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In the media and on the political stage, it is popular to posit science as having all the answers. A few mass-appeal-scientists do put considerable effort into promoting this myth. Watch Discovery Channel. Much of their speculation is leveled against religion, hoping, for reasons that baffle me, to dispel any notion of the Divine. However, physicists, cosmologists, and biologists know full well that they do not have all the answers and freely admit this among themselves.
There are a great many fundamental unknowns in science.
You happen to be living in a special period of time in which one of the greatest and most mysterious scientific discoveries in the entire history of mankind has been made.
It happens thus…
This week, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics went to three scientists; Saul Perimutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, CA), Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD), and Brian Schmidt from the Australian National University. (Make sure you get this right at the office party. You don’t want to look stupid. Search for a conversation in which to interject this news, between football and Viagra is a good candidate, and then make sure that you call it Johns (correct) not John (incorrect) Hopkins. There’s no apostrophe.) All three physicist will share a prize of about $1.4M.
So, what did they do?
You have to start with a little background. (The details are in my next book, currently in writing, but I’ll give you a preview of it here.)
In 1916, Albert Einstein published what is now called the General Theory of Relativity. In this theory, Einstein had an equation. (Really, it was sixteen coupled equations, but mathematically they can be convolved to look like one general solution. I was temped to include the equation here, to show you what it looked like, but a publisher once cautioned that if you show even one equation, all the readers die and no one will read your book. So, for those who care nothing about the sanctity of life, click here.) Einstein’s equation showed that the universe was expanding.
Uncharacteristically, Einstein lost faith in that part of his theory and introduced a “cosmological constant” (read: fudge factor). He, and most physicists of his day thought that the universe was static, that all things were in equilibrium and nothing was changing (on a macro scale). Well, it was not long before astronomer Edwin Hubble (the man the Space Telescope is named after) and others collected data that the universe was expanding. Einstein abandoned his cosmological constant in 1932 calling it “the biggest blunder of my life.” He acknowledged, unequivocally, that the universe was expanding. What it means is all the stars (like our Sun) are moving away from all the other stars. By the 1950’s this led to the theory of the Big Bang. All data now showed that there was a single point in time, perhaps in space, where the universe began.
Every scientist now believes in the Big Bang. (The theory was widely rejected at first because Georges LeMatire, a Belgium priest and considerable mathematician, first calculated that the universe had a beginning. It took more than a decade for science to accept this, in large part because it sounded “too religious” seeing as how it came from a priest and reeked of creation.)
So, if you were in school in the 1960’s you would have been taught that the universe began with a Big Bang some 14 billion years ago (give or take a billion). The real question at that time was would the universe keep expanding indefinitely or was there enough mass to attract it all back together, to collide again and maybe even produce another Big Bang? The data showed that the mass of the universe was just at that critical point, that it could go either way. No one could say.
(We now know that even if it attracted back together, there could not be another Big Bang. Sorry, I cannot diverge from this current story.)
American Poet Robert Frost (1864-1963) captured the opposing views as early as 1923 when he wrote Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Well, by the early 1980’s it became clear that all was not so clear. When cosmologists calculated the movement of stars and galaxies, they discovered something absolutely astounding. Without doubt, there was “mass” in the universe, considerable mass, that we could not see or detect by any means except by its gravitational attraction to mass we can see. This possibility had been postulated as early as the 1930’s, but now we had to come to grips with its true existence. This un-seeable and otherwise undetectable mass was given the name “dark matter.” To make it even more interesting, there was not just a tiny bit of it here and there, it existed all over the universe and in vast, vast quantities.
(Strike one for the religious leaders who slept through this opportunity.)
So, in 1987, our just recently named Nobel physicists began to search for distant stars to calculate the rate at which the universe was slowing down, mostly due to all this dark matter that clearly should be slowing it down and bringing it all back together. The world was probably going to end in “fire” (another Big Bang of sorts). They worked and worked, separately, with each thinking the other was researching down the wrong path.
Eleven years later, 1998, the three independently published the same conclusion. The data were clear and unambiguous. The results were so astounding that they were awarded the Nobel Prize last week for this work. (The scientific community waits many years before awarding the Nobel Prize to make sure the discovery is correct and documented by others.) You ask, “What was their discovery that was thus worthy of the coveted Nobel and so astounding that it is epochal?”
They discovered that the universe is not slowing down in its expansion, nor is it stationary and standing still. No, it is not slowing down, it is expanding, true. But, it is accelerating in its expansion, and at an unbelievable rate.
“What? Who asked for that,” they questioned?
Too bad Robert Frost was already dead. He could have whispered, “Ice.”
What is causing this acceleration? Well, after years of data collection and research it is apparent that there is some energy out in space, yet undetected except by the observed accelerated expansion, some mass-energy that is accelerating the expansion of the entire universe. Something is pushing the matter out farther and faster, not attracting it. Something is repelling gravity. It is some type of mass, or energy, (mass-energy) that is gravitationally repulsive, not gravitationally attractive like all the other mass we know. It is called “dark energy” as you would have guessed.
(Strike two for the religious folks who watched this one go right over the plate.)
The award of the Nobel Prize cinches it. It is accepted, almost unequivocally, by scientists, that the universe is accelerating in its expansion. To top it all off, the data show that as much as 75% of the entire mass-energy in the universe is dark energy, and 21% is dark matter.
That means that the universe we see and feel, all the universe we love and have come to know, represents only about 4% of all the stuff that’s out there, the 96% we cannot see and feel or detect, yet, by any means except it’s gravity, its presence.
There’s something else out there. It’s gigantic, and it’s everywhere, and it’s pushing the universe apart to be there.
What is all this other stuff? What is it doing out there, where is it going, and why is it such a hurry to get there?
(Ask yourself, too, “Where did all the space come from that the universe is accelerating into?”)
Will the religious leaders stand there for the strike out?
And, you thought Global Warming was important.