The End of Knowledge

What are some of the biggest questions out there?

Some that come to mind right off the bat are -
How did it all begin?
Can we see it all begin?
Are we alone? Are there life forms somewhere else?
Is our universe unique?
What's for dinner tonight, Mom?

(Okay, maybe not that last one. But I had you for a moment there, didn't I? What is for dinner tonight, anyway? Mom!)

Anyway!

Some questions we don't know the answer to today. But we're fairly certain we will have them in the near or distant future. The real question is: what happens then?

There'll be a day when we know the cure to cancer. There will be a day we can control pollution effectively. And there will be a day when we know what the M Theory, the Theory of Everything, is. But what will remain then? Will we have finally reached the point where there's nothing left to explore?

I feel like the answer is no. In an earlier post, I had said that one scientific breakthrough may answer some questions, but pave the way for ten times as many questions that now need to be answered.  As of now, I can't really say (neither can anyone else, I suppose) what those questions will be. But I do have two hypotheses for whether we will reach the end of knowledge.

The first hypothesis is that we'll be extinct before we get there. The human race is clever; maybe clever enough to outlast a global catastrophe. But there are only so many things we can escape. We can't escape the death of our star, or any star. We can't escape quasars or gamma ray bursts.  We certainly can't escape the upcoming galaxy collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda. Humans are just too small to control these events. Even if we do survive the next 5 billion years, we will meet these catastrophes. Every species has its end.

 My second hypothesis is that any discoveries we will make, like the Theory of Everything, will be appropriate only for a certain time (a concept similar to, if not the same as, model dependent realism). Which means a new theory will have to be formulated. So we may see some things through to the end, but some things we may just die before seeing.

The end result is: we'll die, or keep finding things to explore. There is no end to knowledge, nor are humans a species suited to "sitting tight, holing up, waiting for answers".

Poetry in Motion...Sort Of

It is a fact well accepted by me that my prose is better than my poetry. But once in a blue moon, I come up with something that has to be addressed poetically. So here goes nothing:

It was an explosion.
Nay, it was an expansion.
It was the birth,
In which was also written death.

It was the start of a story still in writing.
A story which could just as easily not have existed.
A species would later on term this "contingency",
A species, a member of which writes this today.

To witness it would have been agony.
To witness it would be a feat.
To witness it one would have to transcend reality.
To witness it is to witness everything.

Everything was brought into existence by it.
Everything which could easily not exist today.
Everything then is everything now.
And everything everywhere is a function of how.

Every sunrise, every sunset.
Every star to ever adorn the night sky.
Every galaxy to be a home to some wonder in this expanse.
Every species to ever marvel at the beauty around her.

It is a glass bowl waiting to shatter.
It is a glass bowl which could have shattered.
It is a glass bowl which will shatter.
It is a cosmic house of cards; one false step collapses it all.

All was written in it.
All was born with it.
All will die with it.
All is fundamentally bound to it.

Well, I can see why I don't wax poetic often.

The Origin of Everything, Part Two

You think a nuclear war is violent? Well, being witness to the Big Bang would give you nightmares for the rest of your life. (Of course, one could make the case that nuclear war is more destructive than the Big Bang, and vice versa for the latter. But let's just talk about the energy released in the moment of creation.)

 The Creation of Matter

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you know Einstein's equation, E=mc². It's very elegant. It describes a lot - nuclear fusion in the sun, nuclear fission in our nuclear power plants, the power of our hydrogen, atom, and nuclear bombs, and also...how matter was created in the early universe.

E=mc² explains all of these in facets. You can use various aspects of it to describe phenomena, from why we can't go faster than the speed of light, to what happened in the early universe. And to explain that, I'm going to have to use the facet of E=mc² that says that all matter is essentially a condensed form of energy. It's an abstract concept, so I request you to bear with me.

There are some nights where your brain feels like it is on hyper drive - won't let you have a moment's rest. There's just so much flurry up there that you feel like you have to get up and make sense of it all before you get a good night's sleep. I don't know the technical term for it. But you have thoughts and thoughts and thoughts...an onlooker will see you get restless, always changing positions. It's not very pleasant.

In some sense, that was what was happening in the early universe. There was an extreme amount of energy all over the place. The universe could not calm down. And because of this, particles could not be made. Rest could not be had. If a particle was made, it would be destroyed. It would have nothing to coalesce with.

Of course, the situation changed. Maybe the universe had milk and cookies, because it calmed down. It started cooling. And as it cooled, it allowed the formation of particles.

 Think about that for a second. This is the beginning of the universe. You know the law of conservation of matter - "Matter can neither be created nor be destroyed, it can only change from one form to another"? Do you know what it implies? The atoms in you, in me, in that bookshelf to my right, and the most distant star are all nearly 13,820,000,000 years old. They just have a long history of being in lots of chemical reactions.

"What can come out of a man looking up at the night sky?" They said. 

Constants

When I was in elementary school and first learned of the Big Bang, I hypothesized a tiny little solar system and tiny stars inside something like a sun. And I imagined the Big Bang like the hatching of an egg. Like that fiery ball just spit everything out and that’s the way it’s been since. I was wrong in some respects, and right in some.

Because, essentially, the “cosmic egg” did contain the ingredients for everything. Matter was only one of the things that the Big Bang spit out. It also spit out the four fundamental forces, dark matter, dark energy – you name it. And what that means is that it also defined the physics, chemistry, math, and biology that we study today.

My physics textbook for this year has this question (which I’m paraphrasing) –

“Physicist P.A.M. Dirac was playing around with some physical constants (like the speed of light and the universal gravitational constant) when he arrived at a quantity whose unit was time. And this quantity was roughly equal to the age of the universe. What does this tell you about the constancy of these quantities?”

The answer seems to jump out – that these constants have remained constant for 13.82 billion years. They were literally born with the Big Bang.

This post and the last don’t really do justice to the story of creation. Maybe there’ll be posts sprinkled throughout this blog in the future regarding this subject. Till then, ponder over this: We’re a more integral part of this universe than we ever imagined. 

The Origin of Everything, Part One

The night sky directly above our heads holds many secrets (of course, they wouldn't have to stay secret if it weren't for light pollution). It was looking up that jump started our creative thinking.  And, indeed, The question that incites the greatest curiosity is -  how did it all begin?

Like the flat Earth hypothesis, and the geocentric model of our solar system, it was at first thought that the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the universe and that the universe was static. It has no beginning and will have no end.

Then in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble shook this belief by -  you guessed it - looking up. So groundbreaking was his discovery that we named a space telescope after him. And, heck, even the space telescope is as famous as he is. See, what Hubble saw was that there were some flecks of light that one could simply not call 'stars'. What Hubble realized was that these flecks were entire galaxies,  just like the Milky Way.

I'd like to pause for a moment here, to explain the chain that continues even today.

 We've gone from being only one planet to realizing there are seven (formerly eight) others, and further, that there are many other planets.  We've gone from a flat Earth belief to a round Earth theory.  We've made the leap from a geocentric model of the universe to a heliocentric model of the universe, and now Hubble was on the verge of adding one more tier to the metaphorical cake.

Hubble not only told us that we are in one galaxy among many, but also that these galaxies are moving away from or toward us. This was a major discovery, because it meant that the belief that the universe was static now had to be scrapped. Something had to be hypothesized to explain the movement of these galaxies. And so the Big Bang hypothesis was, well...hypothesized.

Like many theories, The Big Bang theory was not easily accepted.  In fact, the name itself was an attempt to ridicule it, given by Fred Hoyle. And today it's the most accepted  theory for the origin of the universe.

Think about it this way: if galaxies are flying farther apart, something is pushing them apart (seeing as galaxies can't move on their own). That means that space itself is expanding. Further, it means that space was once much smaller than this.  We call this starting point a "singularity".

So, the Big Bang theory states that the universe was, essentially, born out of a singularity that started expansion 13.82 billion years ago,  and it still hasn't stopped. What came out of it and how it affects us today will be a topic for the next article.