Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries (33 page)

By now, one second of time has passed.

The universe has grown to a few light-years across, about the distance from the Sun to its closest neighboring stars. At a billion degrees, it’s still plenty hot—and still able to cook electrons, which, along with their positron counterparts, continue to pop in and out of existence. But in the ever-expanding, ever-cooling universe, their days (seconds, really) are numbered. What was true for hadrons is true for electrons: eventually only one electron in a billion survives. The rest get annihilated, together with their antimatter sidekicks the positrons, in a sea of photons.

Right about now, one electron for every proton has been “frozen” into existence. As the cosmos continues to cool—dropping below 100 million degrees—protons fuse with protons as well as with neutrons, forming atomic nuclei and hatching a universe in which 90 percent of these nuclei are hydrogen and 10 percent are helium, along with trace amounts of deuterium, tritium, and lithium.

Two minutes have now passed since the beginning.

Not for another 380,000 years does much happen to our particle soup. Throughout these millennia the temperature remains hot enough for electrons to roam free among the photons, batting them to and fro.

But all this freedom comes to an abrupt end when the temperature of the universe falls below 3,000 degrees Kelvin (about half the temperature of the Sun’s surface), and all the electrons combine with free nuclei. The marriage leaves behind a ubiquitous bath of visible-light photons, completing the formation of particles and atoms in the primordial universe.

As the universe continues to expand, its photons continue to lose energy, dropping from visible light to infrared to microwaves.

As we will soon discuss in more detail, everywhere astrophysicists look we find an indelible fingerprint of 2.73-degree microwave photons, whose pattern on the sky retains a memory of the distribution of matter just before atoms formed. From this we can deduce many things, including the age and shape of the universe. And although atoms are now part of daily life, Einstein’s equilibrious equation still has plenty of work to do—in particle accelerators, where matter-antimatter particle pairs are created routinely from energy fields; in the core of the Sun, where 4.4 million tons of matter are converted into energy every second; and in the cores of every other star.

It also manages to occupy itself near black holes, just outside their event horizons, where particle-antiparticle pairs can pop into existence at the expense of the black hole’s formidable gravitational energy. Stephen Hawking first described that process in 1975, showing that the mass of a black hole can slowly evaporate by this mechanism. In other words, black holes are not entirely black. Today the phenomenon is known as Hawking radiation and is a reminder of the continued fertility of
E=mc
²
.

But what happened before all this? What happened before the beginning?

Astrophysicists have no idea. Or, rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. Yet certain types of religious people tend to assert, with a tinge of smugness, that
something
must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime mover.

In the mind of such a person, that something is, of course, God.

But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify—a multiverse, for instance? Or what if the universe, like its particles, just popped into existence from nothing?

Such replies usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist on the ever-shifting frontier. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. And therein lies a fascinating dichotomy. “The universe always was” goes unrecognized as a legitimate answer to “What was around before the beginning?” But for many religious people, the answer “God always was” is the obvious and pleasing answer to “What was around before God?”

No matter who you are, engaging in the quest to discover where and how things began tends to induce emotional fervor—as if knowing the beginning bestows upon you some form of fellowship with, or perhaps governance over, all that comes later. So what is true for life itself is no less true for the universe: knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going.

A
t nearly every public lecture that I give on the universe, I try to reserve adequate time at the end for questions. The succession of subjects is predictable. First, the questions relate directly to the lecture. They next migrate to sexy astrophysical subjects such as black holes, quasars, and the big bang. If I have enough time left over to answer all questions, and if the talk is in America, the subject eventually reaches God. Typical questions include, “Do scientists believe in God?” “Do you believe in God?” “Do your studies in astrophysics make you more or less religious?”

Publishers have come to learn that there is a lot of money in God, especially when the author is a scientist and when the book title includes a direct juxtaposition of scientific and religious themes. Successful books include Robert Jastrow’s
God and the Astronomers
, Leon M. Lederman’s
The God Particle
, Frank J. Tipler’s
The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead,
and Paul Davies’s two works
God and the New Physics
and
The Mind of God
. Each author is either an accomplished physicist or astrophysicist and, while the books are not strictly religious, they encourage the reader to bring God into conversations about astrophysics. Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, a Darwinian pitbull and devout agnostic, joined the title parade with his work
Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life
. The financial success of these published works indicates that you get bonus dollars from the American public if you are a scientist who openly talks about God.

After the publication of
The Physics of Immortality
, which suggested whether the law of physics could allow you and your soul to exist long after you are gone from this world, Tipler’s book tour included many well-paid lectures to Protestant religious groups. This lucrative subindustry has further blossomed in recent years due to efforts made by the wealthy founder of the Templeton investment fund, Sir John Templeton, to find harmony and consilience between science and religion. In addition to sponsoring workshops and conferences on the subject, the Templeton Foundation seeks out widely published religion-friendly scientists to receive an annual award whose cash value exceeds that of the Nobel Prize.

Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion. As was thoroughly documented in the nineteenth-century tome
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
, by the historian and onetime president of Cornell University Andrew D. White, history reveals a long and combative relationship between religion and science, depending on who was in control of society at the time. The claims of science rely on experimental verification, while the claims of religions rely on faith. These are irreconcilable approaches to knowing, which ensures an eternity of debate wherever and whenever the two camps meet. Although just as in hostage negotiations, it’s probably best to keep both sides talking to each other.

The schism did not come about for want of earlier attempts to bring the two sides together. Great scientific minds, from Claudius Ptolemy of the second century to Isaac Newton of the seventeenth, invested their formidable intellects in attempts to deduce the nature of the universe from the statements and philosophies contained in religious writings. Indeed, by the time of his death, Newton had penned more words about God and religion than about the laws of physics, which included futile attempts to invoke the biblical chronology to understand and predict events in the natural world. Had any of these efforts succeeded, science and religion today might be largely indistinguishable.

The argument is simple. I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religious document. Indeed, I can make an even stronger statement. Whenever people have tried to make accurate predictions about the physical world using religious documents they have been famously wrong. By a prediction, I mean a precise statement about the untested behavior of objects or phenomena in the natural world, logged
before
the event takes place. When your model predicts something only after it has happened then you have instead made a “postdiction.” Postdictions are the backbone of most creation myths and, of course, of the
Just So Stories
of Rudyard Kipling, where explanations of everyday phenomena explain what is already known. In the business of science, however, a hundred postdictions are barely worth a single successful prediction.

TOPPING THE LIST
of religious predictions are the perennial claims about when the world will end, none of which have yet proved true. A harmless enough exercise. But other claims and predictions have actually stalled or reversed the progress of science. We find a leading example in the trial of Galileo (which gets my vote for the trial of the millennium) where he showed the universe to be fundamentally different from the dominant views of the Catholic Church. In all fairness to the Inquisition, however, an Earth-centered universe made lots of sense observationally. With a full complement of epicycles to explain the peculiar motions of the planets against the background stars, the time-honored, Earth-centered model had conflicted with no known observations. This remained true long after Copernicus introduced his Sun-centered model of the universe a century earlier. The Earth-centric model was also aligned with the teachings of the Catholic Church and prevailing interpretations of the Bible, wherein Earth is unambiguously created before the Sun and the Moon as described in the first several verses of Genesis. If you were created first, then you must be in the center of all motion. Where else could you be? Furthermore, the Sun and Moon themselves were also presumed to be smooth orbs. Why would a perfect, omniscient deity create anything else?

All this changed, of course, with the invention of the telescope and Galileo’s observations of the heavens. The new optical device revealed aspects of the cosmos that strongly conflicted with people’s conceptions of an Earth-centered, blemish-free, divine universe: The Moon’s surface was bumpy and rocky; the Sun’s surface had spots that moved across its surface; Jupiter had moons of its own that orbited Jupiter and not Earth; and Venus went through phases, just like the Moon. For his radical discoveries, which shook Christendom—and for being a pompous jerk about it—Galileo was put on trial, found guilty of heresy, and sentenced to house arrest. This was mild punishment when one considers what happened to the monk Giordano Bruno. A few decades earlier Bruno had been found guilty of heresy, and then burned at the stake, for suggesting that Earth may not be the only place in the universe that harbors life.

I do not mean to imply that competent scientists, soundly following the scientific method, have not also been famously wrong. They have. Most scientific claims made on the frontier will ultimately be disproved, due primarily to bad or incomplete data, and occasionally to blunder. But the scientific method, which allows for expeditions down intellectual dead ends, also promotes ideas, models, and predictive theories that can be spectacularly correct. No other enterprise in the history of human thought has been as successful at decoding the ways and means of the universe.

Science is occasionally accused of being a closed-minded or stubborn enterprise. Often people make such accusations when they see scientists swiftly discount astrology, the paranormal, Sasquatch sightings, and other areas of human interest that routinely fail double-blind tests or that possess a dearth of reliable evidence. But don’t be offended. Scientists apply this same level of skepticism to ordinary claims in the professional research journals. The standards are identical. Look what happened when the Utah chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed in a press conference to have created “cold” nuclear fusion on their laboratory table. Scientists acted swiftly and skeptically. Within days of the announcement it was clear that no one could replicate the cold fusion results that Pons and Fleischmann claimed. Their work was summarily dismissed. Similar plot lines unfold almost daily (minus the press conferences) for nearly every new scientific claim. The ones you hear about tend to be only those that could affect the economy.

WITH SCIENTISTS EXHIBITING
such strong levels of skepticism, some people may be surprised to learn that scientists heap their largest rewards and praises upon those who do, in fact, discover flaws in established paradigms. These same rewards also go to those who create new ways to understand the universe. Nearly all famous scientists, pick your favorite one, have been so praised in their own lifetimes. This path to success in one’s professional career is antithetical to almost every other human establishment—especially to religion.

None of this is to say that the world does not contain religious scientists. In a recent survey of religious beliefs among math and science professionals (Larson and Witham 1998), 65 percent of the mathematicians (the highest rate) declared themselves to be religious, as did 22 percent of the physicists and astronomers (the lowest rate). The national average among all scientists was around 40 percent and has remained largely unchanged over the past century. For reference, about 90 percent of the American public claims to be religious (among the highest in Western society), so either nonreligious people are drawn to science or studying science makes you less religious.

But what of those scientists who are religious? Successful researchers do not get their science from their religious beliefs. On the other hand, the methods of science currently have little or nothing to contribute to ethics, inspiration, morals, beauty, love, hate, or aesthetics. These are vital elements of civilized life and are central to the concerns of nearly every religion. What it all means is that for many scientists there is no conflict of interest.

As we will soon see in detail, when scientists do talk about God, they typically invoke him at the boundaries of knowledge where we should be most humble and where our sense of wonder is greatest.

Can one grow tired of wonderment?

In the thirteenth century, Alfonso the Wise (Alfonso X), the king of Spain, who also happened to be an accomplished academician, was frustrated by the complexity of Ptolemy’s epicycles accounting for the geocentric universe. Being less humble than others on the frontier, Alfonso once mused, “Had I been around at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe” (Carlyle 2004, Book II, Chapter VII).

In full agreement with King Alfonso’s frustrations with the universe, Albert Einstein noted in a letter to a colleague, “If God created the world, his primary worry was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us” (1954). When Einstein could not figure out how or why a deterministic universe could require the probabilistic formalisms of quantum mechanics, he mused, “It is hard to sneak a look at God’s cards. But that He would choose to play dice with the world…is something that I cannot believe for a single moment” (Frank 2002, p. 208). When an experimental result was shown to Einstein that, if correct, would have disproved his new theory of gravity Einstein commented, “The Lord is subtle, but malicious He is not” (Frank 2002, p. 285). The Danish physicist Niels Bohr, a contemporary of Einstein, heard one too many of Einstein’s God-remarks and declared that Einstein should stop telling God what to do! (Gleick 1999)

Today, you hear the occasional astrophysicist (maybe one in a hundred) publicly invoke God when asked where did all our laws of physics come from or what was around before the big bang. As we have come to anticipate, these questions comprise the modern frontier of cosmic discovery and, at the moment, they transcend the answers our available data and theories can supply. Some promising ideas, such as inflationary cosmology and string theory, already exist. These could ultimately provide the answers to those questions, further pushing back our boundary of awe.

My personal views are entirely pragmatic and partly resonate with those of Galileo who, during his trial, is credited with saying, “The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go” (Drake 1957, p. 186). Galileo further noted, in a 1615 letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, “In my mind God wrote two books. The first book is the Bible, where humans can find the answers to their questions on values and morals. The second book of God is the book of nature, which allows humans to use observation and experiment to answer our own questions about the universe” (Drake 1957, p. 173).

I simply go with what works. And what works is the healthy skepticism embodied in scientific method. Believe me, if the Bible had ever been shown to be a rich source of scientific answers and understanding, we would be mining it daily for cosmic discovery. Yet my vocabulary of scientific inspiration strongly overlaps with that of religious enthusiasts. I, like others, am humbled in the presence of the objects and phenomena of our universe. And I go misty with admiration for its splendor. But I do so knowing and accepting that if I propose a God who graces our valley of unknowns, the day may come, empowered by the advance of science, when no more valleys remain.