Atom: a Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth

FREE ATOM: A SINGLE OXYGEN ATOMS ODYSSEY FROM THE BIG BANG TO LIFE ON EARTH... AND BEYOND PDF

Many are called, but few are chosen. In the yearthe second Mongol invasion of Japan began, and ended. The invaders were defeated as much by the force of nature as by the Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond warriors, as the Mongol ships suffered grievous losses due to the Kamikaze, or "divine Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond. Those Mongol ships that survived the crossing of the Sea of Japan may have noticed the range of mountains that rise sharply from the water near the town of Toyama. Deep below these snowy peaks, where the sun never shines, indeed has never shone, may lie the secret of our existence, forged from a fiery wind, not necessarily divine, but more intense than any that has ever swept the Earth and as old as creation itself. In the deep Mozumi mine in the town of Kamioka lies an immense tank of pure, clear water, recycled daily to remove contaminants. Yet this device, located in a working mine, is maintained with the spotless cleanliness of an ultra-purified laboratory clean room. It has to be. If the scientists' attention wavers for even a second, they could miss an event that might not occur again in the lifetime of the detector, or the scientists. A single event could explain why we live in a universe of matter, and how long the universe as we know it may survive. Yet compared to the timescale of the process behind the event being searched for, even this stretch is just the blink of a cosmic eye. We are about to embark on a journey through space and time, traversing scales unimaginable even a generation ago. A tank of water located in the dark may seem an odd place to begin, but it is singularly appropriate on several grounds. Yet amid the 10 1 followed by 34 zeroes or so identical atoms in the tank is a single oxygen atom whose history is about to become of unique interest to us. We do not know which one. Nothing about its external appearance can give us any Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond to the processes that may be occurring deep inside. Thus we must be ready to treat each atom in the tank as an individual. The vast expanse of scale separating the huge Super-Kamiokande tank and the minute objects within it is a prelude to a voyage inward where we will leave all that is familiar. The possible sudden death of a single atom within the tank might hearken back to events at the beginning of time. But beginnings and endings are often inextricably tied. Indeed, each Sunday one can hear proclaimed loudly in churches across the land: "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Surely not. Our Earth had a beginning. Life had a beginning. And as sure as the sun shines, our world will end. Can we nevertheless accept this prayer as metaphor? Our world will end, but our world is merely one of a seemingly infinite number of worlds, surrounding an unfathomable number of stars located in each of an even larger number of galaxies. This state of affairs was suspected as early as when the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno penned his De l'infinito universo e mondi. He wrote:. There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating around their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system. We see only the suns because they are the largest bodies and are luminous, but their planets remain invisible to us because they are smaller and non-luminous. The countless worlds in the universe are no worse, and no less inhabited than our Earth. If, in the context of this grander set of possibilities, we contemplate eternity, what exactly is it that we hope will go on forever? Do we mean life? Are even our very atoms eternally perdurable? And so that is ultimately why our journey begins in the water in this dark mineshaft. If we explore deeply enough into even a drop of water, perhaps located in the Super- Kamiokande tank, we may eventually make out the shadows of creation, and the foreshadows of our future. The water is calm, clear, and colorless, but this apparent serenity is a sham. The dust speck will jump around mysteriously, as if alive. This phenomenon is called Brownian motion, after the Scottish botanist Robert Brown, who observed this motion in tiny pollen grains suspended in water under a microscope inand who at first thought that this exotic activity might signal the existence of some hidden life force on this scale. He soon realized that the random motions occurred for all small objects, inorganic as well as organic, and he thus discarded the notion that the phenomenon had anything to do with life at all. By the s, physicists were beginning to suggest that these movements were due to internal motions of the fluid itself. In his miracle year of activity,Albert Einstein proved, within months of his famous paper on relativity, that Brownian motion could be understood in terms of the motion of the individual bound groups of atoms making up molecules of water. Moreover, he showed that simple observations of Brownian motion allowed a direct determination of the number of molecules in a drop of water. For the first time, the reality of the previously hidden atomic world was beginning to make itself manifest. It is difficult today to fully appreciate how recent is the notion that atoms are real physical entities, and not mere mathematical or philosophical constructs. Even inscientists did not yet generally accept the view that atoms were real. In that year the renowned Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann took his own life, in despair over his self-perceived failure to convince his colleagues that the world of our experience could be determined by the random behavior of these "mathematical inventions. But atoms are real, and even at room temperature they live a more turbulent existence than a farmhouse in a tornado, continually pulled and pushed, moving at speeds of hundreds of kilometers an hour. At this rate a single atom could in principle travel in 1 second a distance 10 trillion times its own size. But real atoms in materials change their direction at least billion times each second due to collisions with their neighbors. Thus in the course of one minute, a single water molecule, containing two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms, might wander only one-thousandth of a meter from where it began, just as a drunk emerging from a bar might wander randomly back and forth all night without reaching the end of the block on which the bar is located. Imagine, then, the chained energy! A natural speed of meters per second is reduced to an effective speed of one-thousandth of Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond meter per minute! The immensity of the forces that ensure the stability of the world of our experience is something we rarely get to witness directly. In fact, it is usually reserved for occasions of great disaster. You can get some feeling for the impact that tiny atoms can have on one another by inflating a balloon and tying the end, then squeezing the balloon between your hands. Feel the pressure. What is holding your hands back, stopping them from touching? Most of the space inside the balloon is Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond, after all. The average distance between atoms in a gas at room temperature and room pressure is more than ten times their individual size. As the nineteenth-century Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, the greatest theoretical physicist of that time, first explained, the pressure you feel is the result of the continual bombardment of billions and billions of individual atoms in the air on the walls of the balloon. As the atoms bounce off the wall, they impart an impulse to the wall, impeding its natural tendency to contract. So when you feel the pressure, you Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond "feeling" the combined force of the random collisions of countless atoms against the walls of the balloon. Although this collective behavior of atoms is familiar, the world of our direct experience almost never involves the behavior of a single atom. But attempting to visualize the world from an atomic perspective opens up remarkable vistas, and gives us an opportunity to understand more deeply our own circumstances. The eighteenth-century British essayist Jonathan Swift recognized the inherent myopia governing our worldview when he penned Gulliver's Travels, which noted that the rituals and traditions of any society may seem perfectly rational for one who has grown up with them. Swift's Lilliputians fought wars over the requirement that eggs be broken from their smaller ends. From our vantage point, the requirement seems ridiculous. The same may be true for our view of the physical world, which is colored by a lifetime of sensory experience. And so, as we approach the beginning of our oxygen atom's journey forward, we have to stretch our minds in the tradition of Swift. The atoms getting thrashed today in a drop of water may have a hard life, but this can't even begin to compare to the difficulties associated with their birth. To imagine these moments, we must go back to a time before water existed in the universe. We must venture back to when things were vastly more violent, back to a time more than 10 billion years ago, and perhaps less than 1 billionth of a billionth of a second after the beginning of time itself. We must visualize the universe on a scale that is so small, words cannot capture it. Indeed, we must go back to a time when there were no atoms About Lawrence M. Lawrence M. He wrote: There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating around their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system. Krauss Lawrence M. ATOM: An Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earthand Beyond | PhysicsCentral

His story is about the universe told from the perspective of a single oxygen atom. A drink of water in the Rodin sculpture garden in Paris sets the stage for what becomes a toast to the beginnings of a universe that gave rise to this atom. What follows, he says is "the atom's remarkable and amazing journey that is fraught with accidents and catastrophes that nevertheless ultimately makes life possible, and which will continue after we are gone. By telling a story about oxygen, he wanted to show his readers how in a very real way "every atom in our body has been, and will be, in some amazing places," and that forefront of science has a real and immediate connection to the atoms in each of our bodies. His oxygen hero emerges in its present form billions of years after the earliest moments of the Big Bang, where quarks form into protons and neutrons that within minutes become the building blocks for helium and hydrogen -- the first elements. It takes several billion years before the oxygen atom ultimately forms, and during this time its ingredients experience cosmic odysseys as they travel through space in a still young, unsettled, and dynamic universe. Caught up in the collapse of gas to form a star, a carbon atom -- an early ancestor of oxygen -- is blown into space after a supernova explosion and finds its way to a comet. That comet seeds another planet with the elements for growing life, only to have another asteroid destroy the emerging ecosystem. Spewed into space again, the atom wanders throughout the Milky Way galaxy for eons before it once again finds itself swept up in an evolving star, merging with other partners, all of which have had their own adventures, to form the nucleus of an oxygen atom. After this star also explodes in a supernova, this atom ultimately makes its way to earth. We are all star children," exclaims Krauss. Jupiter's gravity played a role in flinging this oxygen protagonist to earth. The planet acted as a gatekeeper for space objects, either sending them outside the galaxy into the Oort Cloud beyond or as a barrage of matter to Earth or other inner planets in the solar system. Inside one of many comets that rained down upon the earth and helped to seed it with water to form oceans, the water molecule containing our oxygen atom reacted with carbon dioxide to form carbonic acid, falling in an early acid rain. Reacting with rock, it became trapped in limestone that settled in the ocean depths, where the shifting tectonic plates buried it for anotheryears. A volcanic eruption spewed it into the atmosphere as part of the carbon dioxide molecule. The cycle continued to repeat itself every million years as life forms began to evolve. At first oxygen was toxic to life, writes Krauss. He points out that if the earth had had an oxygen atmosphere early on, life would likely never have formed. It took billions of years Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond living organisms to be able to sustain life in an oxygen environment, and remarkably it is precisely these organisms that helped create the oxygen atmosphere we now breathe today. Early life forms of bacteria and slime-like organisms continue to exist even today deep within the oceans near heated earth vents and well-protected from such catastrophes that may have annihilated many species over the past four billion years of earth's history, including the loss of dinosaurs. These catastrophes also helped to give rise to new life forms that could co-exist in an oxygen-rich world. Similar, or worse, catastrophes will occur in the future, but our oxygen atom will live on and have other adventures, says the physicist. Whether life can survive Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond long is a question Krauss deals with in the last part of the book, which unveils a remarkable vision for the future. Krauss' work profoundly changed the way he now looks at the world. He hopes Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond book does the same for his readers. I hope it will capture people's imaginations in the same way," says Krauss. He is working with PBS and the BBC to develop a multi-part television series to follow this exciting adventure of an atom. Innovation spins spider web architecture into 3D imaging technology Purdue University Artificial intelligence reveals hundreds of millions of trees in the Sahara University of Copenhagen Children with chronic kidney disease have outsized health burden Michigan Medicine - University of Michigan Rethinking the link between cannabinoids and learning Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown View all latest news releases. Krauss book explores universe from oxygen atom's perspective | EurekAlert! Science News

Krauss won the Science Writing Award for this book. In this book Krauss discusses creating parts of an oxygen atomthe primary atoms of the Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond Bang. Then he follows it through the remaining history of the Universe. As time has been passing by, the atom was a part of a supernova and star duststar and planet systems, and, ultimately, a part of living cells. In his review Chris Lavers of The Guardian stated "Krauss weaves his cosmic story around the life of a single oxygen atomfrom the time it was just a twinkle in the universe's eye to the eventual death of its constituent particles. This denouement may come to pass in some distant part of the cosmos long after we have all passed away, but, if we are really lucky, it may just happen in an enormous tank of minutely scrutinised water currently located down a mineshaft in Japan. If and when it does, physicists the world over will jump up and down with excitement, because they will have learned something truly profound. Exactly what would take too long to explain, which is a relief, because I'm not at all sure I understand it. Read the book and try for yourself I am in a better position to judge Krauss's geology and biology, subjects he admits he had to learn from scratch before writing Atom. Not only has he mastered them, he often finds lyrical ways of explaining ideas in both fields. Indeed, the standard of writing in Atom is perhaps even higher than in his bestseller, The Physics of Star Trek. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Archived from the original on Retrieved May 26, Categories : Popular physics books non-fiction books Books by Lawrence M. Namespaces Article Atom: A Single Oxygen Atoms Odyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth. and Beyond. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. Svenska Edit links. Hardcover edition. Lawrence M. Science Writing Award Hiding in the Mirror.