The First Three Thresholds

FIRST PAGES the fi rst three thresholds 10 chr85611_ch01_010-031.indd 10 08/03/13 10:11 PM FIRST PAGES chapter 1 The Universe, Stars, and New Chemical Elements Seeing the Big Picture 13.7 to 4.6 Billion Years Ago What do we mean by “thresholds” in big history? And why are these turning points so important? Why does the appearance of the universe count as the fi rst threshold? What existed after that threshold that did not exist before? If you wanted to persuade someone that the big bang was a true story of the origin of the universe, what evidence would you give? Why does the emergence of stars count as the second threshold of increasing complexity? Why does the emergence of new elements in dying stars count as the third threshold of increasing complexity? 11 chr85611_ch01_010-031.indd 11 08/03/13 10:11 PM FIRST PAGES to “point a fi nger at the moon” in the Buddhist metaphor. Threshold 1: Big Bang Cosmology Notice how this phrase invites curiosity. It’s mysterious and the Origin of the Universe like the cosmos itself because, though we can understand a lot, we can never fully understand everything. That’s why The formation of the universe counts as our fi rst threshold people always use complex, poetic, and metaphorical lan- because, as far as we know, that moment saw the origin of guage when they try to explain things as mysterious as the everything around us. It is the beginning of the history of origin of the universe. everything (Threshold 1 Summary). Threshold 1 Summary GOLDILOCKS EMERGENT THRESHOLD INGREDIENTS c STRUCTURE c CONDITIONS = PROPERTIES BIG BANG: ORIGIN Energy, matter, space, Energy and matter within ? quantum fl uctuations Potential to create OF UNIVERSE time (everything in our a rapidly expanding within the multiverse ? everything around us. universe!). space–time continuum. So, our fi rst question is: how did history begin? This is Third, at the center of all these stories is a paradox, one of the deepest and the most important questions we the paradox of beginnings. All these stories begin by try- can possibly ask. Whatever society you live in, it is impor- ing to describe a time when what we know did not exist. tant to know the best available answers, whether or not you agree with them. FIGURE 1.1 Some cave paintings, such as this Australian painting of a “rainbow serpent” from Traditional Origin Stories Arnhem Land in northern Australia, hint at the For most of human history, accounts of the origin of ev- origin stories that all human societies seem to erything depended on little more than imaginative guesses, have told. or intuition, or what many experienced as “revelation,” the Source: Photo from Chris Scarre, ed., The Human Past: World Prehis- whispered words of divine beings or inner voices (Fig- tory and the Development of Human Societies (London: Thames & ures 1.1 and 1.2). Nevertheless, the question of how our Hudson, 2005), 273; photo by Tom Hill. universe came to exist is so important that people seem to have asked it in all human societies. And, having asked the question, humans came up with a huge variety of answers. Table 1.1 shows some brief extracts from the beginnings of a number of traditional origin stories. Note that despite their differences these accounts of the origin of everything share important features. First, note that from outside, the origin stories of other societies usually seem naive and simplistic. They also lack emotional power for those who did not grow up with them. But we should not forget that within the societies that told them, such stories could have great, almost magical power, like the story of the birth of Christ in Christian societies, or accounts of the Buddha’s nirvana or enlightenment within Buddhist societies. Second, all the extracts we have cited are poetic. When- ever humans try to describe the indescribable, they must resort to metaphors, stories, parables, to language that tries to convey more than can be conveyed in simple, direct prose. So it is usually a mistake to take origin stories too literally, and it is probable that those who told them did not always treat them as the literal truth. Origin stories are attempts to describe things that words never fully convey, 12 Chapter 1 The Universe, Stars, and New Chemical Elements chr85611_ch01_010-031.indd 12 08/03/13 10:12 PM FIRST PAGES FIGURE 1.2 God Grants Adam Life, Sistine Chapel, the Vatican. This famous artwork conveys a powerful origin story from the West. In it, God is depicted imparting life to Adam, that is, to humankind. the fi thresholds rst three the fi TABLE 1.1 Accounts of the Origin of Everything from Origin Stories From the Hopi of northeastern “The fi rst world was Tokpela [endless space]. But fi rst, they say, there was only the Creator, Taiowa. Arizona All else was endless space. There was no beginning and no end, no time, no shape, no life. Just an immeasurable void that had its beginning and end, time, shape, and life in the mind of Taiowa the Creator.” From southern China, one of “At fi rst there was nothing. Time passed and nothing became something. Time passed and something many versions of the story of split in two: the two were male and female. These two produced two more, and these two produced Pangu Pangu, the fi rst being, the Great Man, the Creator.” From another version of the “First there was the great cosmic egg. Inside the egg was Chaos, and fl oating in Chaos was Pangu, story of Pangu the Undeveloped, the divine Embryo. And Pangu burst out of the egg, four times larger than any man today, with an adze in his hand . with which he fashioned the world.” From the Indian cycle of hymns, “When neither Being nor Not-being was the Rig-Veda, which dates to Nor atmosphere, nor fi rmament, nor what is beyond. ca. 1200 BCE What did it encompass? Where? In whose protection? What was water, the deep unfathomable? Neither death nor immortality was there then, No sign of night or day. That One breathed, windless, by its own energy: Nought else existed then.” An Islamic origin story from “Before the beginning of time there was God. He was never born nor will He ever die. If He wishes a Somalia thing, He merely says to it: ‘Be!’ and it exists.” From the Old Testament, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. The Earth was without form and void, and Genesis 1:1 darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” Threshold 1: Big Bang Cosmology and the Origin of the Universe 13 chr85611_ch01_010-031.indd 13 08/03/13 10:12 PM FIRST PAGES Then they explain how something appeared out of noth- In medieval Europe, explana- Early Cosmologies ing. Many of them insist that a creator made the world, but tions of the origin of the universe always there is the nagging problem: How was the creator were based on two main traditions. The fi rst was Christian created? Or, to put it more generally, how did something theology. Christianity, like Judaism, is a monotheistic reli- come out of nothing gion. It posits the existence of a single, supreme God, and We will see that the account of origin contained within it explains the appearance of the universe as God’s work. modern big bang cosmology (the modern, scientifi c ex- By the third century ce, as Christianity spread within the planation of the origin of the universe) shares all these fea- Roman Empire, a number of Christian theologians at- tures. Viewed from outside, it may seem quite crazy. It also tempted to date the moment of creation. Their attempts has poetic or metaphorical qualities because even modern were “scientifi c” insofar as they were based on evidence science must sometimes use poetic language when it tries from the most authoritative written source they knew: the to describe the indescribable. The phrase “big bang,” for Bible. Using this source, a number of early Christian schol- example, is a metaphor; no modern cosmologist really ars tried to estimate the moment of creation by counting the thinks there was a “bang” when the universe appeared! generations recorded in the Old Testament. These estimates Finally, even modern cosmology (the study of the evo- suggested that God had made the Earth and the universe in lution of the universe) cannot solve the paradox of begin- about 4000 bce. That meant that the universe was just over nings. Although cosmologists are often keen to speculate 4,000 years old at the height of the Roman Empire. (See about what was there before the big bang, the truth is that the section “Shaping of Earth’s Surface” in Chapter 2 for at present we have no idea why a universe should have ap- more on this.) peared out of nothingness. We don’t even know if there was The second tradition on which medieval Christian cos- nothing there before the big bang. One speculation, which mologies were built was the work of the Roman-Egyptian was taken quite seriously until recently, is that there was a astronomer Ptolemy of Alexandria (ca. 90–168 ce). Ptol- previous universe that shriveled to nothing, then exploded emy was a geographer, mathematician, and astronomer. again to form a new universe (see Chapter 13). Another His greatest work on astronomy was written in Greek, speculation, which is now taken more seriously, is that but when Muslim scholars translated it into Arabic, they there is a vast multidimensional “multiverse” within which called it al-Majisti, or “The Great Work.” Medieval Chris- universes keep appearing, each with its own distinctive fea- tian translators referred to it as the Almagest, and in the tures, so that our universe may be one of countless billions Christian world it became the foundation for ideas about of universes.

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