Small Thoughts on Big Questions - by Winston

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Small Thoughts on Big Questions - May 2007

Moving!

May 15th 2007 20:34

There I was, minding my own business, when suddenly I was blessed to receive the words of the Almighty Orble Gods. "Ye," they said unto me, "wouldst thou like a domain blog?" And thus thoughtzone.net is born.

Much like this blog, I will ponder big, strange issues. I may also start focusing on smaller topics as well (pretty much whatever mood I'm in). I might bounce from religion to immigration to Bigfoot and back again. The point is to question and to think, regardless of the issue. It's pretty dull, though, if no one agrees or disagrees with me and I'm essentially talking to myself. So, feel free to read the new blog and shower me with either a) praise or b) less praise or c) abject hatred. I'm pulling for a) or b), but I'll take what I can get.

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Question #7 -- Universal questions

May 7th 2007 20:14

I really hate it when I wake up at 3:00 a.m. with some weird, deep thoughts running through my brain. First of all, it's 3:00 a.m. and, sorry brain, I really would just like to sleep. Got to get up and go to work, you know. Second, I can never remember exactly what I was thinking about in any real detail when the alarm clock goes off.

This is what happened to me very early this morning. I'm pretty sure I was having a good, deep inner dialog, but unfortunately I told the voice in my head to shut up and go back to sleep. What I managed to recall this morning, though hazy, was interesting. Essentially, the question I was asking myself was: what is the nature of the universe?

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I have no idea about how to answer this question. With the exception of having a great interest in astronomy and cosmology, tempered by very limited skill and comprehension in these areas, I have no qualifications whatsoever to even begin to address this sort of question. My point? Take whatever I say here with a very small grain of salt.

The universe is large. So large, in fact, that it is scarcely possible for the human mind to comprehend its magnitude. Numbers like 93,000,000 miles (the distance from the Earth to the Sun -- also known as one Astronomical Unit, or AU) are vast. We can conceive of the number 93,000,000 in theory, but even this number is really too large for us to truly understand. How then to understand distance and size on the cosmic scale, where 93,000,000 miles is a pitifully small number. It is over 40 AU's just to get to Pluto, within our very own solar system. That's about 4 billion miles just to get out towards our own back yard. The next closest star is Alpha Centauri, about 4 light-years away. A light-year, of course, is the distance that light travels in one year. With light moving at a speed of 186,000/second, a light-year is about equal to 5.9 trillion miles. That makes Alpha Centauri about 24 trillion miles away. Raise your hand if you can conceive what a number that large really means.....yeah, not a lot of hands flying up. One more huge number to finish up with: our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light-years across. That's 590,000,000,000,000,000 miles. Honestly, that number doesn't even make sense. When you consider that this number only involves the diameter of our own galaxy, and that there are a couple hundred billion more galaxies out there, it is truly incomprehensible.

What I'm driving at here is our notion of size. To a human being traveling on a tiny, rocky speck orbiting an anonymous star in the suburbs of the galaxy, these numbers are towering, staggering monstrosities that we can't hope to truly understand. But, on the universal scale, they are quite small. We assign meaning to concepts like "size" and "distance" based upon our own fragile stature. In reality, our notions of scale are completely inconsequential.

Time is another concept that fries the mind. Many people get bound up thinking about what happened "before" the Big Bang, or what will happen "after". This is completely understandable. We live linear lives. Conception, birth, life, death. This order is the same whether you're a wasp or a whale. The universe seems to have followed the same path. Obviously it started at some point, and based on our current observations it will end at some point (although the how and when of this event are still murky and so far away in time as to be a meaningless discussion for the human race). However, time itself begins when the universe begins. There can't be time in the absence of movement or matter to record it. Time is a consequence of the motion, birth, and decay of the universe. Speaking about what happened "before" the universe started ends up being a question with no answer. There is no "before" to speak of.

Imagine, as some people do, that our current universe is just the latest in a perpetual series of expansions, collapses, and rebirths. In this instance, everything is broken down and completely reformed continually. The old timeline is wiped out, and a new one begins. Under this model, it's possible that there have been many civilizations that have existed in preceding universes. However, it's not correct to speculate that these civilizations are older than ours. They may have existed much longer than ours and grown far more advanced than ours. But to say they existed before we did implies that there is some way that we could look back, like cosmic archaeologists. There is not. Under this model, instead of one linear stream of time like this,

Time------->--------------->- --------------->------------- ->

we have many separate, unrelated, incomparable timelines, like this:

TimeA------->--------->Crunch
TimeB------->--------->Crunch
TimeC------->--------->Crunch
etc.

It is commonly remarked that there is a very large set of conditions that exist in the universe that, had they formed only slightly differently, would have rendered the universe uninhabitable. If gravity were not just so, if the temperature at the Big Bang had been a fraction of a degree hotter, if matter had not won out, by one particle-per-billion, over anti-matter during the formation of the universe, I would not be typing this right now. Taken together, the odds of all these conditions occurring in just the right way to favor life are astronomically low. However, if we consider that these properties resulted by chance during an infinite succession of universes, such as in this model, then the odds are overwhelmingly increased in our favor.

One of the problems with this model, despite how neat and tidy it sounds, is that all the most current cosmological research indicates that the universe will not collapse back into itself and start over (i.e., The Big Crunch). It appears that the rate of expansion in the universe is actually increasing, driven by the still mysterious force described as dark energy. This dark energy, of unknown origin, makes up the bulk of the energy in the universe. Astronomers believe that it is responsible for accelerating the rate of universal expansion. In time, galaxies will be moving away from each other so quickly that the light escaping from them will never reach us. At that point we will not be able to observe any more changes in our universe outside of our immediate neighborhood. The universe itself will continue to expand and decay, until galaxies and stars break down into their component atoms, and the decay will continue even further until even the atoms themselves dissolve into drifting particles in the void. It sounds unpleasant, but it's really pretty cool if you think about it. Or maybe that's just me....

At any rate, this predicted end to the universe does not sound compatible with the idea above of a continuously "reincarnated" universe. Personally, I favor a different idea: that of the multiverse. This idea essentially expands upon what we see all around us. The universe is composed of galaxies, galaxies are composed of stars orbited by planets, stars and planets are composed of atoms and molecules, atoms and molecules are composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons, which are composed of quarks and neutrinos.....there seems to be a spectrum of near-infinite "largeness" balanced by nearly infinite "smallness". As I mentioned earlier, our ability to conceptualize size and scope is incredibly limited. Anything over or under a certain threshold is essentially nonsensical to our little minds. Why, then, is it not possible that our observable universe is not simply a bubble or particle in a much larger structure? Is that any harder to imagine than trying to conceive of distances such as 5.9 trillion miles x 10,000,000,000?

I know, this sounds like something I should be discussing while taking bong hits and listening to Pink Floyd. It is, at this point, entirely unfalsifiable and essentially is meta-science. It is certainly closer to theology or philosophy than hard science. Anyone who has read anything else I've written should be aware that I don't put too much stock into ideas that are entirely speculative and unfounded. About all I can say in defense of this idea is that, unlike notions of creator gods, this idea follows the model that we see every day. It follows a logical progression of ideas and observations. If we ever gain the ability to truly test the nature of the universe (and this is doubtful) it is all too likely that the multiverse theory will fall flat on its face. Most likely, every idea that we have on this topic is wrong. Perhaps it will turn out that the universe is the way it is because it couldn't exist any other way. It is only by radically expanding our understanding of cosmology and physics that we could possibly determine that. The road to that knowledge is very long and exceedingly difficult. And why shouldn't it be? Our earliest stabs at science only go back 2000 years, and our first glimmers of real scientific theory only go back a few hundred. Why should we even dare to dream that we will unlock the fundamental secrets of this 14 billion-year-old universe any time soon? The only answer I can give is to say that the quest to truly understand our origins is the deepest and most noble task which we can assign to ourselves. It may well be beyond our reach, but that is no reason not to extend our hands.

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