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The Creation of the World – According to Science

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The Creation of the World – According to Science The Creation of the World – According to Science Ram Brustein, Judy Kupferman Department of Physics, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel CAS, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Muenchen, 80333 Muenchen, Germany E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Abstract How was the world created? People have asked this ever since they could ask anything, and answers have come from all sides: from religion, tradition, philosophy, mysticism… and science. While this does not seem like a problem amenable to scientific measurement, it has led scientists to come up with fascinating ideas and observations: the Big Bang, the concept of inflation, the fact that most of the world is made up of dark matter and dark energy which we can not perceive, and more. Of course scientists cannot claim to know the definitive truth. But we can approach the question from a scientific viewpoint and see what we find out. How do we do that? First, we look to the data. Thanks to modern technology, we have much more information than did people of previous ages who asked the same question. Then we can use scientific methods and techniques to analyze the data, organize them in a coherent way and try and extract an answer. This process and its main findings will be described in the article. Introduction How was the world created? People have asked this ever since they could ask anything, and answers have come from all sides: from religion, tradition, philosophy, mysticism….and science. While this does not seem like a problem amenable to scientific measurement, it has led scientists to come up with fascinating ideas and observations: the Big Bang, the concept of cosmic inflation, the fact that most of the world is made up of dark matter and dark energy which we can not perceive, the fact that in every direction we observe the same very faint background radiation, and more. Of course scientists cannot claim to know the definitive truth. But we can approach the question from a scientific viewpoint and see what we find out. How do we do that? First, we look to the data. Thanks to modern technology, we have much more information than did people of previous ages who asked the same question. Then we can use scientific methods and techniques to analyze the data, organize them in a coherent way and try and extract an answer. The concept of creation takes on a particular and specific meaning in a scientific context, not to be confused with the concept of “creation out of nothing” that we find in metaphysics or in monotheist theologies. In its narrow and most commonly used sense, it means a specification of the state of the universe at some initial time, together with the laws of physics that have evolved this initial state up until today. The initial state may or may not be approximately classical or quantum and the laws of evolution may involve quantum mechanical equations or classical equations. Sometimes the specification of the initial state is only statistical, chosen from some ensemble of states with a prescribed probability. In this case, the idea of one initial state is replaced by the set of possible initial states and the probability distribution on it. Even when Stephen Hawking describes the creation of the Universe from “nothing” the process involves a specification of some initial conditions for the quantum wavefunction. So in order to discuss creation, we need to consider what may have been the initial conditions. Thus, the scientific meaning of “creation” is in effect a mathematical description in terms of equations and initial conditions of a “natural beginning” or an “emergence from something”. The universe today Since we wish to know whether the universe had a beginning and if so, how the universe began, it would help to construct a picture of the early universe – what was it like at the earliest possible times? We do this by looking at the universe today. We know a lot about the laws of nature today, and we have many indications that they have not changed in the course of the universe’s lifetime. So we can use them to try and construct a picture of the early universe. We can look at the universe today – its content and its size and its development – and try to extrapolate backward. Another complementary way of learning about the state of the universe at early times relies on Einstein’s theory of special relativity. This theory says that light from far away had to travel a long time. So the light we observe today from distant sources was emitted when the universe was much younger, and provides information about a time long ago. When we look at the world today, what do we find? We begin with what we can see. It turns out that we can't see much! Very little of the universe is actually visible matter, in fact only about five percent. This is made up of stars and gas (mostly hydrogen), all bound together by gravity into galaxies. The galaxies too are bound together, organized into clusters. Length Scales in the Universe A useful unit of distance is the parsec, which is the characteristic distance between stars. • 1pc=3.26 light years – about 30 billion kilometers. • Typical galaxy size: 10 kiloparsec, or 30,000 light years. • Distance between galaxies: 500 kpc, or about 1.5 million light years. • Distance to the galaxy cluster nearest us: 20 Mpc (million parsecs) • Size of the visible universe : 10Gpc (a gigaparsec is a billion parsecs), about 30 billion light years. Stars are spherical bodies made up mostly of hydrogen. A star emits light because it has a natural nuclear reactor inside, burning “on a low flame”. There are about a hundred billion stars in a galaxy, and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe – that is altogether 10 22 stars (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). The galaxies turn round and round, at the breathtaking speed of one complete rotation every hundred million years. In fact there are far more stars than grains of sand on the shore! We can work this out: • The average size of a grain of sand is 1 mm. so there are a billion grains of sand per square meter. • In one kilometer of sea shore there are about ten thousand square meters – that is about 10 13 grains of sand. • Israel has a thousand km. of seashore – 10 16 grains of sand! That is six orders of magnitude (a million times) smaller than the amount of stars in the sky. What else does the universe contain? If visible matter is only about 5% of the universe, what else is there? About a quarter of it is invisible, and is therefore called “dark matter,” within and surrounding the galaxies and the clusters. There is about six times more dark matter than visible matter! But how do we know it is there? Dark matter exerts the force of gravity on visible matter. We can see this in two ways. First, we measure the speed of rotation of stars and estimate from the velocity the strength of the force that is driving the rotation and from that the amount of matter that is exerting this force. Second, we “look” at galaxy clusters. An example of a famous galaxy cluster is the Perseus cluster. How can we map out the dark matter in a galaxy cluster? By charting the proper velocities of individual galaxies and stars, by looking at the temperature map, by analyzing gravitational lensing and by reconstructing collisions. We conclude that in galaxy clusters, too, there is about five times as much dark matter as visible matter. So far we have about 5% visible matter, and then another quarter which is dark matter – that leaves a large chunk of unidentified stuff. We call the remaining constituent of the universe “dark energy”, and it is spread uniformly throughout the entire universe. How do we know? That is a long and fascinating story, and it is not yet complete. That story should be told in another article and we will not attempt to tell it here. How does the universe behave? Now we have looked at the universe and described what it contains. The next question is: what is it doing? Most people have heard that it is expanding. People often ask: expanding into what? One popular explanation is that the universe is a sort of balloon. We draw stars on the surface of the balloon, and as we blow it up, we see the stars going farther apart. But the balloon expands into the surrounding air. The universe, however, has no surrounding air. It’s all there is. So into what does it expand? The correct answer is – into nothing. There is nobody outside the universe watching it grow bigger and bigger, as you might watch the balloon. Instead, the expansion can be understood as a recalibration of distance. This was Albert Einstein’s major discovery in 1907 that led to the general theory of relativity, completed 10 years later. Picture a drawing of a grid. Say the grid lines are a centimeter apart. Now draw two stars, each on a grid line and with one grid line between them. So the stars are about two centimeters apart. Now somebody waves a magic wand, and the grid lines change slowly until they are now a meter apart. The stars are still sitting on the same grid lines. They haven’t moved with relation to the grid, and they haven’t moved outwards into some outer space.
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