The Universe E-Book

Richard Osborne

• Herausgeber: Pocket Essentials
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 151

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The single biggest and most difficult question that exists? From early religions through Greek Philosophy and Western Science, man has attempted to discover the meaning of the Universe and our place within it. In the last twenty year these debates have all been stood on their head by amazing discoveries, big bang theory and ideas about new sub-atomic layers. The nature of Time and Space are truly up for grabs. With a witty and accessible style Osborne leads us on a historical and informative adventure through the philosophies of the universe; including the importance of telescopes, mathematics and relativity theory and ending with contemporary mind-expanding concepts such as the reversibility of time and parallel universes.

Leseprobe

Where did the Universe come from?

The single biggest and most difficult question that there is. From early religions through Greek Philosophy and Western Science man has always attempted to discover the meaning of our place in the Universe.

In the last twenty years these debates have all been stood on their head by amazing discoveries, big bang theory and ideas about new sub-atomic layers. The nature of Time and Space are truly up for grabs.

With a witty and accessible style Osborne leads us on a historical and informative journey through the philosophies of the universe including the importance of telescopes, mathematics and relativity theory and ending with contemporary mind-expanding concepts such as the reversibility of time and parallel universes.

Richard Osborne, author of the internationally bestselling Philosophy for Beginners and the recent guide to all things cultural, Megawords, now looks at the biggest picture - The Universe.

Throughout this work, I am assuming that most scientists most of the time are rigorous in attempting to produce clear knowledge based on sound mathematical principles, and I cannot be held legally or morally responsible for outcomes, conclusions or facts that are proven to be untrue, irrelevant or simply wrong.

The Universe

Explained, Condensed and Exploded

RICHARD OSBORNE

POCKET ESSENTIALS

For Harriet, Helen, the Havenhands and my Chemistry A level teacher whose name I’ve forgotten.

Contents

Introduction – The Beginnings of Cosmology

1: From Stars in their Eyes to Telescopes and Beyond

2: The Newtonian Revolution: Mechanics and Maestros

3: The Rise of Modern Cosmology: From Here to Eternity

4: New Dimensions

5: Holes, Bangs and Curvature: Eternity Gets Bigger

6: Looking at Things Differently

7: Life Gets More Complicated

Postscript

Further Reading

Internet Sites

Copyright

Introduction The Beginnings of Cosmology

Somewhere out past The Venus Love Bar there is a notice that reads ‘Last fuel before the end of the Universe’ and, on the back of it as you go past, it says ‘Last fuel at the start of the Universe’, and as both could be true, there we have the conundrum. How does one define a beginning and an end in something that could possibly be limitless, or could be expanding, or might well bend back on itself? The latest theory suggests that the Universe is still expanding, like a nice big balloon, but then it might contract again into a much smaller thing. (Although we’re talking pretty big spaces here.) The trouble is it’s not just the spaces that are a bugger. It turns out that time mightn’t be quite what we thought (and you have to be quick to get that one). Whichever way you look at it, the great spaces and vast distances of our galaxy alone are enough to bend the mind, and our galaxy, it turns out, is just one of thousands, or millions. Trying to think about what we call the Universe means trying to think about everything that might have existed, and anything else that might also come into being and what might exist in the future. As Winnie the Pooh once pointed out, this does make your brain ache. Are there parking meters at the end of the Universe, and what time limit is there on the meter? This is the stuff that we all worry about and it reflects our basic human desire to know about the Universe, and also to try and grasp it on a human scale. ‘There’s nowt so queer as the Universe,’ as some famous Northerner once said. Interestingly, the more we learn about the Universe, the more peculiar it seems to get. This doesn’t stop people, or theoretical physicists anyway, from trying to develop a unified theory of everything. This is like trying to establish some basic principle, or set of rules, that will describe everything in the Universe forever.There are those who suggest that this might be a little bit over-ambitious, but we’ll consider that question later (along with the question of black holes and the no-boundary proposal). Here we are just going to look at exactly why the Universe is such a problem, and why we worry about it (if we do).

This is another funny thing. Here we are wafting around in the middle of nowhere and we try to make the Universefit our bug-eyed, small-brained view of everything. To put that scientifically, we might say that ‘man is the measure of all things’ and that our view of the earth, the planets and the stars has always been limited by our humanness. We have always been convinced that we are the centre of the Universe, the key factor in everything. To suggest otherwise has, throughout the ages, been seen as ridiculous, illogical and generally treasonable or heretical, or both. It’s obvious, surely, that the moon, the sun and the stars circle the earth, which must therefore be at the centre of the Universe and everything goes around it in nice circles. God ordained all this and it all works perfectly, so there is no sensible reason to doubt what we see with our own eyes. That, at least, was the general line of argument for a couple of thousand years. This idea has, of course, changed in the last few centuries as technology has allowed us to see, and hear and record, many more things than we ever dreamed of. Our little human view of the Universe is being blasted apart all over the place. Without a doubt the telescope is the single most revolutionary bit of technology we have ever dreamed up and, with it, our views of the Universe began to change dramatically. That was where Copernicus and Galileo came in, pointing out to everyone that the earth went around the sun and not the other way around. There was actually hardly any reaction when Copernicusfirst said it, and almost no widespread reaction for 50 to 100 years. This was a very quiet revolution indeed. Now we look at the stars and we think,‘The light from that place definitely took 500 years to get here,’ because we all now know that galaxies go on forever and we last for little specks of time. Some people’s reaction to the real difficulties involved in thinking about all of this stuff is to drink beer and watch football, or to take up knitting, and try not to worry about it.This is a very human reaction but everyone, at some point, has to have a quiet worry about it all and that’s what we’re doing here. We’re taking a look at the Universe for Simpsonites (and if the Universe could be as funny as The Simpsons, that would probably be a good thing). Indeed, the episode where Homer Simpson gets to grips with the various natures of different realities is the best bit of scientific popularising in existence. The questions Homer may well have put are, ‘Where are all those aliens?’, ‘Are they boring?’ and ‘Do they drink beer?’ These are very important questions as it’s really a way of saying, ‘Are aliens like us?’ If they’re not, it could be difficult to get on with them, since we’re not very good at getting on even with our own types. Conceptually speaking, it’s all about thinking outside the box, thinking in a way that is critical rather than commonsensical. Imagining the Universe and what is in it is the really hard bit for all of us. It’s yoga for the brain. As Einstein once said, ‘I’m going sailing.’

Anyway,first of all, what do we mean by the Universe? To quote the Oxford English Dictionary, the Universe is, ‘The whole of existing or created things regarded collectively, all things, including the earth, the heavens, and all that is in them, considered as constituting a systematic whole’. When astronomers talk about the Universe, they mean everything that is accessible to our observations, but that keeps expanding, as does the way that all of these things interact. The Universe includes all that we can survey or experiment on, from the moon that orbits our own planet out to the most distant islands of stars in the vastness of space.We also assume that the Universe is all joined up, and made of the same sort of things. Since we cannot visit most of the Universe, we rely on the information it can send to us. Fortunately, we receive an enormous amount of cosmic information all the time, coded into the waves of light and other forms of energy that come to us from objects, stars and galaxies at all distances. Now that we have learnt, or theoretical physicists have, to decipher all this information, we can seriously analyse the Universe. So the main task of astronomy is to decode all that information and assemble a coherent picture of the cosmos.We could say that at the end of the day it all comes down to how we observe the Universe and what thinking about those observations does for our ideas of science, society and self.The Universe ought to inspire a deep sense of awe in everyone, but instead we block it out with hideous orange street-lamps so that we can’t see the stars.

As the evidence accumulates about the nature of the Big Bang, you would think that we would more and more adopt scientific attitudes to the world but, in fact, religion seems to be on the march everywhere.That we know what makes the Universe tick would, you would think, help us to understand everything else better but, in a strange way, it seems to scare people. It’s almost as though we want to stick with the idea that the world isflat and supported on the backs of elephants or tortoises, although that’s a bit like believing that David Beckham is as important as Stephen Hawking. We call this ‘ideology versus science’ and, unfortunately, the myth-makers, who are often the media, frequently have the upper hand and promote ideology. Take, for example, the environmental debate about global warming. Almost all scientists believe that the evidence is overwhelming yet the media constantly portray the issue as speculative. Politicians encourage this, as they don’t want to do anything about it. So many people – politicians, religious bigots, big companies and tobacco companies – have an ongoing interest in de-bunking science so that superstition rules the airwaves. (Remember the so-called debate about the link between smoking and ill-health?) But at the same time, we know more and more scientifically and seem unable to do anything with it, except make weird sciencefiction movies.This poses what we can call the Universe gap, between what we know and how we act.

Perhaps we are alone in the Universe, rattling about in gigantic spaces with just dust and rubbish for companions, or there may be lots of other civilisations out there just waiting for us to get in touch. Apparently, loads of Americans have been abducted by aliens but they were warned to keep quiet, or at least only to go on a chat show and talk about it. How we get in touch with all of these other civilisations, or even vaguely establish whether they exist, is one of the trickier questions that we face. Given that we now know that there are thousands of planets out there in various galaxies that could support life, it would seem credible that other life forms may have evolved. Or to put that another way, doesn’t it seem a bit improbable that we lousy humans are the only intelligent life form in all of these endless voids and galaxies? It may seem improbable, but all the information we have at the moment (and by that we mean hard, scientific evidence) suggests that this may be the case. We now listen out all the time for messages from space and we are able to monitor vast tracts of the Universe, but we haven’t yet had a single hello from anybody, or at least verifiable hellos that don’t involve Elvis Presley or the Scientologists or whoever. This is rather odd in one sense. Logically, one might surmise that there must be other life forms out there but perhaps they are just too far away, or of such a different form that communication is, for the moment, impossible. However, given that the Universe is much the same from one end to the other, in terms of what it is made of and the way it works in terms of gases, radiation, light and movement, you would think that scientific development in other civilisations would have to be pretty similar to ours, and so they should come up with similar modes of communication.Thus, logically, if they are out there looking at the stars like us, but from another planet, they ought to be able to notice the peculiar things that go on, on earth. Indeed, perhaps that is why they haven’t been in touch; they don’t want to get involved with such a destructive bunch of lunatics. However, it is just as possible that we are the only life form in the entire Universe, brought into being by a series of accidents, fusions, natural selection and sheer improbability, and the way that many humans behave suggests that this could be the case. It is extraordinary, however, how we mere humans have so relentlessly over the centuries tried to work out what makes the Universe tick and have been able to discover so much in scientific terms about our planet, our Universe, and our physical being. It is just as extraordinary that we seem to have discovered so little about our social being, and to be able (simultaneously) to explore the stars and tofight like dogs in the gutter. It seems as though every time someone makes a scientific discovery, someone else dreams up a particularly appalling use for it, like atomic bombs or car technology that is destroying the earth’s atmosphere. One recent argument for space travel is that we are messing up the planet so quickly that we will need to get off en masse within the next couple of hundred years. This is what is known as curious logic.

Before we get to the end of the planet, it is worth going back to one of the original philosophical questions, ‘Where did everything come from?’ This can properly be described as the grand-daddy (or grandmother) of all questions and it can rightly be seen as what distinguishes us from other, non-rational beings. Rather than just reacting to our environment, as many animal species do, often in intelligent ways, we as a species have constantly tried to work out where our planet came from, why things happen as they do and what causes such events. The earliest explanations tended to be mythical, or religious, but gradually, particularly through observation, observers started to pose questions that could really be described as philosophical or scientific. As far as we can tell, the early Greeks brought these things to fruition and produced all sorts of fascinating ideas that got Western science and civilisation off to a head-start. Greek philosophers more or less developed the scientific method of thinking ‘What if…?’ or of just thinking about the Universe, both in abstract terms and in the sense of thinking about measuring it, which is effectively where it all begins. Their idea of ‘natural philosophy’ was to think about everything in terms of its inter-connectedness, or of systems, and to speculate on how one bit affected another. It is still quite staggering to see what they came up with, based on a few measurements, some mathematics and a great deal of pre-computer intelligence. From the invention of writing, about 5,000 years ago, to the Greeks speculating about the atomic structure of the Universe, was a period so short that it was like a fruitfly developing language and inventing the computer before it died in two weeks (or however long they live). There are other very interesting questions about why Greek civilisation suddenly blossomed in the way that it did, and also then declined, but that’s a whole other debate.

As I’ve said, we are confronted with the slightly difficult questions of ‘Where did the Universe come from?’ and ‘What is it made of?’ Perhaps God made the Universe, or a group of gods who have since fallen out, which would explain all the war and pestilence. Or perhaps the Universe just happened, by mistake, and we were part of that mistake, and later we’llfind out why. Basically, for all of us who are not theoretical physicists, or God, we have a problem in understanding what all of this stuff is about and that is why we need to think about it in non-mathematical ways. Already you are asking what is this talk about the Universe and understanding it in ways that are non-mathematical, and that is a good question. As we philosophers like to say, a good question is where it all starts from; where it goes from there is anybody’s guess. The point is that most of the development of science and astronomy has been bound up with the development of mathematics (or numbers as we non-professionals like to say). The question of where numbers come from or who invented them is another one of those rather tricky questions that they don’t teach you about in school. Pythagoras and his Greek mates were all convinced that numbers were mystical and spiritual, sort of alive, and made up the way the Universe functioned.This is a very long way from the origin of mathematics in counting things, like sheep, cows and eggs; but without mathematics, none of the scientific developments would really have been possible. The development from numbering things to being able to devise, and solve, mathematical problems is another one of those great mysteries that almost defies explanation but, without it, our ability to measure and analyse our observations of the Universe would be non-existent. Going with numbers meant that we could measure things by inference rather thanfl