moon and sun from Earth we get the following figure.

Explanation: The orange line is the angular size of the sun viewed from Earth when Earth is closest to the sun (perihelion) and the yellow line is the same calculation from when Earth is farthest from the sun (aphelion). The black line is the angular diameter of the moon at its farthest distance from Earth (apogee) and the green line is for its closest distance to Earth (perigee). What you see is that the lunar curves cross the solar curves and indicate when these two diameters are equal, allowing a total solar eclipse to be viewed. So long as the solar lines are between the two lunar lines, you will have a total solar eclipse.

What this graph says is that 1044 million years ago, the sun at perihelion matched the moons size at apogee when it had the smallest angular size. After this ‘year’ the moons size at apogee was too small to cover the sun at perihelion and so total solar eclipses at lunar apogee ceased to happen when the solar disk was largest at perihelion. Notice that before 1044 million years the lunar lines were above the solar lines. This means that the disk of the moon was always much greater than the disk of the sun at any time in the lunar orbit. In fact, the lunar disk was so big that not only was the disk of the sun covered by the moon but much of the inner corona too. You would still have total solar eclipses before 1044 million years ago, but they would look dramatically different than the ones we see today.

By the time we get to 710 million years ago, the moon at apogee was also too small to cover the sun at aphelion when the solar disk is smallest. Between 1044 and 710 million years ago, the small apogee moon could still cover the sun when the sun was between aphelion and perihelion, but after 710 million years ago, there would never again be a total solar eclipse of the sun when the moon was at apogee. This was before the emergence of multi-cellular life on Earth during the Cambrian Explosion. Only annular eclipses will be viewed from then on during lunar apogee.

Now the second lunar curve in green is more interesting. It shows the angular size of the perigee moon, and it is pretty clear that today (Time-0) the size of the perigee moon is larger that the sun at both perihelion and aphelion. So we get total solar eclipses no matter if Earth is at perihelion or aphelion. However, by 280 million years from now, the moon will start to become smaller than the solar disk at perihelion and so eclipses will stop being total solar eclipses when the sun is closest to earth and the moon is also closest to earth. After 613 million years from now, you will no longer have total solar eclipses for the perigee moon and the smaller aphelion sun. After 613 million years the lunar disk will never again be big enough to completely cover the solar disk. This is the estimate you are likely to find in many popularizations of this Final Event such as a SpaceMath problem at NASA, and NASAs lunar scientst Dr. Richard von Drak.

A More Accurate Calculation.

The previous linear calculation was based on the moon maintaining its outward 3.8 cm/yr motion for the next 600 million years, but detailed supercomputer calculations of the evolution of the Earth-Moon system give a more accurate result. I used the model published in 2021 by Prof. Houraa Daher and her team at the University of Michigan [7], and specifically used their Figure 5a, which gave the past value for the lunar orbit semi-major axis. I also used the 2020 data from the published work by Dr. Bijay Sharma [8] at the National Institute of Technology in India, specifically Figure 7, which gave the recession speed (cm/yr) with lunar semi-major axis. Ideally, both of these data should be derived from the same calculations but unfortunately this was not possible to obtain at the time of this writing. However, if they are both faithful to the same underlying physics, then the results should be consistent.

The application of these detailed models to the lunar size evolution is shown in the next figure.

The straight, linear extrapolations have now been replaced by more realistic curved predctions. Here we see along the black line that at 700 million years ago, the lunar size at apogee matched the solar disk size at perihelion (1952 arc-seconds) , some 300 million years later than the linear model. By 500 million years ago the apogee lunar disk no longer covered the disk of the sun at aphelion, so from this time forward there were no longer any total solar eclipses when the moon was at its farthest apogee distance. This happened around the time of the Cambrian Explosion.

Meanwhile, the green line for the perigee moon shows that it has a disk size greater then the size of the large perihelion sun (1952 arcseconds) disk until 300 million years from today. At this time, the lunar diameter varies from 1718 arcseconds (black line) to 1952 arcseconds (green line) so we can still have total solar eclipses so long as the moon is close to its perigee when the sun passes through one of the lunar ‘nodes’ during the equinoxes. At about 700 million years from now the large perigee moon with a diameter of 1952 arcseconds covers the sun at perihelion, but after this time, its diameter continues to decrease until from this time forward all we ever see are annular eclipses. So this critical ‘date’ is about 80 million years later than the linear model.

By 700 million years from now, the moon will continue to drift away from Earth, but at a slower rate of 3.0 cm/year. Its distance from Earth will have grown from 60.2 Re (384,400 km) to 63.8 Re (407,155 km). The moon will then take 28.4 days to orbit Earth having gained about 26.4 hours since today. This means that the time between one full moon and the next will be 30.7 days instead of the current 29.5 days. Meanwhile, the Earth’s rotation has changed from its current 23h 56m to about 26h 25m as the lunar tides continue to do their work. What this means is that an Earth Year at 700 million years from today will only about 330 days long!

Will there be anyone there to care? Probably not.

Our sun continues to evolve and grow in luminosity so by then it will be about 10% more luminous than it is today.  This means the average global temperature will be 117o F and not the 57o F we enjoy today. By this time, the level of carbon dioxide will have fallen below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees.  Some plants use the C4 carbon fixation method to persist at carbon dioxide concentrations as low as ten parts per million. However, the long-term trend is for surface plant life to die off altogether. The extinction of plants  will be the demise of almost all animal life since plants are the base of much of the animal food chain on Earth. Climate models suggest that by about this time Earth will be hot enough to cause the slow evaporation of the oceans into the atmosphere. This will be the start of what is called the “moist greenhouse” phase, resulting in a runaway evaporation of the oceans and Earth becoming Venus.  Meanwhile, the current continents will have merged and separated and merged again into yet another supercontinent with its own lethal contribution to global heating and weather [9].

So basically by about 700 million years from now, Earth will be a humid, desert world with no complex living organisms to appreciate total solar eclipses except perhaps extremophile bacteria…and cockroaches?

Have a nice day!

[1] Five Millennium Catalog of Solar eclipses https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/catkey.html

[2] Ancient eclipses Reveal How Earths Rotation has Changed https://www.space.com/ancient-eclipse-records-earth-rotation-history

[3] Highly Stable Evolution of Earths Future Orbit Despite Chaotic Behaavior of Solar System https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/811/1/9

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/04/09/earth-is-spiraling-away-from-the-sun-for-now-but-will-eventually-crash-into-it/?sh=863220238580

[5] Long-Term Earth-Moon Evolution With High-Level Orbit and Ocean Tide Models https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021JE006875 figure 6

[6] The moon has been drifting away from Earth for 4.5 billion years. A stunning animation shows how far it has gone. https://www.businessinsider.com/video-moon-drifts-away-earth-4-billion-years-2019-9

[7] Long‐Term Earth‐Moon Evolution With High‐Level Orbit and Ocean Tide Models, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9285098/

[8] The Past, Present and the Futuristic Earth-Moon Orbital-Global Dynamics – and its habitability – https://www.proquest.com/openview/c945a68d9b4a2354aaea7cf859b776ba/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=4882998

[9] What if You Traveled One Billion Years into the Future? https://whatifshow.com/what-if-you-traveled-one-billion-years-into-the-future/

This is Not Your Father’s Universe!

When I was learning astronomy in the 60s and 70s, we were still debating whether Big Bang or Stady State were the most accurate models for our universe. We also wondered about how galaxies like our Milky Way formed, and whether black holes existed. The idea that planets beyond our solar system existed was pure science fiction and no astronomers spent any time trying to predict what they might look like. As someone who has reached the ripe old age of 70, I am amazed how much progress we have made, from the discovery of supermassive black holes and exoplanets, to dark matter and gravitational radiation. The pace of discovery continues to increase, and our theoretical ideas are now getting confirmed or thrown out at record pace. There are still some issues that remain deliciously mysterious. Here are my favorite Seven Mysteries of the Universe!

1-How to Build a Galaxy: In astronomy, we used to think that it would take the universe a long time to build galaxies like our Milky Way, Thanks to the new discoveries by the Webb Space Telescope, we now have a ring-side seat to how this happens, and boy is it a fast process!

The oldest galaxies discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope date back to between 400 and 500 million years after the Big Bang. A few weeks ago, Webb spotted a galaxy that seems to have formed only 300 million years after the Big Bang. Rather than the massive galaxies like the Milky Way, these young galaxies resemble the dwarf galaxies like the Large Magellanic Cloud, perhaps only 1/10 the mass of our galaxy and filled with enormus numbers of massive, luminous stars. The above image from Hubble is a nearby galaxy called M-33 that has a mass of about 50 billion suns. There were lots of these smaller galaxies being formed during the first 300 million years after the Big Bang.

It looks like the universe emerged from the Dark Ages and immediately started building galaxies. In time, these fragments collided and merged to become the more massive galaxies we see around us, so we are only just starting to see how galaxy-building happens. Our Milky Way was formed some 1 billion years after the Big Bang, so the galaxy fragments being spotted by Webb have another 700 million years to go to make bigger things. Back in 2012, Hubble had already discovered the earliest spiral galaxy seen by then; a galaxy called Q2343-BX442, camping out at 3 billion years after the Big Bang. In 2021, an even younger spiral galaxy was spotted, called BRI 1335-0417, seen as it was about 1.4 billon years after the Big Bang.

So we are now watching how galaxies are being formed almost right before our eyes! Previous ideas that I learned about as an undergraduate, in which galaxies are formed ‘top-down’ from large collections of matter that fragment into stars, now seem wrong or incomplete. The better idea is that smaller collections of matter form stars and then merge together to build larger systems – called the ‘bottom-up’ model. This process is very, very fast! Among the smallest of these ‘galaxies’ are things destined to become the globular clusters we see today.

2-Supermassive Black Holes: The most distant and youngest supermassive black hole was discovered in 2021. Called J0313-1806, its light left it to reach us when the universe was only 670 million years old. Its mass, however, is a gargantuan 1.6 BILLION times the mass of our sun. Even if the formation of this black hole started at the end of the Dark Ages ca 100 million years after the Big Bang, it would have to absorb matter at the rate of three suns every year on average. That explains its quasar energy, but still…it is unimaginable how these things can grow so fast! The only working idea is that they started from seed masses about 10,000 the mass of our sun and grew from there. But how were the seed masses formed? This remains a mystery today.

3-The Theory of everything: The next Big Thing that I have been following since the 1960s is the search for what some call the Theory of Everything. Exciting theoretical advancements were made in the 1940s and 1960s to create accurate mathematical models for the three nongravity forces, called the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces. Physicists call this the Standard Model, and every physicist learns its details as students in graduate school. By the early 1980s, string theory was able to add gravity to the mix and go beyond the Standard Model. It appeared that the pursuit of a unified theory had reached its apex. Fifty years later, this expectation has all but collapsed.

Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider continue to show how the universe does not like something called supersymmetry in our low-energy universe. Supersymmetry is a key ingredient to string theory because it lets you change one kind of particle (field) into another, which is a key ingredient to any unified theory. So the simplest versions of string theory rise or fall based on whether supersymmetry exists or not. For over a decade, physicists have tried to find places in the so-called Standard Model where supersymmetry should make its appearance, but it has been a complete no-show. Its not just that this failure is a problem for creating a more elegant theory of how forces works, but it also affects astronomy as well.

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/making-sense-string-theory

Personally, when string theory hit the stage in the 1980’s I, like many other astronomers and physicists, thought that we were on the verge of solving this challenge of unifying gravity with the other forces, but this has not been the reality. Even today, I see no promissing solutions to this vexing problem since apparently the data shows that simple string theory is apparently on a wrong theoretical track.

One cheerful note: For neutrinos, the path from theoretical prediction to experimental observation took 25 years. For the Higgs boson, it took 50 years. And for gravitational waves, it took a full 100 years. We may just have to be patient…for another 100 years!

4-Dark Matter: The biggest missing ingredient to the cosmos today is called dark matter. When astronomers ‘weigh’ the universe, they discover that 4.6% of its gravitating ‘stuff’ is in ordinary matter (atoms,. stars, gas, neutron stars etc), but a whopping 24% is in some other ‘stuff’ that only appears by its gravity. It is otherwise completely invisible. Putting this another way, it’s as though four out of every five stars that make up our Milky Way were completely invisible.

Dark matter in Abell 1679.

Because we deeply believe that dark matter must be tracable to a new kind of particle, and because the Standard Model gives us an accounting of all the kinds of elementary particles from which our universe is built, the dark matter particle has to be a part of the Standard Model…but it isn’t!!!! Only by extending the Standard Model to a bigger theory (like string theory) can we logically and mathematically add new kinds of particles to a New Standard Model- one of which would be the dark matter particle. String theory even gives us a perfect candidate called the neutralino! But the LHC experiments have told us for over a decade that there is nothing wrong with the Standard Model and no missing particles. Astronomers say that dark matter is real, but physicists can’t find it….anywhere. Well…maybe not ALL astronomers think it’s real. So the debate continues.

Personally, I had heard about ‘missing mass’ in the 1960s but we were all convinced we would find it in hot gas, dim red dwarf stars or even black holes. I NEVER thought that it would turn out to be something other than ordinary matter in an unusual form. Dark matter is so deeply confounding to me that I worry we will not discover its nature before I, myself, leave this world! Then again, there isnt a single generation of scientists that has had all its known puzzles neatly solved ‘just in time’. I’m just greedy!!!

5- Matter and Antimatter: During the Big Bang, there were equal amounts of matter and anti matter, but then for some reason all the antimatter dissappeared leaving us with only matter to form atoms, stars and galaxies. We don’t know why this happened, and the Standard Model is completely unhelpful in giving us any clues to explain this. But next to dark matter, this is one of the most outstanding mysteries of modern, 21st century cosmology. We have no clue how to account for this fact within the Standard Model, so again like Dark Matter, we see that at cosmological scales, the Standard Model is incomplete.

6- Origin of Time and Space: Understanding the nature of time and space, and trying to make peace with why they exist at all, is the bane of any physicists existence. I have written many blogs on this subject, and have tried to tackle it from many different angles, but in the end they are like jigsaw puzzels with too many missing pieces. Still, it is very exciting to explore where modern physics has taken us, and the many questions such thinking has opened up in surprising corners. My previous blog about ‘What is ‘Now’ is one such line of thinking. Many of the new ideas were not even imagined as little as 30 years ago, so that is a positive thing. We are still learning more about these two subjects and getting better at asking the right questions!

https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/0264-9381/page/Focus-issue-loop-quantum-gravity

7-Consciousness: OK…You know I would get to this eventually, and here it is! Neuroscientists know of lots of medical conditions that can rob us of consciousness including medical anesthesia, but why we have this sense about ourselves that we are a ‘person’ and have volition is a massively hard problem. In fact, consciousness is called the ‘Hard Problem’ in neuroscience..heck…in any science!

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/articles/what-if-consciousness-is-not-what-drives-the-human-mind-307159

The ‘Soft Problem’ is how our senses give us a coherant internal model of the world that we can use to navigate the outside world. We know how to solve the Soft Problem, just follow the neurons. We are well on our way to understanding it thanks to high-tech brain imaging scanners and cleverly-designed experiments. The Hard Problem is ‘hard’ because our point-of-view is within the thing we are trying to undertand. Some think that our own ‘wet ware’ is not up to the task of even giving us the intelligence to answer this qustion. It will not be the first time someone has told us about limitations, but usually these are technological ones, and not ones related to limits to what our own brains can provide as a tool.

So there you have it.

My impression is that only Mysteries #1 and #2 will make huge progress. The Theory of Everything is in experimental disarray. For antimatter, there has been no progress, but many ideas. They all involve going outside the Standard Model. Dark matter might be replaced by a modification of gravity at galactic and cosmological scales.

Beyond these ‘superficial’ mysteries, we are left with three deep mysteries. The origin of space, time and consciousness remain our 21st century gift to children of the 22nd century!

Check back here in a few weeks for the next blog!

Black Holes for Fun and Profit!

Well, astronomers finally did it. Nearly 100 years ago, Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity predicted that black holes should exist. Although it took until the 1960’s for someone like physicist John Wheeler to coin the name ‘black hole’ the study of these enigmatic objects became a cottage industry in theoretical physics and astrophysics. In fact, for certain kinds of astronomical phenomena such as quasars and x-ray sources, there was simply no other explanation for how such phenomena could generate so much energy in such an impossibly small volume of space. The existence of black holes was elevated to a certainty during the 1990s as studies of distant galaxies by the Hubble Space Telescope turned in tons of data that clinched the idea that the cores of most if not all galaxies had them. In fact, these black holes contained millions or even billions of times the mass of our sun and were awarded a moniker all their own: supermassive black holes. But there was still one outstanding problem for these versatile engines of gravitational destruction: Not a single one had ever been seen. To understand why, we have to delve rather deeply into what these beasties really are. Hang on to your seats!

               General relativity is the preeminent theory of gravity, but it is completely couched in the language of geometry – in this case the geometry of what is called our 4-dimensional spacetime continuum. You see, in general relativity, what we call space is just a particular feature of the gravitational field of the cosmos within which we are embedded rather seamlessly. This is all well and good, and this perspective has led to the amazing development of the cosmological model called Big Bang theory. Despite this amazing success, it is a theory not without its problems. The problems stem from what happens when you collect enough mass together in a small volume of space so that the geometry of spacetime (e.g. the strength of gravity) becomes enormously curved.

               The very first thing that happens according to the theory is that a condition in spacetime called a Singularity forms. Here, general relativity itself falls apart because density and gravity tend towards infinite conditions. Amazingly according to general relativity, and proved by the late Stephen Hawkins, spacetime immediately develops a zone surrounding the Singularity called an event horizon. For black holes more massive than our sun, the distance in kilometers of this spherical horizon from the Singularity is just 2.9 times the mass of the black hole in multiples of the sun’s mass. For example, if the mass of a supermassive black hole is 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun, its event horizon is at 6.5 billionx2.9 or 19 billion kilometers. Our solar system has a radius of only 8 billion km to Pluto, so this supermassive black hole is over twice the size of our solar system!

               Now the problem with event horizons is that they are one-way. Objects and even light can travel through them from outside the black hole, but once inside they can never return to the outside universe to give a description of what happened. However, it is a misunderstanding to say that black holes ‘suck’ as the modern colloquialism goes. They are simply points of intense gravitational force, and if our sun were replaced by one very gently, our Earth would not even register the event and continue its merry way in its orbit. The astrophysicist’s frustration is that it has never been possible to take a look at what is going on around the event horizon…until April 10, 2019.

               Researchers using the radio telescope interferometer system called the Event Horizon Telescope were able to synthesize an image of the surroundings of the supermassive black hole in the quasar-like galaxy Messier-87 – also known as Virgo A by early radio astronomers after World War II, and located about 55 million light years from Earth. They combined the data from eight radio telescopes scattered from Antarctica to the UK to create one telescope with the effective diameter of the entire Earth. With this, they were able to detect and resolve details at the center of M-87 near the location of a presumed supermassive black hole. This black hole is surrounded by a swirling disk of magnetized matter, which ejects a powerful beam of plasma into intergalactic space. It has been intensively studied for decades and the details of this process always point to a supermassive black hole as the cause.

Beginning in 2016, several petabytes of data were gathered from the Event Horizon Telescope and a massive press conference was convened to announce the first images of the vicinity of the event horizon. Surrounding the black shadow zone containing the event horizon was a clockwise-rotating ring of billion-degree plasma traveling at nearly the speed of light. When the details of this image were compared with supercomputer simulations, the mass of the supermassive black hole could be accurately determined as well as the dynamics of the ring plasma. The round shape of the event horizon was not perfect, which means that it is a rotating Kerr-type black hole. The darkness of the zone indicated that the event horizon did not have a photosphere of hot matter like the surface of our sun, so many competing ideas about this mass could be eliminated. Only the blackness of a black hole and its compact size now remain as the most consistent explanation for what we are ‘seeing’. Over time, astronomers will watch as this ring plasma moves from week to week. The next target for the Event Horizon Telescope is the four million solar mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way called Sgr-A*. Watch this space for more details to come!!

We have truly entered a new world in exploring our universe. Now if someone could only do something about dark matter!!!

Eclipse Postscript

In a previous blog in June , I described the August 21, 2017 eclipse and what to expect from it, along with the many resources available at the NASA website that fill-in the details of this event as we were expecting it to unfold.  This website, by the way,  went crazy for the eclipse and got over 2 billion hits from tens of millions of daily visitors. For myself, I was not prepared for the surge of emotions I would feel even after glimpsing only 15 seconds of this event between gaps in the clouds over Carbondale, Illinois. Why Carbondale? I described in a 2014 Huffington Post article how this would be the place where the eclipse lasted the longest, 2 minutes and 40 seconds, and so this is where NASA Edge decided to park us for our major public outreach activities and NASA TV interviews.

I had been interviewed by a number of TV and radio reporters as well as a memorable Facebook interview with Curiosity. My article at NASA on the airline flights that would see the eclipse got quite a bit of traction. It was fun to see my articles on smartphone eclipse photography get so much press like this one at BuzzFeed, or this one at WIRED.  I even presented my smartphone tips to 1000 students at a local high school, which was carried by the local TV station WSIL-TV. Amazingly, despite my public ‘expertise’ on the matter, I did not bother using my smartphone at all in the brief time that the eclipse showed itself!

I mentioned in an interview with Carolyn Cerda also on WSIL-TV how I had brought along my cameras and hoped to grab just one image of this event. This was after many weeks of debating with myself whether I should even bother with photography at all. I knew how easy it was to get lost among the f/stops and exposure speeds in pursuit of a trophy to commemorate this event. I certainly didn’t want to waste precious time wrestling with the very finicky smartphone telephoto lens set up. But I also wanted to spend as much time as possible letting the emotions wash over me, just as they had done for millions of other people down through the thousands of years of human history. Could I, too, experience the fear that had so commonly been the popular experience? Or would my science protect me from these irrational feelings like some coat-of-armor? I had no idea, and in many of my TV interviews I said as much.

So I compromised.

I would run my digital, Sony camcorder during totality, and on the same tripod bracket, I would set my Nikon D3000 to a fixed f/stop and exposure speed selected to highlight the dazzling bright inner corona and any prominences or blood-red chromospheric light that may be present. I would hold the shutter release down so that the camera took bursts of a dozen photos, and periodically snap photos at mid-eclipse, and on each side of the 2.5-minute window to catch Baily’s Beads and anything else going on. It sounded like a good plan, and one in which I could still spend all of my eyeball time looking at totality and not at my camera!

This turned out to be a very good choice!

The clouds did roll in and cover the entire eclipse except for the last 15 seconds of totality. I snapped a few pictures like the one above using the clouds themselves to filter the intense sunlight, revealing a diminishing crescent sun. Had my NASA activities allowed us to be located a mile east rather than by Saluki Stadium at the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale campus, I would have been treated to a full 2.5 minutes of eclipse. But 15 seconds was just enough time to send chills down my spine and have the experience of a lifetime.

My photos turned out not to be too bad. The montage below was posted on my Facebook page within an hour or so, and although a bit fuzzy for the clouds, it was clear I had seen the entire circumferential inner corona, several red spots along the solar limb as the chromosphere peaked through, and the delightful Diamond Ring of sunlight streaking through a deep lunar canyon! My camcorder also showed the emergence of the sun from totality, capturing the dense clouds and the screams from the thousands of people looking on. This also went up on my Facebook page to the delight of dozens of my friends and family!

But how did I feel?

It was frustrating to see the crescent sun dip in to the dense clouds at the start of totality, and to watch the clock tick out the next few minutes, but as we reached mid-eclipse the scenery around me turned to twilight so quickly that I actually gasped in amazement! Hopefully, and with cameras at the ready I waited and then suddenly the brightening of a small portion of the cloud heralded that the eclipsed sun was about to make its appearance. When it did, everyone shouted and I watched with amazement, not really understanding what it was I was seeing. I immediately placed my finger on the shutter button, let the camera’s machinery take a series of 100 images, and hoped for the best. Again I was not dissappointed.

A dark object appeared surrounded by an intense ring of light. I thought this was just the reflection of sunlight on the cloud, but in an instant I realized this was no sun glint for there was no brilliant solar disk to illuminate it. Instead, it was the corona itself, brighter to the naked eye than I ever could have imagined! Within a few seconds the moon began to move off the western edge of the solar disk and slowly but steadily a single bright point of light appeared and grew in brightness until I could no longer stare at it with my eye through the digital display of my camcorder.

There was so much noise and ruckus from everyone else cheering that it was hard for me to collect and reflect on my thoughts – a process that took several days and repeated sharing of my experiences with family and friends. I had only experienced the ‘tip of an iceberg’ in the emotions that had hit me, and some were no doubt muted by the confusion of what I was seeing so briefly. I could only imagine what the full two minutes would have brought to mind.

I was not prepared for the days to follow. My sense of loss was something ineffable that I could not quite shake. I drifted from day to day, occasionally gawking at the many gorgeous online photos taken by more savvy photographers and old-hands at totalities. But you have to start somewhere, and at least for the first time in my life as an astronomer I can describe to my students,not only why we have eclipses and how our ancestors regarded them, but as with the Northern Lights, I can now add my own tiny voice to describing them in purely human terms!

Thinking Visually

Look at the two images  for a few minutes and let your mind wander.

What impressions do you get from the patterns of light and dark? If I were to tell you that the one at the top is a dark nebula in the constellation Orion, and the one on the bottom is a nebula in the Pleiades star cluster, would that completely define for you what you are experiencing…or is there something more going on?

Chances are that, in the top image you are seeing what looks like the silhouette of the head and shoulders of some human-like figure being lit from behind by a light. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but the image seems vaguely mysterious and perhaps even a bit frightening the more you stare at it.

The image on the bottom evokes something completely different. Perhaps you are connecting the translucence and delicacy with some image of a shroud or silken cloak floating in a breeze. The image seems almost ghost-like in some respects…spiritual

But of course this is rather silly” you might say. “These are interstellar clouds, light-years across and all we are doing is letting our imaginations wander which is not a very scientific thing to do if you want to understand the universe.” This rational response then tempts you to reach for your mouse and click to some other page on the web.

What has happened in that split second is that a battle has been fought between one part of your brain and another. The right side of your brain enjoys looking at things and musing over the patterns that it finds there. Alas, it cannot speak because the language centers of the brain live in the left cerebral hemisphere, and it is here that rules of logic and other ‘scientific’ reasoning tools exist. The left side of your brain is vocal, and talking to you right now. It gets rather upset when it is presented with vague patterns because it can’t understand them and stamp them with a definite emotion the way the right hemisphere can. So it argues you into walking away from this challenge of understanding patterns.

If you can suspend this indignation for a moment or two, you will actually find yourself thinking about space in a way that more nearly resembles how a scientist does, though even some scientists don’t spend much time thinking about space. This indifference has begun to change during the last 20 years, and we are now in the midst of a quiet revolution.

There are three child-like qualities that make for a successful scientist:

Curiosity. This is something that many people seem to outgrow as they get older, or if they maintain it as adults, it is not at the same undiluted strength that it was when they were a child.

Imagination. This is something that also wanes with age but becomes an asset to those that can hang on to even a small vestige of it. It is what ‘Thinking out of the box’ is all about.

Novelty. As a child, everything is new. As an adult we become hopelessly jaded about irrelevant experiences like yet another sunset, yet another meteor shower, yet another eclipse. In some ways we develop an aversion for new experiences preferring the familiarity of the things we have already experienced.

If you wish to understand what space is all about, and explore the patterns hidden in the darker regions of nature, you will have to re-acquaint yourself with that child within you. You will need to pull all the stops out and allow yourself to ‘play’ with nature and the many clues that scientists have uncovered about it. You will need to do more than read books by physicists and astronomers. They speak the language of the left-brain . They can help you to see the logical development of our understanding of space and the Void, but they can not help you internalize this knowledge so that it actually means something to you. For that, you have to engage your right-brain faculties, and this requires that you see the patterns behind the words that physicists and astronomers use. To do that, you will need to think in terms of pictures and other types of images. You will need to bring something to the table to help you make sense of space in a way that you have not been able to before. You will need to expand your internal library of visual imagery to help you find analogues to what physicists and astronomers are trying to describe in words and equations. These visual analogues can be found in many common shapes and patterns, some seen under unusual and evocative circumstances. Here are some evocative images that seem to suggest how space might be put together compliments of  a diatom, the painters Miro and Mondrian, dew on a spider web, and atoms in a tungsten needle tip!

Spider web covered with dew drops

Remember, the right brain uses ALL sensory inputs to search for patterns and to understand them. It even uses imaginary information, dreams, and other free-forms to decode what it is experiencing.  

My book ‘Exploring Quantum Space’ is a guidebook that will give you some of the mental tools you will need to make sense of one of the greatest, and most subtle, discoveries in human history. Space, itself, is far from being ‘nothing’ or merely a container for matter to rattle around within. It is a landscape of hidden patterns and activity that shapes our universe and our destiny. You cannot understand it, or sense the awe and mystery of its existence, by simply reading words and following a logical exposition of ‘ifs and thens’. You also have to experience it through evocative imagery and imagination. Space is such a different medium from anything we have ever had to confront, intellectually, that we need to employ a different strategy if we wish to understand it in a personal way. Once we do this, we will be reconnected with that sense of awe we feel each time we look at the night sky.

My next blog about Nothing introduces some of the other ideas and techniques that scientists use to think about the impossible!

 

Thinking about Nothing

Looking back at the millennia of model building and deduction that has occurred, not a century has gone by when the prevailing opinion hasn’t been that a perfectly empty vacuum is impossible.

Aristotle’s Aether blends seamlessly into the 19th century Ether. In this century, overlapping quantum waves and virtual particles have finally taken root as the New Ether, though it is now infinitely more ephemeral than anything Aristotle or Maxwell could have imagined. We have also seen how the Atomist School of ancient Greece reached its final vindication in the hands of 19th century scientists such as Boltzman. By the 20th century, the Atomist’s paradigm has even been extended to include not just the graininess of matter, but the possible quantum graininess of the vacuum and space itself. In the virtual particles that animate matter, we finally glimpse the world which Heinrich Hertz warned us about nearly a century ago when he said that we would eventually have to reach some accommodation with “invisible confederates” existing alongside what we can see, to make our whole model of reality more logically self-consistent.

Even by the start of the 21st Century, we have reached this accommodation only by shrugging our shoulders and honestly admitting that there are things going on in the world that seem to defy human intuition. What impresses me most about the evolution of our vision of the vacuum is that the imagery we find so potent today is actually in some sense thousands of years old.

It is difficult to imagine that humans would be drawn to the same understanding of physics and astronomy that we now enjoy if our brains had been wired only slightly differently. Without sight and mobility we could not form the slightest notion of 3-D space and geometry. This is what Kant spoke about, what Henri Poincare described at great length without the benefit of 20th century neuroscience, and what Jacob Bronowski described in his book The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination with the benefit of such knowledge. But the object of science is more than just making sense of our senses. It must also guide us towards a deeper understanding of the physical world. This understanding must be self-consistent, and independent of whether we are sensorially or neurologically handicapped. Mathematics as the premier language of physical model building, seems uniquely suited to providing us with an understanding of the physical world. Mathematics lets us see the world in a way that all of the other human languages do not.

If our mathematical understanding of nature is a product of mental activity, and this activity can be physically affected by the hard-wiring of our brain, how do we arrive at a coherent model of the physical world? Can we see in this process any explanation for why certain ideas in physics appear to be so historically tenacious?

It is commonly believed that in order for mathematics and the underlying logic to exist, at the very least a conscious language must be pre-existent to support it. This is the point of view expressed by Benjamin Whorf. But the thoughtful reflections by individuals such as Einstein, Feynman and Penrose point in a very different direction. Einstein once wrote a note to Jaques Hadamard prompted by Hadamard’s investigation of creative thinking,

“…The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements of thought are certain signs ( symbols ) and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined…The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type…”

Roger Penrose echoes some of this same description in his book, The Emperor’s New Mind,

“…Almost all my mathematical thinking is done visually and in terms of non-verbal concepts, although the thoughts are quite often accompanied by inane and almost useless verbal commentary such as ‘that thing goes with that thing and that thing goes with that thing’..”

Freeman Dyson, one of the architects of modern QED had this to say about how Feynman did his calculations,

“…Dick was using his own private quantum mechanics that nobody else could understand. They were getting the same answers whenever they calculated the same problem…The reason Dick’s physics was so hard for ordinary people to grasp was that he did not use equations…Dick just wrote down the solutions out of his head without ever writing down the equations. He had a physical picture of the way things happen, and the pictures gave him the solutions directly with a minimum of calculation…It was no wonder that people who had spent their lives solving equations were baffled by him. Their minds were analytical; his was pictorial…”

In many instances, the conversion of abstract thinking into conventional language is seen as a laborious, almost painful process. Often words are inadequate to encompass the subtleties of the non-verbal, abstract ideas and their interrelationships. According to Penrose,

“I had noticed, on occasion, that if I have been concentrating hard for a while on mathematics and someone would engage me suddenly in conversation, then I would find myself almost unable to speak for several seconds”

In fact, abstract thinking is often argued to be a right-hemisphere function. Visual or pattern-related thinking and artistic talents are frequently coupled to this hemisphere, and since the language centers are in the left-hemisphere, with such a disconnect between language and abstract thinking, there is little wonder that theoreticians and artists find themselves tongue-tied in explaining their ideas, or are inclined to report that their work is non-verbal.

So the creation of sophisticated physical theories may involve a primarily non-verbal and visual-symbolic thinking processes, often manipulating patterns and only later, with some effort of will, translating this into spoken language or fleshing out the required mathematical details. Could this be why scientists, and artists for that matter have such difficulty in explaining what they are thinking to the rest of the population? Could this be why ancient philosophers managed to land upon archetypes for their Creation legends that seem familiar to us in the 20th century? The symbols that are used appear disembodied, and no amount of word play can capture all of the nuances and motivations that went into a particular interpretive archetypes, and make them seem compelling to the non-mathematician or non-artist. Feynman once wrote about the frustrating process of explaining to the public what goes on in nature,

“…Different people get different reputations for their skill at explaining to the layman in layman’s language these difficult and abstruse subjects. The layman then searches for book after book in the hope that he will avoid the complexities which ultimately set in, even with the best expositor of this type. He finds as he reads a generally increasing confusion, one complicated statement after another,… all apparently disconnected from one another. It becomes obscure, and he hopes that maybe in some other book there is some explanation…but I do not think it is possible, because mathematics is NOT just another language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning…if you do not appreciate the mathematics, you cannot see, among the great variety of facts, that logic permits you to go from one to the other…”

If this is the mental frame used by some physicists to comprehend physics, it is little wonder that a great chasm exists between the lay person and the physicist in explaining what is going on. The task that even a physicist such as Freeman Dyson had in translating Feynman’s diagrammatic techniques into mathematical symbology, seems even more challenging knowing that Feynman may have had a whole other perspective on visualization via his apparent color-symbol synthesia. The equations below are the current best mathematical expression for the Standard Model in physics, which describes all known particles and fields excepting gravity.

Another feature of thinking that separates scientists and artists from everyone else seems to be the plasticity of the thinking process itself. Scientists flit from one idea to another until they arrive at a model that best explains the available data, although scientists can also get rooted to particular perspectives that are difficult to forget after decades of inculcation. The general adult population prefers a more stable collection of ideas and ‘laws’ which it can refer to over a lifetime.

Where does this all leave us?

The vacuum has been promoted to perhaps the most important clue to our own existence. The difficulty is that we lack a proper Rosetta Stone to translate the various symbolisms we use to describe it. The clues that we do have are scattered among a variety of enigmatic subjects which strain at our best intellectual resources to understand how they are linked together. Could it be that we are lacking an even more potent symbolic metaphor, and an internal non-verbal language, to give it life? Where would such a thing come from?

Spider web covered with dew drops

If we take our clue from how ideas in physics have emerged in the past, the elements of the new way of thinking may be hidden in some unexpected corner of nature. We may find an analogy or a metaphor in our mundane world which, when mixed with mathematical insight, may take us even closer to understanding gravity, spacetime and vacuum. It is no accident that string theory owes much of its success because it asks us to think about quantum fields as ordinary strings operating in an exotic mathematical setting. It is exciting to think that the essential form of the Theory of Everything could be this close to us, perhaps even lurking in a pattern we see, and overlook, in our everyday lives.

Much of this symbolic process may be performed sub-consciously, and only the form of dreams, insights or hunches seem to bring them into consciousness when the circumstances are appropriate. It is, evidently, the non-verbal and unconscious right hemisphere which experiences these ideas. Is there a limit to this process of symbolic thinking? At least a dozen times this century, physicists have had to throw up their hands over what to make of certain features of the world: the collapse of the wave function; quantum indeterminacy; particle/wave dualism; cosmogenesis. Some of these may eventually find their explanation at the next level of model building. Others such as the meaning of quantum indeterminacy and particle/wave dualism, seem to be here to stay.

In working with these contradictions, the human mind prefers the avenue of denial, you can almost hear your inner voice saying “Aw come on, quantum mechanics just can’t be that weird!” or a state of anxiety as the two hemispheres try to fabricate conflicting world models. Little wonder that we have particle/wave duality, the seeming schism between matter and energy, and a whole host of other ‘polar’ ideas in physics, as two separate minds try to resolve the universe into one model or another with the left one preferring time ordered patterns, and the right one, spatial patterns.

It is hard to believe that our brains can control what we experience of the objective world, but we need only realize that the brain actually blindsides us in a variety of subtle ways, from seeing a wider sensory world. The object of science, however, is to discern the shapes of objective laws in a way that gets to the universal elements of nature that are not coupled to a particular kind of brain circuitry. It doesn’t matter if all scientists have anasognosia and see the world differently in some consistent way, what counts is that they must still live by the laws of motion dictated by gravity and quantum mechanics.

Nils Bohr believed atoms are not real in the same sense as trees. The quantum world really does represent a different kind of reality than our apparently naive understanding of macroscopic reality implies. This being the case, we must first ask to what extent fields and the denizens of the quantum vacuum can be represented by any analogy drawn from the macroworld? We already know that the single most important distinguishing characteristic of atomic particles is their spin; far more so than mass or charge. Yet unlike mass and charge, quantum mechanical spin has ABSOLUTELY no analog in the macroscopic world. Moreover, fundamental particles cannot be thought of as tiny spheres of charged matter located at specific points in space. They have no surface, and participate in an infernal wave-like dance of probability, at least when they are not being observed. Yet despite this warning, we feel comfortable that we understand something about what reality is at this scale, in the face of these irreconcilable differences between one set of mental images and what experiments tell us over and over again. What is the true nature of the vacuum? How did the universe begin? I suspect we will not know the answer to these questions in your lifetime or mine, perhaps for the same reason that it took 3000 years for geometers to ‘discover’ non-Euclidean geometry.

At the present time we are faced with what may amount to only a single proof of the parallel-line postulate, unable to see our way through to another way of looking at the proof. There is also the very real worry that some areas of nature may require modalities of symbolic thinking beyond the archetypes that our brains are capable of providing as a consequence of their neural hard-wiring. Today, we have quantum field theory and its tantalizing paradoxes, much as the ancient geometers had their parallel-line postulate. We, like they, scratch the same figures in the sand over and over again, hoping to see the glimmerings of a new world view appearing in the shifting sands. At a precision of one part in a trillion, our quantum theories work too well, and seem to provide few clues to the new direction we must turn to see beyond them.

The primary arbiters we have at our disposal to decide between various interpretive schemes, experimental data, are not themselves in unending supply as the abrupt cancellation of the U.S. Superconducting Super Collider program in 1989 showed. It was replaced by the CERN Large Hadron Collider shown above, but even the LHC may not be large enough to access the new physics we need to explore to further our theories and understanding.

Whatever answers we need seem to be hidden, not in the low- energy world accessible to our technology, but at vastly higher energies well beyond any technology we are likely to afford in the next few centuries. It is easy to provide a jet plane with an energy of 100 billion billion billion volts — its energy of motion at a speed of a few hundred miles per hour, but it is beyond understanding how to supply a single proton or electron with the same energy. On the other hand, our internal symbolic thinking seems to lead us to similar interpretative schemes, and unconscious dualities which may only be a reflection of our own neural architecture, which we all share, and which has remained essentially unchanged for millennia. We visualize the vacuum in the same way as the Ancients did because we are still starting from the same limited collection of internal imagery. At least for some general problems, we seem to have hit a glass ceiling for which our current style of theory building seems to lead us to a bipolar and contradictory world populated by various dualities: matter/energy, space/time, wave/particle. When we finally do break through to a new kind of reality in our experiments, would we be able to recognize this event? Will our brains filter out this new world and show us only the ghostly shadows of contradictory archetypes cast upon the cave wall?

We have seen that many schemes have been offered for describing the essential difference between matter and empty space; many have failed. Theoreticians since Einstein have speculated about the geometric features of spacetime, and the structure of electrons and matter for decades. The growing opinion now seems to be that, ultimately, only the properties of space such as its geometry or dimensionality can play a fundamental role in defining what matter really is. In a word, matter may be just another form of space. If the essence of matter is to be found in the geometric properties of ’empty’ space, our current understanding of space will not be sufficient to describe all of matter’s possible aspects.

Misconceiving the Big Bang

The Big Bang was NOT a Fireworks Display!

Written by Sten Odenwald
Copyright (C) 1997. Published in the Washington Post Horizon education supplement on May 14, 1997.

The Big Bang wasn’t really big. Nor was it really a bang. In fact, the event that created the universe and everything in it was a very different kind of phenomenon than most people–or, at least, most nonphysicists–imagine.
Even the name “Big Bang” originally was a put-down cooked up by a scientist who didn’t like the concept when it was first put forth. He favored the idea that the universe had always existed in a much more dignified and fundamentally unchanging, steady state.

But the name stuck, and with it has come the completely wrong impression that the event was like an explosion and that the universe is expanding today because the objects in it are being flung apart like fragments of a detonated bomb.

Virtually every basic aspect of this intuitive image for the Big Bang (we ARE stuck with the name) is incorrect. To understand why, you need to understand Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Or, at least, you need to have a sense of it. That may sound daunting, but general relativity is the most revolutionary scientific advance of the 20th century, and we all ought to acquire some feeling for it before the century ends.

After all, it’s been 82 years since Einstein put forth his theory. It’s been tested in scores of experiments and has always passed with flying colors and is now firmly established as our premier guide to understanding how gravity operates. Moreover, it is part of the foundation of Big Bang cosmology. And it is because of general relativity that we know the Big Bang was (and is, for the event is still going on) nothing like an explosion.

Albert Einstein developed general relativity in order to make his famous theory of special relativity include the effects of gravity. It is a better way than Sir Isaac Newton’s of understanding how gravity works. Like a hungry amoeba, general relativity ( or just GR for short) had absorbed both Einstein’s newly-minted special relativity and Newton’s physics, giving us the means to replicate ALL of the predictions from these two great theories, while extending them into unfamiliar realms of experience. One of these realms was the Black Hole. The other was the shape and evolution of the universe itself.

Big Bang cosmology says that the universe came into existence between 10 to 20 billion years ago, and that from a hot dense state has been expanding and cooling ever since, remains unassailable. Yet, Big Bang cosmology is vulnerable. It is based on GR being accurate over an enormous range of scales in time and space. Just how good is general relativity? So far, GR has made the following specific predictions:

1…The entire orbit of Mercury rotates because of the curved geometry of space near the sun. The amount of ‘perihelion shift’ each century was well known at the time Einstein provided a complete explanation for it in 1915.

2…Light at every frequency can be bent in exactly the same way by gravity. This was confirmed in the 1919 Solar Eclipse for optical light using stars near the Sun’s limb, and in 1969-1975 using radio emissions from star-like quasars also seen near the limb of the Sun. The deflection of the light was exactly as predicted by GR.

3…Clocks run slower in strong gravitational fields. This was confirmed by Robert Pound and George Rebka at Harvard University in 1959, and by Robert Vessot in the 1960’s and 70’s using high-precession hydrogen maser clocks flown on jet planes and on satellites.

4…Gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. Most recently in 1971, Vladimir Braginsky at Moskow University confirmed GRs prediction of this to within 1 part in a trillion of the exact equality required by GR.

5…Black holes exist. Although these objects have been suspected to exist since they were first introduced to astronomers in the early 1970’s, it is only in 1992 that a critical acceptance threshold was crossed in the astronomical community. It was then that Hubble Space Telescope observations revealed monstrous, billion-sun black holes in the cores of nearby galaxies such as Messier 87, Messier 33 and NGC 4261.

6…Gravity has its own form of radiation which can carry energy. Russel Hulse and Joseph Taylor in 1975 discovered two pulsars orbiting each other, and through careful monitoring of their precise pulses during the next 20 years, confirmed that the system is loosing energy at a rate within 1 percent of the prediction by GR based on the emission of gravitational radiation.

7…A new force exists called ‘gravito-magnetism’. Just as electric and magnetic fields are linked together, according to GR, a spinning body produces a magnetism-like force called gravitomagnetism. GR predicts that rotating bodies not only bend space and time, but also make empty space spin. A NASA satellite called Gravity Probe B will be launched in the next few years to see whether this effect exists. This is a killer. If it is not found, GR is mortally wounded despite its long string of other successes.

8…Space can stretch during the expansion of the universe. This was confirmed by Edwin Hubble’s detection of the recession of the galaxies ca 1929. More recently in 1993, Astronomer Kenneth Kellerman confirmed that the angular sizes of distant radio sources shrink to a minimum then increase at greater distances exactly as expected for a dilating space. This is not predicted by any other cosmological model that does not also include the dilation of space as a real, physical phenomenon.

We have now boxed ourselves into a corner. If we accept the successes of GR, we are forced to see the world and the cosmos through its eyes, and its eyes alone, since it is the theory which satisfies all known tests to date.

So, how should we think about the Big Bang? Our mental ‘fireworks’ image of the Big Bang contains these basic elements: 1) A pre-existing sky or space into which the fragments from the explosion are injected; 2) A pre-existing time we can use to mark when the explosion happened; 3) Individual projectiles moving through space from a common center; 4) A definite moment when the explosion occurred; and 5) Something that started the Big Bang.

All of these elements to our visualization of the Big Bang are completely false according to GR!

Preexisting Space?

There wasn’t any!

The mathematics of GR state specifically and unambiguously that 3-dimensional space was created at the Big Bang itself, at ‘Time Zero’, along with everything else. It was a ‘singular’ event in which the separations between all particles everywhere, vanished. This is just another way of saying that our familiar 3-dimensional space vanished. Theorists studying various prototypes for the Theory of Everything have only modified this statement somewhat. During its earliest moments, the universe may have existed in a nearly incomprehensible state which may have had more than 4 dimensions, or perhaps none at all. Many of these theories of the earliest moments hypothesize a ‘mother space-time’ that begat our own universe, but you cannot at the same time place your minds eye both inside this Mother Spacetime to watch the Big Bang happen, and inside our universe to see the matter flying around. This is exactly what the fireworks display model demands that you do.

Preexisting Time?

There wasn’t any of this either!

Again, GR’s mathematics treats both space and time together as one object called ‘space-time’ which is indivisible. At Time Zero plus a moment, you had a well defined quantity called time. At Time Zero minus a moment, this same quantity changed its character in the mathematics and became ‘imaginary’. This is a mathematical warning flag that something dreadfully unexpected has happened to time as we know it. In a famous quote by Einstein, “…time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live”. Steven Hawking has looked at the mathematics of this state using the fledgling physics of Quantum Gravity Theory, and confirms that at the Big Bang, time was murdered in the most thorough way imaginable. It may have been converted into just another ‘timeless’ dimension of space…or so the mathematics seems to suggest.

Individual objects moving out from a common center?

Nope!

GR says specifically that space is not a passive stage upon which matter plays out its dance, but is a member of the cast. When you treat both galaxies and space-time together, you get a very different answer for what happens than if you treat them separately, which is what we instinctively always do. Curved space distorts the paths of particles, sometimes in very dramatic ways. If you stepped into a space ship and tried to travel to the edge of the universe and look beyond, it would be impossible. Not only could you not reach a supposed “edge” of the universe no matter how long or how fast you traveled, in a closed universe, you would eventually find yourself arriving where you departed. The curvature of space would bring you right back, in something like the way the curvature of Earth would bring you home if you flew west and never changed course. In other words, the universe has no edge in space. There is nothing beyond the farthest star.

As a mental anchor, many have used the expanding balloon as an analogy to the expanding universe. As seen from any one spot on the balloon’s surface, all other spots rush away from it as the balloon is inflated. There is no one center to the expansion ON THE SURFACE of the balloon that is singled out as the center of the Big Bang. This is very different than the fireworks display which does have a dramatic, common center to the expanding cloud of cinders. The balloon analogy, however, is not perfect, because as we watch the balloon, our vantage point is still within a preexisting larger arena which GR says never existed for the real universe.

The center of the Big Bang was not a point in space, but a point in time! It is a center, not in the fabric of the balloon, but outside it along the 4th dimension…time. We cannot see this point anywhere we look inside the space of our universe out towards the distant galaxies. You can’t see time afterall! We can only see it as we look back in time at the ancient images we get from the most distant objects we can observe. We see a greatly changed, early history of the universe in these images but no unique center to them in space.

It is at this point that common sense must give up its seat on the bus, and yield to the insights provided by GR. And it is at precisely this point that so many non-physicists refuse to be so courteous. And who can blame them? But there’s more to come.

Projectiles moving through space?

Sorry!

GR again has something very troubling to say about this. For millions of years we have learned from experience on the savanas of the African continent and elsewhere, that we can move through space. As we drive down the highway, we have absolutely no doubts what is happening as we traverse the distance between landmarks along the roadside. This knowledge is so primal that we are incapable of mustering much doubt about it. But science is not about confirming our prejudices. It’s about revealing how things actually are.

What if I told you that you could decrease the distance from your house and the Washington Monument by ‘standing still’ and just letting space contract the distance away? GR predicts exactly this new phenomenon, and the universe seems to be the only arena we know today in which it naturally occurs. Like spots glued to the surface of the balloon at eternally fixed latitude and longitude points, the galaxies remain where they are while space dilates between them with the passage of time. There is no reason at all we should find this kind of motion intuitive.

If space is stretching like this, where do the brand new millions of cubic light years come from, from one moment to the next? The answer in GR is that they have always been there. To see how this could happen, I like to think of the shape of our universe as a “Cosmic Watermellon”. The fact that this is only the shape for a ‘closed’ finite universe is only a technicality. Finite watermellons are also cheaper to buy than infinite ones.

GR predicts the entire past, present and future of the universe all at once, and predicts its entire 4-dimensional shape. As we slice the 4-dimensional, Cosmic Watermellon at one end of the cosmic time line, we see 3-dimensional space and its contents soon after the Big Bang. At the other end of the Cosmic Watermellon in the far future, we see the collapse of space and matter just before the Big Crunch. But in between, our slices show the shape of space (closed, spherical volumes) and the locations of galaxies ( at fixed locations) as space dilates from one extreme to the other.

As a particular slice through an ordinary watermellon, we see that its meat has always been present in the complete watermellon. The meat is present as a continuous medium, and we never ask where the meat in a particular slice came from. Cosmologically, GR ask us to please think of 3-dimensional space in the same way. Space, like the meat of the watermellon, has always existed in the complete shape of the universe in 4-dimensions. But it is only in 4-dimensions that the full shape of the universe is revealed. It is a mystery why our consciousness insists on experiencing the universe one moment at a time, and that is why we end up with the paradox of where space comes from. There really is no paradox at all.

Space is not ‘nothing’ according to Einstein, it is merely another name for the gravitational field of the universe. Einstein once said, “Space-time does not claim existence on its own but only as a structural quality of the [gravitational] field”. If you could experimentally turn-off gravity with a switch, space-time would vanish. This is the ultimate demolition experiment known to physics for which an environmental impact statement would most certainly have to be filed.

The gravitational field at one instant is wedded to itself in the next instant by the incessant quantum churnings of the myriad of individual particles that like bees in a swarm, make up the gravitational field itself. In this frothing tumult, the gravitational field is knit together, quantum by quantum, from perhaps even more elemental building blocks, and it is perhaps here that we will find the ultimate origin for the expansion of the universe and the magical stretching of space. We hope the much anticipated Theory of Everything will have more to say about this, but to actually test this theory may require technologies and human resources that we can only dimly dream of.

Was there a definite moment to the Big Bang?

GR is perfectly happy to forecast that our universe emerged from an infinite density, zero-space ‘Singularity’ at Time Zero, but physicists now feel very strongly that this instant was smeared out by any number of quantum mechanical effects, so that we can never speak of a time before about 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang. Just as Gertrude Stein once remarked about my hometown, Oakland, California that “There is no ‘There’ there”, at 10^-43 seconds, nature may tell us that before the Big Bang, “There was no ‘When’ there” either. The moment dissolves away into some weird quantum fog, and as Steven Hawking speculates, time may actually become bent into a new dimension of space and no longer even definable in this state. Ordinary GR is unable to describe this condition and only some future theory combing GR and quantum mechanics will be able to tell us more. We hope.

Something started the Big Bang!

At last we come to the most difficult issue in modern cosmology. In the fireworks display, we can trace the events leading up to the explosion all the way back to the chemists that created the gunpowder and wrapped the explosives. GR, however, can tell us nothing about the equivalent stages leading up to the Big Bang, and in fact, among its strongest statements is the one that says that time itself may not have existed. How, then, do we speak or think about a condition, or process, that started the whole shebang if we are not even allowed to frame the event as “This happened first…then this…then kerpowie!”? This remains the essential mystery of the Big Bang which seems to doggedly transcend every mathematical description we can create to describe it.

All of the logical frameworks we know about are based on chains of events or states. All of our experiences of such chains in the physical world have been ordered in time. Even when the mathematics and the theory tell us ‘What happened before the Big Bang to start it?’ is not a logical or legitimate question, we insist on viewing this as a proper question to ask of nature, and we expect a firm answer. But like so many other things we have learned this century about the physical world, our gut instincts about which questions ought to have definite answers is often flawed when we explore the extreme limits to our physical world.

I wrote this essay before seeing the new IMAX file at the Air and Space Museum ‘Cosmic Journey”, by far one of the nicest and most heroic movies of its kind I had ever seen. But of course it showed the Big Bang as a fireworks display. No matter. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to accept the fact that the Big Bang was a spectacular moment in history. What is amazing is that the daring audacity of humans may have demystified some of it, and revealed a universe far stranger than any could have imagined.

Still, we are haunted by our hunches and intuitions gathered over millenia, and under circumstances far removed from the greater physical world we are now exploring. No wonder it all seems so alien and maddeningly complex.

Before the Big Bang

Beyond the Big Bang

Written by Sten Odenwald Copyright (C) 1987, Kalmbach Publishing. Reprinted by permission

Sometime between 15 and 20 billion years ago the universe came into existence. Since the dawn of human awareness, we have grappled with the hows and whys of this event and out of this effort have sprung many ideas. An ancient Egyptian legend describes how the universe was created by Osiris Khepera out of a dark, boundless ocean called Nu and that Osiris Khepera created himself out of this ocean by uttering his own name. Human inventiveness has not stood still in the 5000 years since these ideas were popular. The modern theory of the Big Bang states that our universe evolved from an earlier phase billions of times hotter than the core of our sun and trillions of times denser than the nucleus of an atom. To describe in detail such extreme physical conditions, we must first have a firm understanding of the nature of matter and of the fundamental forces. At the high temperatures likely to have attended the Big Bang, all familiar forms of matter were reduced to their fundamental constituents. The forces of gravity and electromagnetism together with the strong and weak nuclear forces, were the essential means through which the fundamental particles of matter interacted.
The feedback between cosmology and particle physics is nowhere more clearly seen than in the study of the early history of the universe. In October, 1985 the giant accelerator at Fermilab acheived for the first time, the collision of protons and anti-protons at energies of 1.6 trillion electron volts, about 1600 times the rest mass of the proton. This was a unique event because for one split second, on a tiny planet in an undistinguished galaxy, a small window onto the Creation Event was opened for the first time in at least 15 billion years.

THE LIMITS OF CERTAINTY

The persuit by physicists of a single, all encompassing theory capable of describing the four natural forces has, as a by-product, resulted in some surprising glimpses of the Creation Event. Although such a theory remains perhaps several decades from completion, it is generally recognized that such a theory will describe physical conditions so extreme it is quite possible that we may never be able to explore them first- hand, even with the particle accelerators that are being designed today. For example, the Superconducting Supercollider to be built by the early 1990’s will cost 6 billion dollars and it will allow physicists to collide particles at energies of 40 trillion electron volts ( 40,000 GeV) matching the conditions prevailing 10 seconds after the Big Bang. The expected windfall from such an accelerator is enormous and will help to answer many nagging questions now plaguing the theoretical community, but can we afford to invest perhaps vastly larger sums of money to build machines capable of probing the quantum gravity world at 10 GeV? At these energies, the full unification of the natural forces is expected to become directly observable. How curious it is that definite answers to questions such as, ‘What was Creation like?’ and ‘Do electrons and quarks have internal structure?’ are so inextricably intertwined. Our ability to find answers to these two questions, among others, does not seem to be hampered by some metaphysical prohibition, but by the resources our civilization can afford to devote to finding the answers. Fortunatly, the situation is not quite so bleak, for you see, the ‘machine’ has already been ‘built’ and every possible experiment we can ever imagine has already been performed!

WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW

We are living inside the biggest particle accelerator ever created – the universe. Ten billion years before the sun was born, Nature’s experiment in high-energy physics was conducted and the experimental data can now be examined by studying the properties and contents of the universe itself. The collection of fundamental facts that characterize our universe is peculiar in that it derives from a variety of sources. A partial list of these ‘meta-facts’ looks like this:

1) We are here, therefore, some regions of the universe are hospitible to the creation of complex molecules and living, rational organisms.

2) Our Universe has 4 big dimensions and all are increasing in size as the universe expands in time and space.

3) There are 4 dissimilar forces acting in Nature.

4) Only matter dominates; no anti-matter galaxies exist and this matter is built out of 6 quarks and 6 types of leptons.

The task confronting the physicist and the astronomer is to create, hopefully, a single theory consistent with these metafacts that can then be used to derive the secondary characteristics of our universe such as the 2.7 K background radiation, the primordial element abundances, and galaxy formation. The interplay between the study of the macrocosm and the microcosm has now become so intense that astronomers have helped physicists set limits to the number of lepton families — No more than 4 are allowed otherwise the predicted cosmological abundance of helium would seriously disagree with what is observed. Physicists, on the other hand, use the astronomical upper limits to the current value of the cosmological constant to constrain their unification theories.

An extention to the standard Big Bang model called the Inflationary Universe (see The Decay of the False Vacuum) was created by MIT physicist Alan Guth in 1981. This theory combined Grand Unification Theory with cosmology and, if correct, allows astronomers to trace the history of the universe all the way back to 10 seconds after the Big Bang when the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces were unified into a single ‘electro-nuclear’ force. During the 4 years since the Inflationary Universe model was proposed, other theoretical developments have emerged that may help us probe events occurring at an even earlier stage, perhaps even beyond the Creation Event itself. Ten years ago, theoreticians discovered a new class of theories called Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories ( SUSY GUTs). These theories, of which there are several competing types, have shown great promise in providing physicists with a unified framework for describing not just the electro-nuclear force but also gravity, in addition to the particles they act on (see The Planck Era: March 1984). Unfortunately, as SUSY GUTs were studied more carefully, it was soon discovered that even the most promising candidates for THE Unified Field Theory suffered from certain fundamantal deficiencies. For instance:

1) There were not enough basic fields predicted to accomodate the known particles.

2) Left and right-hand symmetry was mandated so that the weak force, which breaks this symmetry, had to be put in ‘by hand’.

3) Anomalies exist which include the violation of energy conservation and charge.

4) The Cosmological Constant is 10 times larger than present upper limits suggest.

In recent years, considerable effort has gone into extending and modifying the postulates of SUSY GUTs in order to avoid these problems. One avenue has been to question the legitimacy of a very basic premise of the field theories developed heretofore. The most active line of theoretical research in the last 25 years has involved the study of what are called ‘point symmetry groups’. For example, a hexagon rotated by 60 degrees about a point at its center is indistinguishable from one rotated by 120, 180, 240, 300 and 360 degrees. These 6 rotation operations form a mathematical group so that adding or subtracting any two operations always result in a rotation operation that is already a member of the group ( 180 = 120 + 60 etc). The Grand Unification Theories of the electro-nuclear interaction are based on point symmetry groups named SU(3), SU(2) and U(1) which represent analogous ‘rotations’ in a more complex mathematical space. In the context of ponderable matter, point symmetry groups are also the mathematical statement of what we believe to be the structure of the fundamental particles of matter, namely, that particles are point-like having no physical size at all. But what if this isn’t so? The best that experimental physics has to offer is that the electron which is one of a family of 6 known Leptons, behaves like a point particle at scales down to 10 cm, but that’s still an enormous distance compared to the gravitational Planck scale of 10 cm where complete unification with gravity is expected to occur.

By assuming that fundamental particles have internal structure, Michael Green at Queen Mary College and John Schwartz at Caltech made a remarkable series of discoveries which were anounced in the journal NATURE in April 1985. They proposed that, if a point particle were replaced by a vibrating ‘string’ moving through a 10-dimensional spacetime, many of the problems plaguing SUSY GUTs seemed to vanish miraculously. What’s more, of all the possible kinds of ‘Superstring’ theories, there were only two ( called SO(32) and E8 x E8′) that were: 1) Consistent with both the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics,2) Allowed for the asymmetry between left and right-handed processes and, 3) Were free of anomalies. Both versions were also found to have enough room in them for 496 different types of fields; enough to accomodate all of the known fundamental particles and then some! Superstring theories also have very few adjustable parameters and from them, certain quantum gravity calculations can be performed that give finite answers instead of infinite ones. In spite of their theoretical successes, Superstring theories suffer from the difficulty that the lightest Superstring particles will be completely massless while the next more massive generation will have masses of 10 GeV. It is not even clear how these supermassive string particles are related to the known particles which are virtually massless by comparison (a proton has a mass of 1 GeV!). It is also not known if the 496 different particles will cover the entire mass range between 0 and 10 GeV. It is possible that they may group themselves into two families with masses clustered around these two extreems. In the later instance, experimental physicists may literally run out of new particles to discover until accelerators powerful enough to create supermassive particles can be built.

An attractive feature of the SO(32) model, which represents particles as open-ended strings, is that gravity has to be included from the start in order to make the theory internally consistent and capable of yielding finite predictions. It is also a theory that reduces to ordinary point field theories at energies below 10 GeV. The complimentary theory, E8 x E8′, is the only other superstring theory that seems to work as well as SO(32) and treats particles as though they were closed strings without bare endpoints. This model is believed to show the greatest promise for describing real physical particles. It also includes gravity, but unlike SO(32), E8 x E8′ does seem to reduce at low energy, to the symmetry groups associated with the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions, namely, SU(3), SU(2) and U(1).

If E8 x E8′ is destined to be the ‘ultimate, unified field theory’, there are some additional surprises in store for us. Each group, E8 and E8′, can be reduced mathematically to the products of the groups that represent the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces; SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1). If the E8 group corresponds to the known particles what does E8′ represent? In terms of its mathematical properties, symmetry considerations alone seem to require that the E8′ group should be a mirror image of E8. If E8 contains the groups SU(3), SU(2) and U(1) then E8′ contains SU(3)’, SU(2)’ and U(1)’. The primed fields in E8′ would have the same properties as those we ascribe to the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces. The E8′ particle fields may correspond to a completly different kind of matter, whose properties are as different from matter and anti-matter as ordinary matter is from anti-matter! ‘Shadow Matter’ as it has been called by Edward Kolb, David Seckel and Michael Turner at Fermilab, may actually co-exist with our own – possibly accounting for the missing mass necessary to close the universe. Shadow matter is only detectable by its gravitational influence and is totally invisible because the shadow world electromagnetic force (shadow light) does not interact with any of the particles in the normal world.

BEYOND SPACE AND TIME

The quest for a mathematical description of the physical world uniting the apparent differences between the known particles and forces, has led physicists to the remarkable conclusion that the universe inhabits not just the 4 dimensions of space and time, but a much larger arena whose dimensionality may be enormous (see Does Space Have More Than 3 Dimensions?). Both the Superstring theories and SUSY GUTs agree that our physical world has to have more than the 4 dimensions we are accustomed to thinking about. A remarkable feature of Superstring theory is that of all the possible dimensionalities for spacetime, only in 10-dimensions ( 9 space dimensions and 1 time dimension) will the theory lead to a computationally finite and internally consistent model for the physical world that includes the weak interaction from the outset, and where all of the troublesome anomalies cancil exactly. In such a 10-dimensional world, it is envisioned that 6 dimensions are now wrapped-up or ‘compactified’ into miniscule spheres that accompany the 4 coordinates of every point in spacetime. What would a description of the early universe look like from this new viewpoint? The 6 internal dimensions are believed to have a size of order 10 cm.

As we follow the history of the universe back in time, the 3 large dimensions of space rapidly shrink until eventually they become only 10 cm in extent. This happened during the Planck Era at a time, 10 seconds after the Creation Event. The appearance of the universe under these conditions is almost unimaginable. Today as we look out at the most distant quasar, we see them at distances of billions of lightyears. During the Planck Era, the matter comprising these distant systems was only 10 cm away from the material that makes-up your own body!

What was so special about this era that only 4 of the 10 dimensions were singled-out to grow to their enormous present size?. Why not 3 ( 2 space + 1 time) or 5 ( 4 space + 1 time)? Physicists have not as yet been able to develope an explanation for this fundamental mystery of our plenum, on the other hand, it may just be that had the dimensional breakdown of spacetime been other than ‘4 + 6’, the physical laws we are the products of, would have been totally inhospitable to life as we know it.

As we relentlessly follow the history of the universe to even earlier times, the universe seems to enter a progressively more and more symmetric state. The universe at 10 seconds after the Big Bang may have been populated by supermassive particles with masses of 10^15 GeV or about 10^-13 grams each. These particles ultimatly decayed into the familiar quarks and leptons once the universe had grown colder as it expanded. In addition, there may only have been a single kind of ‘superforce’ acting on these particles; a force whose character contained all of the individual attributes we now associate with gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Since the particles carrying the ‘superforce’ had masses similar to those of the supermassive particles co-existing then, the distinction between the force-carriers and the particles they act on probably broke-down completely and the world became fully supersymmetric.

To go beyond the Planck Era may require a radical alteration in our conventional way of thinking about time and space. Only glimpses of the appropriate way to think about this multidimensional landscape can be found in the equations and theories of modern-day physics. Beyond the Planck Era, all 10 dimensions (and perhaps others) become co-equal at least in terms of their physical size. The supermassive Superstring particles begin to take-on more of the characteristics of fluctuations in the geometry of spacetime than as distinguishable, ingredients in the primordial, cosmological ‘soup’. There was no single, unique geometry for spacetime but, instead, an ever-changing quantum interplay between spacetimes with an unlimited range in geometry. Like sound waves that combine with one another to produce interference and reinforcement, the spacetime that emerged from the Planck Era is thought to be the result of the superposition of an infin ite number of alternate spacetime geometries which, when added together, produced the spacetime that we are now a part of.

Was there light? Since the majority of the photons were probably not created in large numbers until at least the beginning of the Inflationary Epoc, 10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang, it is not unthinkable that during its earliest moments, the universe was born out of darkness rather than in a blinding flash of light. All that existed in this darkness before the advent of light, was an empty space out of which our 10-dimensional spacetime would later emerge. Of course, under these conditions it is unclear just how we should continue to think about time itself.

In terms of the theories available today, it may well be that the particular dimension we call Time had a definite zero point so that we can not even speak logically about what happened before time existed. The concept of ‘before’ is based on the presumption of time ordering. A traveler standing on the north pole can never move to a position on the earth that is 1 mile north of north! Nevertheless, out of ingrained habit, we speak of the time before the genesis of the universe when time didn’t exist and ask, “What happened before the Big Bang?”. The list of physicists investigating this ‘state’ has grown enormously over the last 15 years. The number of physicists, worldwide, that publish research on this topic is only slightly more than 200 out of a world population of 5 billion!

QUANTUM COSMOLOGY

In the early 1970’s Y. Zel’dovitch and A. Starobinski of the USSR along with Edward Tryon at Hunter College proposed that the universe emerged from a fluctuation in the vacuum. This vacuum fluctuation ‘ran away’ with itself, creating all the known particles out of empty space at the ‘instant’ of no-time. To understand what this means requires the application of a fundamental fact of relativistic quantum physics discovered during the latter half of the 1920’s. Vacuum fluctuations are a direct consequence of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which limits how well we can simultaneously know a particle’s momentum and location (or its total energy and lifetime). What we call empty space or the physical vacuum is a Newtonian fiction like absolute space and time. Rather than a barren stage on which matter plays-out its role, empty space is known to be filled with ‘virtual particles’ that spontaneously appear and disappear beyond the ability of any physical measurement to detect directly. From these ghost particles, a variety of very subtle phenomena can be predicted with amazing accuracy. Depending on the total rest mass energy of the virtual particles created in the vacuum fluctuation, they may live for a specific lifetime before Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle demands that they vanish back into the nothingness of the vacuum state. In such a quantum world, less massive virtual particles can live longer than more massive ones. Edward Tyron proposed that the universe is just a particularly long-lived vacuum fluctuation differing only in magnitude from those which occur imperceptably all around us. The reason the universe is so long lived in spite of its enormous mass is that the positive energy latent in all the matter in the universe is offset by the negative potential energy of the gravitational field of the universe. The total energy of the universe is, therefore, exactly zero and its maximum lifetime as a ‘quantum fluctuation’ could be enormous and even infinite! According to Tryon, “The Universe is simply one of those things which happens from time to time.”

This proposal by Tryon was regarded with some scepticism and even amusement by astronomers, and was not persued much further. This was a fate that had also befallen the work on 5-dimensional general relativity by Theodore Kaluza and Oskar Klein during the 1920’s which was only resurrected in the late 1970’s as a potent remedy for the ills plaguing supersymmetry theory.

In 1978, R. Brout, P. Englert, E. Gunzig and P. Spindel at the University of Brussels, proposed that the fluctuation that led to the creation of our universe started out in an empty, flat, 4-dimensional spacetime. The fluctuation in space began weakly, creating perhaps a single matter- antimatter pair of supermassive particles with masses of 10^19 GeV. The existence of this ‘first pair’ stimulated the creation from the vacuum of more particle-antiparticle pairs which stimulated the production of still others and so on. Space became highly curved and exploded, disgorging all of the superparticles which later decayed into the familiar leptons, quarks and photons.

Heinz Pagels and David Atkatz at Rockefeller University in 1981 proposed that the triggering agent behind the Creation Event was a tunneling phenomenon of the vacuum from a higher-energy state to a lower energy state. Unlike the Brout-Englert-Gunzig-Spindel model which started from a flat spacetime, Pagels and Atkatz took the complimentary approach that the original nothingness from which the universe emerged was a spatially closed, compact empty space, in other words, it had a geometry like the 2-D surface of a sphere. but the dimensionality of its surface was much higher than 2. Again this space contained no matter what-so-ever. The characteristics (as yet unknown) of the tunneling process determined, perhaps in a random way, how the dimensionality of spacetime would ‘crystallize’ into the 6+4 combination that represents the plenum of our universe.

Alex Vilenkin at Tufts University proposed in 1983 that our spacetime was created out of a ‘nothingness’ so complete that even its dimensionality was undefined. In 1984, Steven Hawkings at Cambridge and James Hartle at UCSB came to a similar conclusion through a series of quantum mechanical calculations. They described the geometric state of the universe in terms of a wavefunction which specified the probability for spacetime to have one of an infinite number of possible geometries. A major problem with the ordinary Big Bang theory was that the universe emerged from a state where space and time vanished and the density of the universe became infinite; a state called the Singularity. Hawkings and Hartle were able to show that this Big Bang singularity represented a specific kind of geometry which would become smeared-out in spacetime due to quantum indeterminacy. The universe seemed to emerge from a non-singular state of ‘nothingness’ similar to the undefined state proposed by Vilenkin. The physicist Frank Wilczyk expresses this remarkable situation the best by saying that, ” The reason that there is Something rather than Nothing is that Nothing is unstable.”

PERFECT SYMMETRY

Theories like those of SUSY GUTS and Superstrings seem to suggest that just a few moments after Creation, the laws of physics and the content of the world were in a highly symmetric state; one superforce and perhaps one kind of superparticle. The only thing breaking the perfect symmetry of this era was the definite direction and character of the dimension called Time. Before Creation, the primordial symmetry may have been so perfect that, as Vilenkin proposed, the dimensionality of space was itself undefined. To describe this state is a daunting challenge in semantics and mathematics because the mathematical act of specifying its dimensionality would have implied the selection of one possibility from all others and thereby breaking the perfect symmetry of this state. There were, presumably, no particles of matter or even photons of light then, because these particles were born from the vacuum fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime that attended the creation of the universe. In such a world, nothing happens because all ‘happenings’ take place within the reference frame of time and space. The presence of a single particle in this nothingness would have instantaneously broken the perfect symmetry of this era because there would then have been a favored point in space different from all others; the point occupied by the particle. This nothingness didn’t evolve either, because evolution is a time-ordered process. The introduction of time as a favored coordinate would have broken the symmetry too. It would seem that the ‘Trans-Creation’ state is beyond conventional description because any words we may choose to describe it are inherently laced with the conceptual baggage of time and space. Heinz Pagels reflects on this ‘earliest’ stage by saying, “The nothingness ‘before’ the creation of the universe is the most complete void we can imagine. No space, time or matter existed. It is a world without place, without duration or eternity…”

A perusal of the scientific literature during the last 20 years suggests that we may be rapidly approaching a major crossroad in physics. One road seems to be leading to a single unification theory that is so unique among all others that it is the only one consistent with all the major laws we know about. It is internally consistent; satisfies the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics and requires no outside information to describe the particles and forces it contains . A prototype of this may be superstring theory with its single adjustable parameter, namely, the string tension. The other road is much more bleak. It may also turn out that we will create several theoretical systems that seem to explain everything but have within them hard to detect flaws. These flaws may stand as barracades to further logical inquiry; to be uncovered only through experiments that may be beyond our technological reach. It is possible that we are seeing the beginning of this latter process even now, with the multiplicity of theories whose significant deviations only occur at energies near 10^19 GeV.

I find it very hard to resist the analogy between our current situation and that of the Grecian geometers. For 2000 years the basic postulates of Eulidean geometry and the consequences of this logical system, remained fixed. It became a closed book with only a few people in the world struggling to find exceptions to it such as refutations of the parallel line postulate. Finally during the 19th century, non-euclidean geometry was discovered and a renaissance in geometry occurred. Are physicists on the verge of a similar great age, finding themselves hamstrung by not being able to devise new ways of thinking about old problems? Egyptian cosmology was based on motifs that the people of that age could see in the world around them; water, sky, land, biological reproduction. Today we still use motifs that we find in Nature in order to explain the origin of the universe; the geometry of space, virtual particles and vacuum fluctuations. We can probably expect that in the centuries to follow, our descendents will find still other motifs and from them, fashion cosmologies that will satisfy the demands of that future age with, possibly, much greater accuracy and efficiency than ours do today. Perhaps, too, in those future ages, scientists will marvel at the ingenuity of modern physicists and astronomers, and how in the space of only 300 years, we had managed to create our own quaint theory as the Egyptians had before us.

In the meantime, physicists and astronomers do the best they can to fashion a cosmology that will satisfy the intellectual needs of our age. Today, as we contemplate the origin of the universe we find ourselves looking out over a dark, empty void not unlike the one that our Egyptian predecessors might have imagined. This void is a state of exquisite perfection and symmetry that seems to defy description in any linguistic terms we can imagine. Through our theories we launch mathematical voyages of exploration, and watch the void as it trembles with the quantum possibilities of universes unimaginable.

Decay of the False Vacuum

The Decay of the False Vacuum

Written by Sten Odenwald. Copyright (C) 1983 Kalmbach Publishing. Reprinted by permission

In the recently developed theory by Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam, that unifies the electromagnetic and weak forces, the vacuum is not empty. This peculiar situation comes about because of the existence of a new type of field, called the Higgs field. The Higgs field has an important physical consequence since its interaction with the W, W and Z particles (the carriers of the weak force) causes them to gain mass at energies below 100 billion electron volts (100 Gev). Above this energy they are quite massless just like the photon and it is this characteristic that makes the weak and electromagnetic forces so similar at high energy.

On a somewhat more abstract level, consider Figures 1 and 2 representing the average energy of the vacuum state. If the universe were based on the vacuum state in Figure 1, it is predicted that the symmetry between the electromagnetic and weak interactions would be quite obvious. The particles mediating the forces would all be massless and behave in the same way. The corresponding forces would be indistinguishable. This would be the situation if the universe had an average temperature of 1 trillion degrees so that the existing particles collided at energies of 100 Gev. In Figure 2, representing the vacuum state energy for collision energies below 100 Gev, the vacuum state now contains the Higgs field and the symmetry between the forces is suddenly lost or ‘broken’. Although at low energy the way in which the forces behave is asymmetric, the fundamental laws governing the electromagnetic and weak interactions remain inherently symmetric. This is a very remarkable and profound prediction since it implies that certain symmetries in Nature can be hidden from us but are there nonetheless.

During the last 10 years physicists have developed even more powerful theories that attempt to unify not only the electromagnetic and weak forces but the strong nuclear force as well. These are called the Grand Unification Theories (GUTs) and the simplist one known was developed by Howard Georgi, Helen Quinn,and Steven Weinberg and is called SU(5), (pronounced ‘ess you five’). This theory predicts that the nuclear and ‘electroweak’ forces will eventually have the same strength but only when particles collide at energies above 1 thousand trillion GeV corresponding to the unimaginable temperature of 10 thousand trillion trillion degrees! SU(5) requires exactly 24 particles to mediate forces of which the 8 massless gluons of the nuclear force, the 3 massless intermediate vector bosons of the weak force and the single massless photon of the electromagnetic force are 12. The remaining 12 represent a totally new class of particles called Leptoquark bosons that have the remarkable property that they can transform quarks into electrons. SU(5) therefore predicts the existence of a ‘hyperweak’ interaction; a new fifth force in the universe! Currently, this force is 10 thousand trillion trillion times weaker than the weak force but is nevertheless 100 million times stronger than gravity. What would this new force do? Since protons are constructed from 3 quarks and since quarks can now decay into electrons, through the Hyperweak interaction, SU(5) predicts that protons are no longer the stable particles we have always imagined them to be. Crude calculations suggest that they may have half-lives between 10^29 to 10^33 years. An immediate consequence of this is that even if the universe were destined to expand for all eternity, after ‘only’ 10^32 years or so, all of the matter present would catastrophically decay into electrons, neutrinos and photons. The Era of Matter, with its living organisms, stars and galaxies, would be swept away forever, having represented but a fleeting episode in the history of the universe. In addition to proton decay, SU(5) predicts that at the energy characteristic of the GUT transition, we will see the affects of a new family of particles called supermassive Higgs bosons whose masses are expected to be approximately 1 thousand trillion GeV! These particles interact with the 12 Leptoquarks and make them massive just as the Higgs bosons at 100 GeV made the W, W and Z particles heavy. Armed with this knowledge, let’s explore some of the remarkable cosmological consequences of these exciting theories.

The GUT Era

To see how these theories relate to the history of the universe, imagine if you can a time when the average temperature of the universe was not the frigid 3 K that it is today but an incredable 10 thousand trillion trillion degrees (10^15 GeV). The ‘Standard Model’ of the Big Bang, tells us this happened about 10^-37 seconds after Creation. The protons and neutrons that we are familiar with today hadn’t yet formed since their constituent quarks interacted much too weakly to permit them to bind together into ‘packages’ like neutrons and protons. The remaining constituents of matter, electrons, muons and tau leptons, were also massless and traveled about at essentially light-speed; They were literally a new form of radiation, much like light is today! The 12 supermassive Leptoquarks as well as the supermassivs Higgs bosons existed side-by-side with their anti-particles. Every particle-anti particle pair that was annihilated was balanced by the resurrection of a new pair somewhere else in the universe. During this period, the particles that mediated the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces were completely massless so that these forces were no longer distinguishable. An inhabitant of that age would not have had to theorize about the existence of a symmetry between the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions, this symmetry would have been directly observable and furthermore, fewer types of particles would exist for the inhabitants to keep track of. The universe would actually have beed much simpler then!

As the universe continued to expand, the temperature continued to plummet. It has been suggested by Demetres Nanopoulis and Steven Weinberg in 1979 that one of the supermassive Higgs particles may have decayed in such a way that slightly more matter was produced than anti-matter. The remaining evenly matched pairs of particles and anti-particles then annihilated to produce the radiation that we now see as the ‘cosmic fireball’.

Exactly what happened to the universe as it underwent the transitions at 10^15 and 100 GeV when the forces of Nature suddenly became distinguishable is still under investigation, but certain tantalizing descriptions have recently been offered by various groups of theoriticians working on this problem. According to studies by Alan Guth, Steven Weinberg and Frank Wilczyk between 1979 and 1981, when the GUT transition occured, it occured in a way not unlike the formation of vapor bubbles in a pot of boiling water. In this analogy, the interior of the bubbles represent the vacuum state in the new phase, where the forces are distinguishable, embedded in the old symmetric phase where the nuclear, weak and electromagnetic forces are indistinguishable. Inside these bubbles, the vacuum energy is of the type illustrated by Figure 2 while outside it is represented by Figure 1. Since we are living within the new phase with its four distinguishable forces, this has been called the ‘true’ vacuum state. In the false vacuum state, the forces remain indistinguishable which is certainly not the situation that we find ourselves in today!

Cosmic Inflation

An exciting prediction of Guth’s model is that the universe may have gone through at least one period in its history when the expansion was far more rapid than predicted by the ‘standard’ Big Bang model. The reason for this is that the vacuum itself also contributes to the energy content of the universe just as matter and radiation do however, the contribution is in the opposite sense. Although gravity is an attractive force, the vacuum of space produces a force that is repulsive. As Figures 1 and 2 show, the minimum energy state of the false vacuum at ‘A’ before the GUT transition is at a higher energy than in the true vacuum state in ‘B’ after the transition. This energy difference is what contributes to the vacuum energy. During the GUT transition period, the positive pressure due to the vacuum energy would have been enormously greater than the restraining pressure produced by the gravitational influence of matter and radiation. The universe would have inflated at a tremendous rate, the inflation driven by the pressure of the vacuum! In this picture of the universe, Einstein’s cosmological constant takes on a whole new meaning since it now represents a definite physical concept ; It is simply a measure of the energy difference between the true and false vacuum states (‘B’ and ‘A’ in Figures 1 and 2.) at a particular time in the history of the universe. It also tells us that, just as in de Sitter’s model, a universe where the vacuum contributes in this way must expand exponentially in time and not linearly as predicted by the Big Bang model. Guth’s scenario for the expansion of the universe is generally called the ‘inflationary universe’ due to the rapidity of the expansion and represents a phase that will end only after the true vacuum has supplanted the false vacuum of the old, symmetric phase.

A major problem with Guth’s original model was that the inflationary phase would have lasted for a very long time because the false vacuum state is such a stable one. The universe becomes trapped in the cul-de-sac of the false vacuum state and the exponential expansion never ceases. This would be somewhat analogous to water refusing to freeze even though its temperature has dropped well below 0 Centigrade. Recent modifications to the original ‘inflationary universe’ model have resulted in what is now called the ‘new’ inflationary universe model. In this model, the universe does manage to escape from the false vacuum state and evolves in a short time to the familiar true vacuum state.

We don’t really know how exactly long the inflationary phase may have lasted but the time required for the universe to double its size may have been only 10^-34 seconds. Conceivably, this inflationary period could have continued for as ‘long’ as 10^-24 seconds during which time the universe would have undergone 10 billion doublings of its size! This is a number that is truely beyond comprehension. As a comparison, only 120 doublings are required to inflate a hydrogen atom to the size of the entire visible universe! According to the inflationary model, the bubbles of the true vacuum phase expanded at the speed of light. Many of these had to collide when the universe was very young in order that the visible universe appear so uniform today. A single bubble would not have grown large enough to encompass our entire visible universe at this time; A radius of some 15-20 billion light years. On the other hand, the new inflationary model states that even the bubbles expanded in size exponentially just as their separations did. The bubbles themselves grew to enormous sizes much greater than the size of our observable universe. According to Albrecht and Steinhardt of the University of Pennsylvania, each bubble may now be 10^3000 cm in size. We should not be too concerned about these bubbles expanding at many times the speed of light since their boundaries do not represent a physical entity. There are no electrons or quarks riding some expandind shock wave. Instead, it is the non-material vacuum of space that is expanding. The expansion velocity of the bubbles is not limited by any physical speed limit like the velocity of light.

GUMs in GUTs

A potential problem for cosmologies that have phase transitions during the GUT Era is that a curious zoo of objects could be spawned if frequent bubble mergers occured as required by Guth’s inflationary model. First of all, each bubble of the true vacuum phase contains its own Higgs field having a unique orientation in space. It seems likely that no two bubbles will have their Higgs fields oriented in quite the same way so that when bubbles merge, knots will form. According to Gerhard t’Hooft and Alexander Polyakov, these knots in the Higgs field are the magnetic monopoles originally proposed 40 years ago by Paul Dirac and there ought to be about as many of these as there were bubble mergers during the transition period. Upper limits to their abundance can be set by requiring that they do not contribute to ‘closing’ the universe which means that for particles of their predicted mass (about 10^16 GeV), they must be 1 trillion trillion times less abundant than the photons in the 3 K cosmic background. Calculations based on the old inflationary model suggest that the these GUMs (Grand Unification Monopoles) may easily have been as much as 100 trillion times more abundant than the upper limit! Such a universe would definitly be ‘closed’ and moreover would have run through its entire history between expansion and recollapse within a few thousand years. The new inflationary universe model solves this ‘GUM’ overproduction problem since we are living within only one of these bubbles, now almost infinitly larger than our visible universe. Since bubble collisions are no longer required to homogenize the matter and radiation in the universe, very few, if any, monopoles would exist within our visible universe.

Horizons

A prolonged period of inflation would have had an important influence on the cosmic fireball radiation. One long-standing problem in modern cosmology has been that all directions in the sky have the same temperature to an astonishing 1 part in 10,000. When we consider that regions separated by only a few degrees in the sky have only recently been in communication with one another, it is hard to understand how regions farther apart than this could be so similar in temperature. The radiation from one of these regions, traveling at the velocity of light, has not yet made it across the intervening distance to the other, even though the radiation may have started on its way since the universe first came into existence. This ‘communication gap’ would prevent these regions from ironing-out their temperature differences.

With the standard, Big Bang model, as we look back to earlier epochs from the present time, the separations between particles decrease more slowly than their horizons are shrinking. Neighboring regions of space at the present time, become disconnected so temperature differences are free to develope. Eventually, as we look back to very ancient times, the horizons are so small that every particle existing then literally fills the entire volume of its own, observable universe. Imagine a universe where you occupy all of the available space! Prior to the development of the inflationary models, cosmologists were forced to imagine an incredably well-ordered initial state where each of these disconnected domains (some 10^86 in number) had nearly identical properties such as temperature. Any departure from this situation at that time would have grown to sizable temperature differences in widely separated parts of the sky at the present time. Unfortunately, some agency would have to set-up these finely-tuned initial conditions by violating causality. The contradiction is that no force may operate by transmitting its influence faster than the speed of light. In the inflationary models, this contradiction is eliminated because the separation between widely scattered points in space becomes almost infinitly small compared to the size of the horizons as we look back to the epoc of inflation. Since these points are now within each others light horizons, any temperature difference would have been eliminated immediatly since hotter regions would now be in radiative contact with colder ones. With this exponentially-growing, de Sitter phase in the universe’s early history we now have a means for resolving the horizon problem.

Instant Flat Space

Because of the exponential growth of the universe during the GUT Era, its size may well be essentially infinite for all ‘practical’ purposes . Estimates by Albrecht and Steinhardt suggest that each bubble region may have grown to a size of 10^3000 cm by the end of the inflationary period. Consequently, the new inflationary model predicts that the content of the universe must be almost exactly the ‘critical mass’ since the sizes of each of these bubble regions are almost infinite in extent. The universe is, for all conceivable observations, exactly Euclidean (infinite and flat in geometry) and destined to expand for all eternity to come. Since we have only detected at most 10 percent of the critical mass in the form of luminous matter, this suggests that 10 times as much matter exists in our universe than is currently detectable. Of course, if the universe is essentially infinite this raises the ghastly spectre of the eventual annihilation of all organic and inorganic matter some 10^32 years from now because of proton decay.

In spite of its many apparent successes, even the new inflationary universe model is not without its problems. Although it does seem to provide explainations for several cosmological enigmas, it does not provide a convincing way to create galaxies. Those fluctuations in the density of matter that do survive the inflationary period are so dense that they eventually collapse into galaxy-sized blackholes! Neither the precise way in which the transition to ordinary Hubbel expansion occurs nor the duration of the inflationary period are well determined.

If the inflationary cosmologies can be made to answer each of these issues satisfactorily we may have, as J. Richard Gott III has suggested, a most remarkable model of the universe where an almost infinite number of ‘bubble universes’ each having nearly infinite size, coexist in the same 4-dimensional spacetime; all of these bubble universes having been brought into existence at the same instant of creation. This is less troublesome than one might suspect since, if our universe is actually infinite as the available data suggests, so too was it infinite even at its moment of birth! It is even conceivable that the universe is ‘percolating’ with new bubble universes continually coming into existence. Our entire visible universe, out to the most distant quasar, would be but one infinitessimal patch within one of these bubble regions. Do these other universes have galaxies, stars, planets and living creatures statistically similar to those in our universe? We may never know. These other universes, born of the same paroxicism of Creation as our own, are forever beyond our scrutiny but obviously not our imaginations!

Beyond The Beginning…

Finally, what of the period before Grand Unification? We may surmise that at higher temperatures than the GUT Era, even the supermassive Higgs and Leptoquark bosons become massless and at long last we arrive at a time when the gravitational interaction is united with the weak, electromagnetic and strong forces. Yet, our quest for an understanding of the origins of the universe remains incomplete since gravity has yet to be brought into unity with the remaining forces on a theoretical basis. This last step promises to be not only the most difficult one to take on the long road to unification but also appears to hold the greatest promise for shedding light on some of the most profound mysteries of the physical world. Even now, a handful of theorists around the world are hard at work on a theory called Supergravity which unites the force carriers (photons, gluons, gravitons and the weak interaction bosons) with the particles that they act on (quarks, electrons etc). Supergravity theory also predicts the existence of new particles called photinos and gravitinos. There is even some speculation that the photinos may fill the entire universe and account for the unseen ‘missing’ matter that is necessary to give the universe the critical mass required to make it exactly Euclidean. The gravitinos, on the other hand, prevent calculations involving the exchange of gravitons from giving infinite answers for problems where the answers are known to be perfectly finite. Hitherto, these calculations did not include the affects of the gravitinos.

Perhaps during the next decade, more of the details of the last stage of Unification will be hammered out at which time the entire story of the birth of our universe can be told. This is, indeed, an exciting time to be living through in human history. Will future generations forever envy us our good fortune, to have witnessed in our lifetimes the unfolding of the first comprehensive theory of Existence?