What a Wonderful World (31 page)

1
The first galaxies to form were actually relatively small. But, over the past 10 billion years or so, they have repeatedly merged and cannibalised each other, growing ever bigger until finally creating the galaxies we see around us today.

2
John Haines, ‘Little Cosmic Dust Poem’ (1983); http://tinyurl. com/crwo3y4.

3
Strictly speaking, the cosmic background radiation is brightest at a far-infrared wavelength of about 1 millimetre. Historically,
however
, it was first spotted at the easier-to-detect microwave
wavelength
of a few centimetres.

4
Strictly speaking, it is necessary to be at high altitude or in space to see the Universe glowing with the relic heat of the big bang. This is because water vapour in the atmosphere strongly absorbs the far infrared of the cosmic background radiation. At altitude, this water vapour is frozen out.

5
At one time there was a rival of the big bang. In 1948, Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold proposed that, although the
Universe
is expanding, new material continually pops into existence out of nothing to make new galaxies, so the Universe never gets more
dilute but always looks the same. The steady state was dealt a killer blow by the discovery that the distant, and therefore ancient Universe, looks very different from today, and by the discovery of the cosmic background radiation in 1965.

6
When hydrogen nuclei approach each other close enough, they come under the influence of the powerful nuclear force. Like pieces of shrapnel in an explosion in reverse, they begin to fall towards each other. Faster and faster they fall until, finally, they collide. By the time this happens, however, they have acquired a tremendous energy of motion, which they must somehow get rid off if they are to stick together rather than rebound outwards. The surplus energy might be lost in the form of a high-energy particle or gamma ray. The details are unimportant. The key thing is that the formation of a nucleus of helium out of hydrogen nuclei is accompanied by a loss of a large amount of energy. This is the ultimate origin of sunlight. See my
The Magic Furnace.

7
Absolute zero, equivalent to -273.15 °C, is the lowest possible temperature. Classical, or pre-quantum, physics predicts that, as the temperature falls, the jiggling of atoms gets ever more sluggish. At absolute zero, it stops altogether.

8
The cosmic background radiation broke free of matter about 379,000 years after the birth of the Universe. It had existed before but its photons could barely travel across space without being redirected, or scattered, by free electrons. About 379,000 years old, the Universe had cooled sufficiently for electrons to combine with atomic nuclei to make the first atoms. Without free electrons to hinder them, the photons of the fireball were suddenly free to travel across space unhindered. We detect them today as the cosmic background radiation. They have come directly to us from this epoch of last scattering.

9
The speed of light is the cosmic speed limit only in Einstein’s special theory of relativity of 1905. In his general theory of relativity of 1915, space can expand at any speed it likes. Evidence for this
faster-than
-light expansion comes from the size of the observable
Universe
. Although the Universe has existed for only 13.8 billion years, it is 84 billion light years across.

10
According to quantum theory, the vacuum is not empty. Far from it. Whereas in the everyday world the law of conservation of energy forbids energy being created from nothing, in the subatomic world, nature overlooks this edict. Energy can be conjured out of nothing,
as long as it is paid back quickly
. Think of a teenager who gets away with borrowing his dad’s car overnight as long he returns it to the garage the following morning before his dad notices its absence. In the same way, nature turns a blind eye to energy being conjured out of nothing as long as it is for only an ultra-short time. Consequently, the quantum vacuum, far from being empty, seethes with restless energy.

11
According to Einstein’s equations of gravity, the source of gravity is
u
+ 3
P
, where
u
is energy density and
P
is the pressure. Usually, the second term is ignored because, in normal circumstances, the pressure of matter – due to its microscopic components buzzing about – is negligible compared with the energy density of matter. But it is always possible that there exists some hitherto unknown type of material in which the pressure is not negligible. And, if the pressure
P
is negative and less than –
u
/3, this reverses the sign of
u
+ 3
P
, making gravity
repulsive
– that is, gravity
blows
rather than sucks
. This is the case with the inflationary, false, vacuum.
Incidentally
, negative pressure means that, instead of pushing outwards, the vacuum is trying to shrink everywhere. Yet, bizarrely, it has
repulsive
gravity, and inflates. The reason for this is that the pressure has no direct effect. Every chunk of shrinking vacuum is surrounded by other chunks of shrinking vacuum so, overall, the negative pressure cancels out. Instead, the negative pressure has an indirect effect entirely through Einstein’s equations, which endow it with repulsive gravity.

12
This is typical of anything quantum. Its behaviour – for instance, whether it decays – is totally random, totally unpredictable. The Universe was a quantum object in its first split second of existence because it was
smaller than an atom.

13
To be fair, nobody has yet managed to unite quantum theory with Einstein’s theory of gravity. A quantum theory of gravity, for all
we know, may predict the
exact
energy density observed for the dark energy. Uniting quantum theory – a theory of the very small – and the general theory of relativity – a theory of the very big – is essential to understanding the birth of the Universe. After all, at that time, something very big was also very small.

14
The clumping together of matter to form galaxies could begin only when the fireball had cooled enough for electrons to combine with nuclei to form the Universe ’s first atoms. The reason is that free electrons interact strongly with, or scatter, photons, and there were about 10 billion for every electron in the big-bang fireball. They blasted apart any matter trying to clump together under gravity. Once electrons were mopped up by atoms, however, gravity gained control of the Universe. The time when galaxies began to form, about 379,000 years after the birth of the Universe, is known as the epoch of last scattering. Priceless information about this period is imprinted on the cosmic background radiation.

15
The evidence for dark matter also comes from within galaxies. The stars in the outer regions of spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way, for instance, are orbiting
too fast
. Like children on a speeded-up roundabout, they should fly off into intergalactic space. The reason they do not, astronomers maintain, is that they are in the grip of the gravity of a huge mass of dark matter. This dark matter, which greatly outweighs the visible stars, is believed to form a spherical halo in which is embedded the flattened disc of the spiral galaxy.

16
Earlier, it was mentioned that a crucial piece of evidence for the big bang is that 25 per cent of the mass of the Universe is helium. That is 25 per cent of the
ordinary matter.

17
See ‘The Holes in the Sky’, Chapter 6 of my book
The Universe Next Door.

18
Cosmological parameters such as the age and expansion rate of the Universe were once very badly known. Everything changed with the launch in 2001 of NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe to observe the afterglow of the big bang. It ushered in the age of precision cosmology.

19
Apologies for using the image of a bubble in two different contexts.
Each bubble that forms in the inflationary vacuum actually contains an
infinite
number of big-bang regions (smaller bubbles), each like our observable Universe. If you are wondering how something can be bounded yet infinite, it is because the inflationary vacuum is expanding so incredibly fast that, to observers inside the bubble, the boundary is
unreachable
. Effectively, therefore, the bubble is infinite.

20
Arthur C. Clarke, ‘The Wall of Darkness’,
The Other Side of the Sky.

Adams, Douglas,
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(Macmillan, 2009)

Agassiz, Louis,
Geological Sketches
(Ticknor and Fields, 1866)

Anderson, Philip, ‘More Is Different’,
Science
, vol. 177 no. 4047 (4 August 1972)

Atkins, Peter,
Four Laws that Drive the Universe
(Oxford University Press, 2007)

Atkinson, Nancy, ‘Best Evidence Yet That Comets Delivered Water for Earth’s Oceans’,
Universe Today
, 5 October 2011, http://tinyurl.com/6zazxwj

Augarten, Stan,
State of the Art: A Photographic History of the Integrated Circuit
(Houghton Mifflin, 1983)

Bais, Sander,
Very Special Relativity
(Harvard University Press, 2007)

Barash, David,
Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature
(Oxford University Press, 2012)

Begley, Sharon, ‘In Our Messy, Reptilian Brains’,
Newsweek
, 9 April 2007

Berners-Lee, Tim,
Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its Inventor
(Orion Business, 1999)

Bierce, Ambrose,
The Devil’s Dictionary
(1911)

Bollier, David, ‘Why Karl Polanyi still matters’,
Commons Magazine,
24 February 2009, http://tinyurl.com/ctktkt8

Bostrom, Nick, ‘Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?’,
Philosophical Quarterly
, vol. 53 (2003), pp. 243–55

Buchanan, Mark, ‘Mandelbrot Beats Economics in Fathoming Markets’, Bloomberg, 5 December 2011, http://tinyurl.com/75n8ecb

—
Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us about Economics
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013)

—‘Earthquakes and the Mind-Bending Laws of Markets’, Bloomberg, 18 March 2013, http://tinyurl.com/coklmem

Butler, Samuel,
Life and Habit
(1878)

Chang, Ha-Joon,
23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
(Penguin, 2010)

Chin-Wen Chou, James, et al., ‘Optical Clocks and Relativity’,
Science
, 24 September 2010, vol. 329, p. 1630

Chown, Marcus,
The Magic Furnace
(Vintage, 2000)

—
The Universe Next Door
(Headline, 2002)

—
The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead
(Faber and Faber, 2007)

—
Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
(Faber and Faber, 2008)

—
We Need to Talk About Kelvin
(Faber and Faber, 2009)

Clarke, Arthur C.,
The Other Side of the Sky
(Penguin, 1987)

Coase, Ronald, ‘The Problem of Social Cost’,
Journal of Law and Economics
, October 1960, pp. 1–44

Curzon, Paul, Peter McOwan and Jonathan Black,
Computer Science for Fun
, http://www.cs4fn.org/

Darwin, Charles,
The Origin of the Species
(Oxford World Classics, 2008)

Dawkins, Richard, ‘The Ultraviolet Garden’, Royal Institution Christmas Lecture No. 4, 1991

—
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
(Phoenix, 2005)

—
The Blind Watchmaker
(Penguin, 2006)

—
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
(Free Press, 2009).

Dennett, Daniel,
Consciousness Explained
(Back Bay Books, 1992)

Diamond, Jared,
Guns, Germs and Steel
(Vintage, 2005)

Eddington, Arthur,
The Nature of the Physical World
(1915)

Elbaz, David, et al., ‘Quasar Induced Galaxy Formation: A New Paradigm?’,
Astronomy and Astrophysics
, vol. 507 no. 3 (1 December 2009), pp. 1359–74; http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.2923

Elsasser, Walter,
Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age
(Watson, 1978)

Evans, Dylan, and Howard Selina,
Evolution: A Graphic Guide
(Icon Books, 2010)

Feresten, Spike, ‘The Reverse Peephole’,
Seinfeld
season 9 episode 12, 15 January 1998

Feynman, Richard,
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
(Penguin, 1990)

—
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
, edited by Robert Leighton and Matthew Sands, vols i and ii (Addison-Wesley, 1989)

Fischbach, Gerald D., ‘Mind and Brain’,
Scientific American
, vol. 267 no. 3 (September 1992), p. 49

Ford, Kenneth, and John Wheeler,
Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam
(W. W. Norton, 2000)

Freud, Sigmund,
Civilisation and Its Discontents
(1929).

Germonpré, Mietje, et al., ‘Fossil Dogs and Wolves from Palaeolithic Sites in Belgium, the Ukraine and Russia: Osteometry, Ancient DNA and Stable Isotopes’,
Journal of Archaeological Science
, vol. 36 (2009), pp. 473–90

Gill-Mann, Murray, ‘What Is Complexity?,
Complexity
, vol. 1 no. 1, 1995

Gleick, James,
Chaos
(Vintage, 1997)

Gould, Stephen Jay,
Wonderful Life
(Vintage, 2000)

Grabianowski, Ed, ‘Why slime molds can solve mazes better than robots, www.io9.com, 12 October 2012 http://tinyurl.com/9ud95jx

Gray, John,
False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism
(Granta Books, 2009)

‘Great Names in Computer Science’ (http://www.madore.org/~david/computers/greatnames.html)

Gwynne, Peter, Sharon Begley and Mary Hager, ‘The Secrets of the Human Cell’,
Newsweek
, 20 August 1979, p. 48

Harford, Tim,
The Undercover Economist
(Random House, 2007)

Hartle, James, ‘The Physics of Now’,
American Journal of Physics,
vol. 73, issue 2 (February 2005), p. 101; http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0403001

Hartley, L. P.,
The Go-Between
(Penguin Classics, 2004)

Heisenberg, Werner,
Quantum Theory
(1930)

—
Physics and Philosophy
(1963)

Hodges, Andrew,
Alan Turing: The Enigma
(Vintage, 1992)

How evolution REALLY works
, http://tinyurl.com/brbpqod

Hutton, James, ‘Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land
upon the Globe’,
Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
, vol. 1 (1788), pp. 209–304.

Johnson, George,
In the Palaces of Memory: How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads
(Vintage, 1992)

Jones, Terry, ‘A Very Silly Way to Boil Water’,
New Scientist
, 18 June 1987, p. 63

Kahlbaum, Georg W. A., and Francis V. Darbishire (eds),
The Letters of Faraday and Schoenbein, 1836–1862
(Williams and Norgate, 1899)

Kelly, Heather, ‘OMG, the text message turns 20’, CNN, 3 December 2012, http://tinyurl.com/cgoakdg.

Koene, Randal A., ‘How to Copy a Brain’,
New Scientist
, 27 October 2012, p. 26

Lane, Nick,
Life Ascending
(Profile, 2010)

Larkin, Philip,
High Windows
(Faber and Faber, 1967)

‘Laws of Physics for Cats’, http://www.funny2.com/catlaws.htm

Le Page, Michael, ‘A Brief History of the Genome’,
New Scientist,
15 September 2012, p. 30

Leakey, Richard, and Roger Lewin,
Origins
(Penguin, 1982)

Leitch, Ilea, et al., ‘Evolution of DNA Amounts Across Land Plants (Embryophyta)’,
Annals of Botany
, vol. 95 issue 1 (January 2005), pp. 207–17

Lessing, Doris,
The Four-Gated City
(Flamingo Modern Classics, 2012)

Lewis, Gilbert Newton,
The Anatomy of Science
(Oxford University Press, 1926)

Lloyd, Seth, ‘Ultimate physical limits to computation’,
Nature
, vol. 406 no. 6799 (31 August 2000), p. 1047

Lockwood, Michael,
The Labyrinth of Time
(Oxford University Press, 2005)

Lorenz, Edward,
The Essence of Chaos
(Routledge, 1998)

Luther, Martin,
The Table Talk of Martin Luther
, translated by William Hazlitt (1872)

Maxwell, James Clerk, ‘On the Motions and Collisions of Perfectly Elastic Spheres’,
Philosophical Magazine
, January and July 1860

Médaille, John, ‘Friends and Strangers: A Meditation on Money’,
Front Porch Republic
, 20 January 2012; http://tinyurl.com/6q3pbsy

Minsky, Marvin,
The Society of Mind
(Simon & Schuster, 1988)

Misner, Charles, Kip Thorne and John Wheeler,
Gravitation
(W. H. Freeman, 1973)

Moore, Gordon, ‘Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits’,
Electronics
, vol. 38 no. 8 (19 April 1965)

Morran, Levi, et al., ‘Running with the Red Queen: Host-Parasite Coevolution Selects for Biparental Sex’,
Science
, 8 July 2011, vol. 333, pp. 216–18

Moulton, Forest Ray (ed.),
The Cell and the Protoplasm
, Publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, No. 14 (Science Press, 1940)

Norvig, Peter, ‘Brainy Machines’,
New Scientist
, 3 November 2012, p. vii

‘The Origin of the Brain’, http://tinyurl.com/d7sbhpk

‘The Origin of Sexual Reproduction’, http://tinyurl.com/ca8sjwg

Pamuk,Orhan,
The Museum of Innocence
(Faber and Faber, 2008)

Pinker, Steven,
The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity
(Penguin, 2010)

Polanyi, Karl,
The Great Transformation
(Rinehart, 1944)

Pugh, George E.,
The Biological Origin of Human Values
(Basic, 1977)

Rees, Martin, and Mitchell Begelman,
Gravity’s Fatal Attraction
(Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Resnikoff, Howard,
The Illusion of Reality
(Springer-Verlag, 1989)

Ridley, Matt,
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
(Penguin, 1994)

—
The Rational Optimist
(Fourth Estate, 2010)

Ryan, Robert T.,
The Atmosphere
(Prentice Hall, 1982)

Rutherford, Adam,
Creation
(Penguin, 2013)

Sagan, Carl, ‘Wonder and Skepticism’,
Skeptical Enquirer
, vol. 19 no. 1 (January–February 1995)

Scharf, Caleb,
Gravity’s Engines
(Allen Lane/Penguin, 2012)

Schulman, L. S., ‘Source of the Observed Thermodynamic Arrow’,
Journal of Physics: Conference Series
, vol. 174 no. 1 (2009), 12,022

Shipman, Pat, ‘Man’s Best Friends: How Animals Made Us Human’,
New Scientist
, 31 May 2011, p. 32

Sokal, Alan, ‘A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies’,
Lingua
Franca
, May/June 1996; http://tinyurl.com/mv0w

Stenger, Victor,
Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes
(Prometheus Books, 2000)

Stiglitz, Joseph, ‘Inequality is holding back the recovery’, in the series ‘The Great Divide’,
New York Times
, 19 January 2013, http://tinyurl.com/aqxj9ro

Stoppard, Tom,
Hapgood
(Faber and Faber, 1988)

Stringer, Chris,
The Origin of Our Species
(Allen Lane, 2011)

—and Peter Andrews,
Complete World of Human Evolution
(Thames & Hudson, 2011)

Taleb, Nassim,
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
(Penguin, 2008)

Tegmark, Max, ‘Is the “Theory of Everything” Merely the Ultimate Ensemble Theory?’,
Annals of Physics
, vol. 270, issue 1 (20 November 1998), pp. 1–51

Thomas, Lewis,
The Lives of a Cell
(Penguin, 1978)

—
The Medusa and the Snail
(Penguin, 1995)

Tibballs, Geoff,
The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners
(Running Press, 2004)

Twain, Mark,
Following the Equator
(1897)

Tyndall, John,
In Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers
(1872)

Tyson, Neil deGrasse,
Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
(W. W. Norton, 2007)

Van Valen, Leigh, ‘A New Evolutionary Law’,
Evolutionary Theory,
vol. 1 (1973–76), pp. 1–30

Watson, James,
Discovering the Brain
(National Academy Press, 1992)

—
The Double Helix
(Phoenix, 2010)

Wilde, Oscar,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890)

—
De Profundis
(1905)

Wilson, Edward O.,
Consilience
(Vintage, 1999)

—
The Social Conquest of Earth
(W. W. Norton & Co., 2012)

Wolpert, Lewis, ‘Shaping Life ’,
New Scientist
, 1 September 2012

Young, Louise,
Earth’s Aura
(Random House, 1977)