COSMOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
By
Karl H. Puechl
January 14, 1990
You'll note that I listed on the blackboard, the names of some men you may have heard of:
Newton ..... Darwin ..... Maxwell
Planck .....Einstein ----- Quantum Theory; Special and General Relativity Theories
Bohr .....Heisenberg --- Quantum Theory; Uncertainty Principle
Schrödinger ..... Dirac-------- Quantum Theory; Theory of the Electron (Anti-Matter)
Pauli--------Exclusion Principle
The music you heard, was the "Procession of Die Meistersinger" by Wagner; to sort of indicate that these men were entering the room. I'll discuss the works of these men in greater detail later on; for now, suffice it to say that they were all theoretical physicists except for Darwin. Quite obviously, I included him because the title of my talk is "Cosmology and Evolution"; also, I had to include only one biologist because if one truly understands cosmology, evolution is a natural consequence that requires little elaboration. Darwin and Maxwell made their contributions prior to 1900 while the rest came later. These made their contributions between 1900 and 1928, but their theories were not experimentally substantiated until about 1935.
On the other board, I wrote numbers with lots of zero's after them to show that the topic we are about to discuss deals with really large numbers; numbers that are much larger than we generally run across.
There are about 100,000,000,000 = 1 x 1011 stars in our galaxy.
There are about 100,000,000,000 = 1 x 1011galaxies in our universe.
There are 6.02 x 1023 atoms/mole (in a small amount of material that we can readily see or weigh).
There are about 1080 particles in the region of the universe that we see.
The speed of light is 186,000 = 1.86 x 105 miles/second.
The age of the universe is about 15,000,000,000 = 1.5 x 1010 years.
If you believe the "Big Bang" theory, which you've probably heard of, and assume that the universe has been expanding at the speed of light over all these years, you can come up with the maximum possible size of the universe by doing some simple multiplication:
Radius of universe, in miles, is 1.86 x 105 miles/sec x 3600 sec/hr x 24 hr/day x 365 days/year x 1.5 x 1010 years. I'll let you do the multiplication, if you're interested in the answer.
I wrote some of the numbers with lots of zeros and also in scientific short-hand. The scientific short-hand allows one to write large numbers in very little space and, also, it avoids confusion. The exponent on the 10 in scientific shorthand simply tells you how many places you have to move the decimal point (move it to the right if the exponent is positive and to the left if it's negative). The scientific notation avoids confusion because words don't always have the same meaning in different parts of the world. For example, in the U. S., we say that there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. In England, they would say there are a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy; in Germany, they would say there are a hundred milliarden stars in our galaxy. The semantics problem arises because we define a billion as being a thousand million (1 with 9 zeroes after it) while the Europeans define a billion as being a million million (1 with 12 zeroes after it).
Now I'll let you contemplate the meaning of the these large numbers and the wondrousness of our universe by playing a part of the "Ode to Joy" taken from Beethoven's ninth symphony, "The Choral" symphony.
I'm playing music this morning, interspersed with my talk, because there is a strong relationship between music and theoretical physics, or perhaps better stated, between music and our understanding of the universe at the time the music was written. This Beethoven symphony was written when "God was in his heaven and all was right with the world". Similar sentiments are expressed in Handel's Messiah. Up until the late 1800's the physicists thought that they knew all there was to know and that the universe behaved in a relatively simple and easily predictable manner as hypothesized by Newton and Maxwell; Newton established precise theories of gravity and mechanics, while Maxwell showed that electricity, magnetism and light are all part of the same phenomenon and that their behavior can also be readily predicted.
Then just before the turn of the century, experimental physicists made measurements with improved instruments and they generated data that could not be explained by the prevailing theories; also by then, the musicians and artists came to the realization that the universe, or life, could not be so nicely packaged; and as a consequence the picture of an all-knowing god or gods ruling the universe became cloudy. In this atmosphere, Wagner wrote "Götterdämmerung", the "Twilight of the Gods". In this music, he relegated the gods to fantasy; seemingly beautiful and powerful, but pure fantasy divorced from reality. Appropriately, before going on with my talk, I'll play Wagner's "The Ride of the Walküre".
Now before getting into the business of cosmology and evolution, I'm going to give a seemingly unrelated introduction. This cosmology bit can get mighty complicated, so I'm trying to sneak up on it. I'm going to read an article that recently appeared on the editorial page of the LA Times. The article was written by Michael Schrage, who I presume is one of the Times editorial writers since no biographical sketch was provided. The title of the article is "Why Beauty of Scientific Models is Often Only Skin Deep". Here goes:
"Scientific American is fine if you want the conventional wisdoms about global warming and earthquake prediction. But if you want an intuitive appreciation of how science is really done these days, pick up a copy of Vogue.
"You'll find a host of gorgeous models: blondes, brunettes and redheads who are alternately mysterious, provocative and demure. A few look good in anything, others look best in next to nothing. With the right makeup, lighting and layout, the ordinary model becomes an irresistibly alluring creature. The best of them command your attention, convey the right sensibility and sell the concept.
"It's exactly the same with scientists: it's just that their models are built differently.
"Unfortunately, scientific controversies increasingly revolve around the relative sexiness of the models. Take global warming, please. Those media-hyped models do many things but they don't explain what's going on in the atmosphere. Our understanding of fundamental forces is poor, our data incomplete. What these models really are is an attempt to explain what we 'think' is going on. It's not hard science. They aren't descriptions, they're conjectures. Some of these conjectures merit serious attention. But to treat them as models of reality, as a few vocal scientists, journalists and politicians do, is dishonest and reeks of political or personal agendas.
"Too many scientists have fallen in love with their models. The result is that science in the public policy arena today looks less like an objectively rigorous discipline than a sleazy beauty contest. The models are being used to bludgeon policy-makers into completely rewriting regulations on everything from energy to agriculture. Conversely, politicians are grasping these models to push their platforms.
" 'It's become a circus atmosphere,' says Richard Linzden, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist and a critic of several models that purport to show that the Earth is heating up. 'One of the odd things I've discovered with these models is that, if you look at these groups, you have one person who is the administrator--and he is usually the one making the loudest proclamations. Then you have the people who actually run the model and they make much more sober and balanced remarks when they're talking at workshops.'
"What's happening is alchemy of the worst kind: When science mixes with politics, it becomes political science. Scientists trade objectivity for advocacy. 'When one makes an intellectual commitment to a position, that makes it important to prove one is right,' says James Schlesinger, the former energy and defense secretary noted for his skill at wielding technical models for political effect.
" 'There is no question that politics must put you on a limb,' says MIT's Linzden. 'What was previously fun and games suddenly forces you to exaggerate because you know that others are.'
"The bottom line is that too many scientists are squandering their credibility to peddle equations that predict the future less reliably than a coin toss. As Harvard's Harvey Brooks, widely regarded as the dean of technology policy analysis, puts it, 'The more clear-cut the answer gets, the more dishonest the scientist is usually being.' In other words, we're coming to the point where the integrity of the model is less important than the integrity of the scientist. That's not science, it's lobbying.
"It's not that scientists aren't sincere about the legitimacy of their models--it's that most of these models are only good as models; they're too brittle and flimsy to build a meaningful policy around. The techno-gamesmanship that goes on in the media and Congress is as much a byproduct of ignorance as cynical manipulation. People think that these models actually say something important; in practice, they're like an infant struggling to mouth a sentence.
" 'Technically speaking,' says Schlesinger, '[scientific modelers] should be saying that their models aren't only imprecise--but they have no way of knowing how much in error they may be.'
"The same holds true for earthquake prediction. Seismologists do a superb job of understanding the G-forces that shock waves unleash; they do a miserable job of predictive modeling for how the Earth moves. Why? Because, as Oct. 17 confirmed, our understanding of the labyrinth of faults isn't good enough. There is a universe of difference between modeling systems we understand--such as telephone networks and silicon chips--and modeling systems we think we understand, such as the atmosphere, Earth and stock market. It's the difference between cause and effect.
"Let me put it another way. If scientists could reliably model the future, they wouldn't need to keep asking for money--they'd be rolling in dough.
"The appropriate role of scientific models isn't to define the public debate--which is what they're doing now--but to expand the vocabulary of that debate. These models are adjectives and adverbs, not subjects and verbs. Treat models for what they are; a point of view, not a trend about to become our destiny.
"Scientists who testify before Congress and talk to the media should have the guts to admit what they don't know instead of spouting inanities such as 'the polar ice caps may or may not melt half an inch by 1999.' It's not a sin to passionately defend the quality of one's work; but it is no virtue to pimp models for policy purposes.
"Harry Truman once wished for 'one-handed scientists'--scientists who wouldn't always say 'On one hand ... but on the other hand'--but there's a difference between equivocation and context. I'm not worried about finding scientists with strong opinions and even stronger data. I'm worried about finding scientists who can put those strengths in contexts that the public and policy-makers can use. Scientific models don't exist to persuade--they exist to enhance understanding.
"While I strongly question the multiple models surrounding the greenhouse effect, I think it's beyond dispute that there is a rising buildup of gases in the atmosphere. Intuition suggests that this probably isn't a good thing. Common sense suggests that this phenomenon merits careful study. People who care about our planet should welcome all the ideas, data and models we can generate to figure out what's going on. People who care about the truth shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge that it takes a lot of mistakes to get there."
Usually, I don't like to read a complete article that is so long, but Schrage expresses my views so precisely that I couldn't resist the temptation. Now you might very well ask, "How can a layman judge whether a particular model has any validity?" There is no simple answer to this question; the best I can offer is: If the model is described with a picturesque name, the modeler probably spent more time trying to think up the name then he spent on developing and checking the validity of his model.
This discussion of the validity of models leads me a little closer to the subject of cosmology, but only slightly closer. It leads me to some personal comments about a much-quoted scientist, Carl Sagan. Based on some of the comments I made in the past, I suspect that some of you believe that I have a low regard for Carl Sagan; this is not exactly true. I agree most heartily with most things that Carl Sagan has written or has talked about on TV; for example, I think that his COSMOS series of talks was great. It is only recently that I think that Sagan has gone off the deep end. Let me explain. If I accept someone's model of some phenomenon and I espouse it here in the Fellowship as if it were a verified truth, even if I were completely in error, there would be little consequence. However, this is not true with regard to Carl Sagan. Because of his past successes, he has earned a large audience and following. This success carries with it a degree of responsibility which, I feel, has not been appreciated by Sagan. When he accepted a half-baked model named "Nuclear Winter", he lost my respect. There is no question in anyone's mind that the release of even a small fraction of the 50,000 nuclear warheads held at-the-ready by the superpowers could destroy the human race; there is no need for a respected scientist to accept and pimp a model whose proof cannot be verified in order for him to become an advocate for nuclear disarmament.
This commentary on Carl Sagan leads me to this book by the British physicist, Stephen Hawking entitled, "A Brief History of Time", which has the secondary title, "From the Big Bang to Black Holes". My son, Bob, gave me this book for Christmas, which was most opportune since I had, in early December, volunteered to give this talk on cosmology and evolution. Reading this gave me a chance to see how my relatively old theory about cosmology compares to the up-to-date thinking (or models, if you will) that is presented by Hawking. For those of you who are interested, later on after a refreshment break, I'd like to read about a half-hour's worth of excerpts from this book. I think you'll find these excerpts interesting when compared to what I will have said on the subject, if I ever get to it. I conjecture that Hawking's original manuscript had the title, "The Search for God", but that this was unacceptable to his publisher. He then changed the title, but without a major revision of the text he felt uncomfortable and as a solution he ask Carl Sagan to write a short introduction. I'll now quote from this Introduction:
"This is also a book about God...or perhaps about the absence of God. The word God fills these pages. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein's famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the universe. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do."
Having completed my introduction, let me now play another piece of music; this is a concert-piece for 10 instruments written by Karlheinz Stockhausen entitled, "Kontra-Punkte". By listening to this "New Music", and this is the new music rather than Rock and Roll, you'll be better able to appreciate the modern physics that I will touch upon in my presentation. In this music, there is no intimation of a god, no clear signs or any order, yet an eerie sort of beauty that seems to come about by "chance" and by integrating over the entire piece rather than by concentrating on small segments.
Okay, now let's get back to these names on the blackboard. The four scientists that have something written after their names contributed most to our conjectures about the origins of the universe. Einstein postulated that mass could be converted into energy and vice versa, or simply put, that mass is a form of energy. He also proposed that a precise measure of time is a local phenomenon and that our universe should be looked at as being a four-dimensional universe wherein there are 3 spacial dimensions with the 4th dimension being time. He also proposed that mass affects space; that space becomes curved near a body of matter with the curvature becoming greater nearer more weighty entities. Einstein's hypotheses are difficult to describe or explain so I'll not touch upon them any further; what I did say is sufficient to hint that the universe may not be as simple as many of you have envisioned. After Einstein, we soon get to Werner Heisenberg who proposed the uncertainty principle. This principle states that an inherent characteristic of nature is that we can never know precisely
both the position and velocity of any particle; we can only know the product of these two quantities within certain very small, but yet, finite limits. Somewhat later, Paul Dirac made another startling proposal which said that there exist negative energy states as well as positive energy states; this meant that energy, a ray of light for example, could be converted to a real particle such as an electron and an associated anti-particle. Further, that if matter and anti-matter ever met, they would annihilate each other. This meant that the universe might contain both types of matter, separated from each other.
Dirac's hypothesis gave science-fiction writers a field day. Just think of what would happen if a "real" Adonis ever kissed an anti-matter Athena? Ending up with pertinent theories, we come to Wolfgang Pauli who came up with the idea of the exclusion principle. Pauli wondered why things didn't collapse upon themselves because he noted that when he added up the sizes of the different elementary particles that make up any piece of matter, or a human being for that matter, the total size always come up to be much, much less than the actual size. Everything is not very densely packed. Accordingly, Pauli postulated that two identical particles having the same associated energy cannot be located at the same place at the same time, or using a term I used before, two particles being near each other cannot occupy the same energy state. As I said previously, these were extremely novel proposals but they were all verified by appropriate measurements by 1935.
By the time I got into graduate school, these theories were almost universally accepted, and thinking about them, I concluded that they were sufficient to come up with a cosmological theory. Since the then-current cosmological models did not agree with my simple-minded picture as to how the universe got going, I decided that many more measurements would have to be taken before a hard-science model could be developed. Accordingly, I lost interest in cosmology except for doing a little reading now and then to see whether recent measurements and the prevailing thought were progressing towards my simple picture. In reading Hawking's book, I was pleasantly surprised to see how closely current theories agree with my old conjectures; however, we do not yet agree completely. This brings me to another LA times article that I'd like to read, at least the beginning of it. This appeared as a news item in the January 12 issue. The title is " 'Attractor' Theory Gains Adherents" "THE UNIVERSE: Astronomers say they have proved the existence of a mysterious gravitational force tugging at our galaxy. Controversy remains, but other scientists say they also found evidence of the phenomenon." "Scientists said Thursday they have proved that a mysterious gravitational field is forcing our galaxy to streak toward a distant point in the southern sky at nearly 400 miles per second.
"The existence of the 'Great Attractor' was first postulated in 1987 by astronomers Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Institution and Sandra Faber of UC Santa Cruz, along with five colleagues who have been branded the "Seven Samurai" because of their slashing attack on conventional theory."
As stated in the article, this attractive force is contrary to the picture of the universe given by conventional theory, and that provided in Hawking's book, but as you'll see from my description, it does not contradict the picture that is given by my cosmological conjectures.
Now let's really get on with the show. Let me draw a finite-sized line on the blackboard; that is, a line that has two definite ends. I now ask that you find the center of this line segment. Obviously, that is an easy task to accomplish: Either use a ruler to find the center, or if given a compass, do what we all did in geometry class in high school, put the needle of the compass on one end and draw an arc, then on the other end and do the same thing; then draw a line through the 2 intersections of the 2 arcs. Neat, now let's put some ticks, uniformly spaced, on each side of this midpoint. Now if I say that instead of having a line that is a few inches long, I have a line that extends 100 miles in both directions, can you still find the midpoint? Obviously, the answer is yes. You might need some different instruments and, maybe, a car with a good odometer but you could, with some effort, find a midpoint. Now I ask a hypothetical question. Suppose that I could extend the line in one direction so that it has no end; that is, if I walked the tick-marks, every time I thought that I was getting to the end, I'd find more tick-marks. Now could you find the midpoint of this kind of line? I see most of you shaking your heads, the answer is "no". Also, it is "no" if I were to extend the line beyond-end in both directions. Mathematicians call a line of this magnitude as being "countably infinite"; we can't count that high but if we started to count we could at least make ourselves believe that we might eventually come to an end. Now let me hit you with an interesting thought. I draw a line through space, using the exhaust of 2 space-ships going in opposite directions if you need a concrete example, a line that is drawn by two spaceships each of which moves 1 million miles in opposing directions. Obviously the earth will be the midpoint of this line. Now I say that somehow I will extend these lines so that they go on forever; as noted before, we will not be able to define or find a midpoint. What this example illustrates is that something that happens a great distance from us can affect how we perceive things locally. In the illustration, going from a finite line to infinity happened more than a million miles away yet what happened that far out determined whether or not we could find a midpoint of a line!
Now to continue this exercise in mathematics just a bit further, lets look at two adjacent ticks on the finite line that I drew on the board. Let's say that we are looking at this line through a microscope and that these ticks are very close together. Let's say that they are as close together as you want to make them. Interestingly, no matter how close together you name any two numbers, there will be an infinite number of numbers between the two given numbers. Let's do this with decimals. Let's say that you designate one of the ticks as being the number 2.0000001 and the other as 2.0000002. Obviously I can write an infinite number of digits after the 1 in the first number and never reach the second number; even 2.000000199999999999999999 does not equal 2.0000002. So you see that between any 2 numbers that anyone can name there exist an infinite number of numbers! This is beyond being countably infinite. We wouldn't even know how to start counting such an infinite number of infinite numbers.
Now let me ask a seemingly silly question. If the universe had started out as being "nothing" how big would this nothingness have been? To put a boundary on "nothingness" seems sort of silly. If I were asked the question, I would impose the "Principle of Minimum Astonishment" and say that the nothingness would pervade everywhere, that since nobody even told me how many dimensions this nothingness had, it would probably be infinite of the uncountable variety. Incidentally, the Principle of
Minimum Astonishment is most useful when performing intuitive physics. Another similar useful principle is the "Principle of Economy" also known as "Occam's Razor". This principle says: in a theory, never include anything that cannot be observed. How was the universe created? It was created by God. This is not a valid theory because God cannot be observed and the postulate also leads to another unanswerable question: How was God created?
Now let's get away from mathematics and go to something a bit more concrete---radioactivity. Radium is a radioactive material that is found in nature. If one had one atom of radium and surrounded it with Geiger counters or some other radiation detectors and waited to see when and if the atom decayed, the decay might take place shortly or one could wait millions of years before noticing any change. Most likely, an observer of one such atom would watch for a few years and then give up, arriving at the conclusion that radium is a stable element. On the other hand, if this investigator had on hand a measurable quantity of radium, say about half a pound, which as stated on the blackboard would contain about 10 to the 24th atoms, he would measure 10 to the 10th alpha particles (signs of radioactive decay) coming off every second. From these measurements he would conclude that radium was highly radioactive; that half of all the atoms which he had on hand would decay to some other element within 1620 years (defined as its half-life). This gets us to an interesting consequence of the uncertainty principle. If we have a large number of radioactive atoms, we can predict how many will decay in a specific amount of time; but if given only one or a few atoms, we cannot even venture a guess as to when these might decay. Physicists like to look at this as the Mexican jumping bean phenomenon. Suppose that we place a number of jumping beans in the bottom of a beaker and let's assume that these particular beans jump much more frequently than the Mexican variety but that with each jump they can go no higher than a small way up the beaker. A physicist familiar with quantum mechanics would not be surprised to someday find a bean outside of the beaker. He would explain this highly improbable occurrence by saying that most of the beans could have jumped at about the same time and that they could have collided in such a way that the energy that each one had was imparted to a particular bean; this bean could then have had enough energy to spring to the top of the beaker while the other beans, having zero velocity after the collision, simply dropped back to the bottom of the beaker under the force of gravity. With this picture, we see that a highly improbable event can be possible. However, as in the description of radioactivity, it is impossible to predict which bean will be the lucky one that benefits from the multiple impacts. Another similar phenomenon that can be more readily observed is the evaporation of water before the bulk of the water reaches the boiling point. If one heats a pot of water on a stove, one sees steam (molecules of water) coming off the surface before the water starts to bubble. Even though the average water molecule has not reached the boiling temperature; that is, does not have the energy required to overcome the surface tension, multiple collisions among molecules in the bulk of the water can impart sufficient energy to one molecule to make it possible for it to evaporate (to overcome the surface tension). Of course, we cannot, with the naked eye, see one molecule, but the same picture holds for groups of molecules which we can see as steam. Again, it is not possible for us to predict which molecule or molecules will be able to evaporate before the total mass reaches the boiling point. In situations that have a low probability of occurring, we can predict the outcome of a large number of events but it is impossible to even conjecture about the outcome of one or a few events.
Probability theory has interesting day-to-day aspects since almost all of us intuitively tend to come up with the wrong answer whenever probabilities are involved. Let's consider a terrorist who is particularly annoyed with a certain church. He knows that this church has a choir that rehearses every week at the same time and that there are 10 members in the choir, who are all reasonably conscientious and dependable. He figures that each choir member may have other commitments 2 or 3 times per year, and since he wants maximum effect in planting his bomb, he asks himself what is the probability that on the particular night when he intends to plant his bomb no one will show up for choir practice? Without doing the necessary arithmetic, he correctly concludes that this might occur somewhere between once every 2 years and once every 20 years. Since there are 50 rehearsals each year, this means that he's concluded the probability of no one showing up as being between 1 chance in 100 (once every 2 years) and 1 chance in 1000 (once every 20 years). Since these probabilities seem rather low to him, he goes ahead and plants the bomb, feeling reasonably confident that the explosion will kill some choir members. Now it so happens that the bomb goes off and no one showed up for choir practice. Almost everyone says, "Wasn't is a miracle that no one showed up the night the bomb went off?" Some people even say, "Doesn't this prove that there is a God?" Now let's get realistic. To allow comparison, let's express these probabilities in slightly different terms. A one in a thousand chances
is equivalent to 1000 chances in a million; similarly, a one in a hundred chances is the same as 10,000 chances in a million. Is the probability of no choir member showing up on a particular night really such a miraculous occurrence when over a million Californians every week buy one lottery ticket knowing full-well that their chances of winning the grand prize are less than one in a million? And if they should win, they call it "luck" not a "miracle".
Now let us unite this information with the consequences of the uncertainty principle and the theory of matter/anti-matter annihilation. Let's first try to define "nothingness" in an understandable way. Perhaps "nothingness" is like a beehive with the walls of the individual cells being invisible but with each cell, sort of sloppily, containing both a particle and its anti-particle. Since when a particle and its anti-particle meet, they are annihilated into nothingness, an outside observer, if this were possible, would see nothing but empty cells. I designated a sloppy fit within each cell to take into consideration the uncertainty principle which does not allow us to know the exact whereabouts of any particular particle. However, on top of this, the uncertainty principle does not allow us to know the exact velocity of any particular particle; as a consequence, there must be associated with this nothingness some fluctuating energy which for lack of a better term I will call quantum fluctuations. Again, any outside observer would generally observe nothing since the average energy taken over all this nothingness would be zero. On the average, "nothingness" contains no observable matter and no observable energy; if the outside observer could see all this great nothingness at the same time, he would say that it contained no mass and no energy, but because of the uncertainty principle this nothingness would contain a certain amount of sloppiness; i.e., quantum fluctuations of energy which are extremely small and finite and which average out to zero.
Now by again imposing the Principle of Minimum Astonishment, I'll intuitively hypothesize that the normal quiescent state of the universe is completely equivalent to this "nothingness". In my estimation, the nothingness that I have defined, completely defines the universe.
You might now well ask: If this is indeed true, how did we arrive at our universe that we can observe and how did we get here? Now the fun really begins.
Let's look at this not-so-quiescent universe in the light of all the things that were discussed so far. If an outside observer looked at one particular cell, or at a small portion of this vast (more than countably infinite) expanse of nothingness, he, most likely would see nothing. But then again, he might be extremely lucky. Just because it is probable, although highly unlikely, some of the quantum fluctuations might agglomerate and focus on the particular cell that our imaginary observer was looking at. If this were to occur, and the agglomerated energy were sufficient, he might see an electron coming out in one direction with a positron moving in the opposite direction. If he were smart, he would realize that the positron was an anti-electron, or even more ingeniously, he would realize that the positron was simply a "hole" in this nothingness, a hole that could wander just the way the electron could. This, incidentally, is just modern physics. In the laboratory, physicists do convert energy, highly energetic light rays or gamma rays, into electrons and positrons and the positrons are often characterized as holes, especially by solid-state physicists who do such practical things as designing computer chips.
Since our quiescent universe is so vast, it is only realistic to assume that many groups of quantum fluctuations are bunching up all the time and that many electron/positron pairs are being created all the time, but, perhaps, not at what we would call "close" distances. As with our attempts to define a midpoint, what can "close" mean in an infinite domain? However, even though it is highly improbable, with an infinite universe and an infinity of associated quantum fluctuations, it is conceivable that a sufficient number fluctuations could bunch up to cause a substantial amount of matter and anti-matter to be created simultaneously at a localized portion of this nothingness. Again considering the vastness of this infinitely infinite universe, it wouldn't be at all surprising if a myriad of quantum fluctuations bunched up to create what our observer would characterize as a "Big Bang". By Jove we've done it, we've shown that the universe, as we see it, could have been produced out of the nothingness! What a blast, from little quantum fluctuations to a full-blown universe. Furthermore, there is nothing in our conjecturing that says that our observable universe is the only observable universe that has ever been created, nor does it say that ours is the only one that will ever be created, nor does it say that created observable universes have to be so far apart that they cannot interact. It is this latter observation which leads me to be unsurprised by the finding of a "Great Attractor". There could even be more than one, and one could even come into being at any time.
If this postulated occurrence of highly improbable events has you scratching your head, let's get somewhat practical by playing poker. When we are dealt a five-card hand without even a pair of jacks, when asked, we tend to say that we have "nothing". What a coincidence, a more-or-less random hand is described as being "nothing". Sounds familiar? Now after a few more rounds of dealing, we are endowed with a pair of queens---we now have something; something like an electron/positron pair. Once is a blue moon, we might even be dealt a Royal Flush; a highly unlikely, improbable event, but nevertheless possible with small but finite probability. Can't we characterize a Big Bang as being equivalent, on a probabilistic scale, to a Royal Flush? Isn't God simply playing poker. Or in Einstein's terms, can God do anything but throw the dice?
We can characterize the universe, the beginning of an observable segment, its continuation, its demise, and the birth and death of other observable segments, by considering another common pastime, the jig-saw puzzle. Consideration of the jig-saw puzzle also gets us to the concept of "time" which may be troublesome to some of you. Let's suppose that we have a puzzle that shows a pretty picture cut into little square pieces (I've eliminated the usual prongs so as not to get into an argument about how hard it might be to get the prongs into their appropriate indentations), and let's further suppose that the puzzle is in a big box wherein the entire puzzle can, when completed, fit on the bottom. Now suppose that the box is purchased with the pieces well shook up so that when we look at the pieces laying in the bottom, they seem be in a random order. This can be considered to be equivalent to our quiescent universe; the puzzle may be much too small to make a great representation but nevertheless large enough to provide most of the necessary elements. Now let's give the box a little shake---a quantum fluctuation. When we again examine the pieces, probably they will still be completely random, but ,perhaps, two adjoining pieces will fit the picture. If so, we will have produced a poker-pair or an electron/positron pair. If we continue to shake and to look, we might find more adjoining pieces that fit; eventually, if we should be so lucky, we might even see a large number of adjoining pieces that fit neatly together---a Big Bang or a Royal Flush. Now if after this surprising development we again shake the box, we will probably find that things are getting more random with each shake. There is no guarantee that another major piece-agglomeration will not soon occur, but it is highly unlikely because the overall probability of this occurring is mighty low--though not impossible. This is just like our observable universe. Since the time of the Big Bang, the second law of thermodynamics has been applicable and this law states that entropy, or randomness, is always increasing. This thermodynamic law, incidentally, is also what we feel "time" to be. If we view a snapshot that shows a newly-painted house with the grounds well-manicured, and also see a similar picture that shows the same house with the paint peeling off and the lawn covered with weeds and we are told that these pictures were taken within the past 10 years after the owner had died and no work was put into maintenance during that time, we can reliably assume that the photo which shows greater randomness was taken later in time. One might say that a highly improbable action (agglomeration of quantum fluctuations) winds the clock, and from then on it will run down until the next unlikely event occurs.
In our observable universe, the initial mass thrown off by the Big Bang may have been so large that gravity will eventually draw everything back together to again create nothingness; or the nothingness may be re-created locally by matter being pulled into "black holes" (a discussion of which I'll forego since black holes are a minor phenomenon in the over-all cosmological picture); or the expansion of the observable universe may cease if gravity cannot pull everything back together, in which case this observable universe may stay in a completely random state until another big bang occurs in the vicinity with gravity then drawing the old matter towards the new matter thereby eventually making gravitational collapse possible. Because of the infiniteness of the great nothingness, you can be assured that somewhere in the nothingness and somewhere in time, although time has no meaning within the nothingness, another observable universe, perhaps, similar to ours will be created. More likely, again because of the magnitude of infinity, many such universes in various stages of development already exist.
Having wrapped up cosmology in a nice neat package, we can now go on to a discussion of evolution, which will, in comparison, be mighty short.
To avoid making this talk too much longer and getting into unnecessary detail, let us simply assume that the Big Bang produced mostly electrons and positrons and as the temperature from this great eruption dropped, material began to coalesce and, through collisions, neutrons, protons, and helium, and eventually all the elements were produced. Eventually, stars were formed wherein the force of gravity, that drew the material together, was balanced by internal pressure produced by nuclear fusion. The light or energy from these stars could then substantially influence the characteristics of surrounding, relatively-small, bodies of matter (planets) whose velocity was such that centrifugal force balanced the gravitational pull between star and planet. The planet earth, as well as other planets, in its early days, was hot and without an atmosphere. However, an atmosphere, of sorts, eventually developed since gases that escaped from rocks and volcanic eruptions were incapable of escaping the earth's gravitational field.
Eventually, the earth cooled sufficiently for the oceans to develop, and, within the oceans, large combinations of atoms began to associate in haphazard fashion. Quite by accident, a few of these atomic configurations or macromolecules, through their atomic agglomeration, altered the composition of their surroundings to more readily allow for the production of similar macromolecules; in short, the initial chance production of a particular molecule altered the local environment sufficiently so that other similar molecules could be more readily produced. Even though this reproductive capability had tremendous potential, most of the early macromolecular colonies probably, quite rapidly, became extinct. However, eventually, molecules were formed that had reproductive potential and survivability. Given enough time, even events that have extremely low probability of occurrence are bound to happen. Consequently, through trial and error, through throwing of the dice, the evolutionary process was started on earth, and it would continue through to the formation of higher-and-higher forms of molecules which we now call life.
The evolutionary process continues today, especially in man. Each of us who is still capable of reproduction, because of the promiscuity of his or her ancestors, has within the reproductive DNA a treasure-house of genetic variability. The combinations of characteristics that we can pass on to our children through natural chemical orientation of the atoms within the DNA is extremely great. In addition, chance mutations have probably occurred because our reproductive material has been somewhat altered by the action of cosmic rays from outer space, natural radioactivity from the earth's crust, excessively high temperatures due to fevers, inhalation or ingestion of extraneous chemicals, medical X-rays, etc. Most of these mutations, as with most mutations in the past, will be detrimental to our offspring, but ever so infrequently a particular mutation may be so "good" that it will thrive and persist; thereby helping the human race to evolve further. In addition, man is now rapidly improving his capability to intrude upon the natural development of the DNA molecule; man has evolved to the point where he is becoming capable of controlling the direction of his further evolution. This can lead to an entirely new and unrelated discussion which I will not pursue any further at this time.
However, there are some important aspects of this evolutionary chain that merit discussion. First, at any particular time, the conditions that existed on earth had to be forgiving; i.e., the environmental changes brought about locally by the reproducing molecule could not have been such as to destroy the conditions needed for reproduction and further evolution of the particular molecule. Further, the reproductive capability of the molecule could not have been so great as to destroy the local environment, even if this were extraordinarily forgiving. These features of evolution have existed throughout the evolutionary cycle and they still exist today. A reproducing macromolecule or living species can become extinct if its reproductive capability is too weak to sustain upsets in the environment, or in the numerical-increase or improved-capability of predators. On the other hand, it can also become extinct if its reproductive capability is so great that it can harm its environment to the extent that the environment cannot readily recover. For example, if a species is so successful at reproduction that it tends to outrun its food supply, the forgiving nature of the environment may
simply curtail the reproductive capability so as to keep population and food supply in balance; however, if the population ever went out of balance sufficiently so as to ruin the capability of the environment to produce the food, the macromolecule or species could become extinct because of being "overly successful".
A second characteristic of evolution that merits attention, is the meaning of "survival of the fittest". No macromolecule or living species is, in an absolute sense, the "fittest". For simplicity, from now on let us talk only in terms of living things, species. A particular species can only be described as being fit or unfit relative to its environment. In one environment, a chance mutation that gives a particular bird's offspring more-colorful plumage can be considered to make the offspring more fit because the color increases his reproductive attractiveness and, therefore, his offspring (who also have the tendency to be more colorful) will tend to be more prolific than birds who have not undergone this chance mutation. Within this particular environment, the more colorful bird will eventually predominate so that the entire species ends up being colorful. Now let us consider the effects of the identical mutation in an environment that includes a predator which is particularly attracted by the colors in the altered plumage of our mutant offspring. In this environment, the mutant would be readily gobbled up and the mutation would rapidly die out. Carrying this theme of mutation and environmental interaction throughout the evolutionary chain, we see that chance plays a large part in the development of species; not only the chanciness of a particular mutation occurring, but also the chanciness that the environment will nurture a particular mutation. There is no inherent evolutionary arrow that points towards the development of an intelligent being such as man. Man accidentally developed because certain chance mutations occurred when, again by chance, the environment was conducive to accepting and nurturing the particular mutation.
Most of us have heard someone make the remark that "there must be a God because nature is so beautiful or because everything in nature or the universe seems to fit together so nicely; i.e., in the manner necessary to support life." Quite frankly this is an asinine remark. We wouldn't be here if things didn't hang together so that we could exist. This, incidentally, is called the "Anthropic Principle". Personally, I feel that it would be a rather mundane, even trivial, achievement for an omniscient God to create this beautiful, finely-tuned universe. However, to realize that it all happened by chance, with a very small probability of occurrence, is truly awe-inspiring. The realization may not do much for the human ego, but it is truly awesome!
This leads me to one last comment before I give a short summary. Many of you have probably heard that one of the main thrusts in theoretical physics today is the development of a unified field theory; in fact, this was Einstein's primary endeavor during the last 30-or-so years of his life. Personally, I think that this was a waste of his time because there were insufficient data available at that time to allow one to conceptualize such a theory. Today, the endeavor makes a bit more sense but the near-term outcome will do little for humanity and the "unified" theory will be far from what a physicist would call elegant or beautiful. Over the past few decades, physicists have defined in great detail, and with great accuracy, the behavior of 4 specific fields of force that exist in the universe and that explain all currently observed behavior. These are the gravitational force, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force. Simplistically, one can very well ask, "what's so difficult about combining forces; why not just add the four force fields with different multipliers before each of the 4 components, with each of the multipliers designed to approach zero in the regions where they are not applicable?" Basically, this is where the theorists start to put things together, but the result does not give any greater understanding and it certainly is not elegant. Recently, the theorists have successfully been able to combine the electromagnetic and weak-nuclear fields so that the results satisfy one basic set of equations. The theory, while elegant to a degree, is extremely complicated and, seems to be somewhat "forced". The approaches that are being made to include one or the other or both of the remaining two fields complicate matters still further; one can almost say "complicate things to the extreme". Nevertheless, the physicists are saying that they might have it all put together within the next decade or so. Again personally, I will not be astounded by this but, also, I doubt whether it will lead to much greater understanding. What will be needed is continual refinement of this grand unified theory aimed at simplifying the basic concepts along with the simultaneous gaining of further understanding. Eventually, I suggest, that the theorist will find that the simple concept of probability is all that will be required to completely explain everything about this glorious universe. Ultimately, I believe that everything will be derivable from the simple fact that when one throws a die, the probability that he will throw a particular number will be one chance in six. When theoretical physicists will be able to perform this feat, my guess is about 300 years from now, they will indeed have a Grand Unified Theory of the Universe.
Now for the summary. In essence, my theory of cosmology and the resulting evolution hinges on very few assumptions. I needed Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to provide quantum fluctuations. I needed Dirac's hypothesis about there being anti-matter or negative energy states in order to be able to define the "nothingness". I needed the Principle of Minimum Astonishment to conclude that this nothingness is all-pervasive. (My model really does not require the nothingness to be infinitely infinite; it just has to be extremely large. But giving a boundary to nothingness seems unrealistic to me.) I needed Pauli's exclusion principle to keep matter from bunching up to unrealistic proportions. I needed Einstein's gravitational theories to show the equivalence between mass and energy and further to allow gravity to be, sort of, the vacuum cleaner that pulls everything back together so that we can get from one time-cycle to the next without being astonished by the transition. Now shall we play God---poker or craps anyone?