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Origins of the Universe
by Aaron F.
Last night I sat down to eat my turkey burger from Fuddruckers and flipped through the channels. When I heard a computerized voice, I stopped. It was Stephen Hawking on the discovery channel, in a program about his life and his work on the origins of the universe.
There are a few people in the world that are so far up on the top of their field that when the person speaks, I stop what I'm doing, shut up, and listen, because I know that they are the absolute best in the world at what they do. Michael Jordan for athletics. Alan Greenspan for economics. Stephen Hawking.
Here's a guy that lost control of his body and the set of tools associated with having control over one's arms and legs, and was therefore forced to develop a whole new set of tools - like the ability to visualize complex diagrams in his head - that no other human being has.
Anyway, here's the gist of some of his work, as I was able to retain it:
The Big Bang theory dictates that the known universe came from a singluarity, which is an object of infinite density, and gravitational force, and no size. Singularities exist in the known universe today and they're called black holes. Black holes occur when stars die. The nuclear fuel is used up and the star collapses upon itself, creating a gravitational force where nothing, not even light, can escape. But that's not exactly true. Black holes have radiation. The universe apprantly consists of pairs of opposing particles which appear, separate, come back together, and annihilate each other (matter and anti-matter?). Occasionally, something happens to one of the particles before they can rejoin. In the case of a black hole, one of the paticles can get sucked in, and the other may not. The remaining particle exists as a sort of radiation. Of course, it's difficult to assess the physics of a black hole, since the laws of physics, including the theory of relativity, break down as you cross the event horizon (the point of no return - the border of the black hole's pull). But Hawking thinks that when an object enters a black hole, either the mass or the speed of light (in the form of radiation) can survive, but not both.
Even time gets stretched as you cross the event horizon. If there were two people, one getting sucked into a black hole, and the other observing him from afar, here's what would happen: To the person outside, the man getting sucked in would take an infinitely long time to get sucked in. Essentially, time would freeze for the man in the black hole and the observer would see a frozen image - a snap-shot - of the man getting sucked in. To the man in the black hole, everything would appear normal to him, except that the universe outside speeds up and he essentially sees the future. Over what would appear to the man in the black hole as a couple of weeks, the man would gradually get stretched and squeezed until he is basically spaghetti.
What about time...Hawking found that time does not have a starting point. Common sense would have us believe that the map of time resembles a diamond. One end is the moment of creation, and like the two particles that separate, come together, and annihilate each other, so goes the map of time. That theory would dictate that at a certain point, time comes back together - that is, it starts goes backwards until the moment of destruction (the big crunch). But this calculation proved to be wrong - the math just didn't work out. Hawking found that his model of the universe was not complex enough. He found that the map of time is elliptical, not pointy. Basically, that the big bang was not the point of creation, and in fact there IS no point of creation. Which begs the question - how can there be a creator, if there was no moment in time when creation came to be?
I encourage everyone to read A Brief History of Time, or see the film version that I just saw. Amazing stuff.
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