....and away we go!!

October 9, 2010

Lately I have come to believe that television is finally living up to its promise.  For years we have had to contend with watching really stupid stuff like "Three's Company" and "My Mother, the Car".  Not only that but we have had to endure commercials that insult a person's intelligence.  And, although this may be a topic for a future blog, we have had to contend with "political correctness".  Any caucasian man may be depicted as being as dumb as a post  in a commercial but not black men or women of any color.  The intelligence of black men or women can never be questioned.  We would appear to be bigotted and chauvanistic.  Advertising still remains dismal but programming seems to be emerging into the daylight.  I have learned more about history and basic science in the last several years on television than I ever learned in college.  This is great!  Lately I have been thinking the really big thoughts like who are we and why are we here.  It prompted me to write a couple of paragragraphs about this incorporating some of the things I have learned recently.

THE FATE OF THE UNIVERSE

When our three score and ten are over, we depart and after a few generations most of us are forgotten. A few of us live on for a bit longer in the memory of the living because we did something significant during out tenure. But even the mightiest of us will eventually be forgotten.

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822

The dinosaurs ruled the earth for several hundred million years, but man has only been around for about a million years and our civilization is much younger. During the last million years, we learned how to use fire and, eventually, how to make it. We developed language and tools to make life more productive and easier. However, civilization really started about 10,000 years ago with the rise of agriculture. With agriculture, man tamed the process of acquiring food. Not every minute of every day was spent finding food for survival. He no longer had to wander around looking for food or follow the migration paths of animals. He was able to build permanent structures for living and develop a society. Many societies have risen and fallen in the last 10,000 years. During the short life of our civilization, we streamlined communication through reading and writing. We used record keeping to document and then learn from the past and build on it. We have creatively harnessed the forces of nature. In the future, we may develop a source of virtually free energy (perhaps sustained nuclear fusion) and together with population control, make life on earth a paradise. Perhaps our biggest challenge then, would be learning to live in paradise where survival of the fittest would have a completely new meaning. Barring that possibility, disease, war, or some natural disaster will eventually spell the end of our society, just as it did with Ozymandias, but our species will survive. A new society may rise like a phoenix on the ashes of the old but eventually it too will end. As the eons roll by our civilization will also end and our species will evolve in some direction we can only imagine. Abilities that we are now only on the fringe of developing, such as being able to know what another person is thinking, may blossom. If we do not kill ourselves off in some nuclear war or cover the planet with some killing virus, and if some natural disasters give us a break, we may evolve into brainy creatures.

Our universe began about 14 billion years ago with a big bang. Though it is hard to believe, our universe started with a speck smaller that the head of a pin and expanded more rapidly than can be imagined. Our universe contains about 100 billion galaxies and each galaxy contains about 200 billion stars. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years across. Our sun is a middle aged star about two-thirds the distance from the center to the edge of the galaxy. It is about half way into a ten billion year lifespan. Our solar system may be about 4.5 billion years old. Our sun has the mass to become a red giant near the end of its life. Inside the sun heavier elements are built from lighter elements through nuclear fusion. Energy is released in the process. As the sun ages, it expands. Eventually the sun will expand to the point where it will engulf the orbit of our planet. Life will have long since ceased to exist on earth and as the sun engulfs it, the earth itself will cease to exist. After its nuclear fuel is nearly spent, the sun will shrink down to a white dwarf and as its remaining fuel is used up, it will cease to shine and become a lifeless rock. Smaller and larger stars behave differently at the end of their lives but in all cases, their nuclear engines cease functioning. Some explode (supernovae) and some shrink down to a neutron star or a black hole. One of these eventualities will happen to every star in the universe. One by one, the lights will go out.

It appears there is not enough matter in the universe to slow down, stop and reverse the expansion of the universe. If that is true, the universe will continue to expand forever. But, since there will be no intelligence anywhere to measure and record it, it is meaningless. However, if it turns out that there is enough matter in the universe, then perhaps the expansion will cease and the universe may collapse back down to a singularity. As we find out more and more about our universe, we may actually know the answer to that question within a few years. We do now have a possible explanation of it.

After Albert Einstein published the Theory of Relativity, he spent the rest of his life working on the Unified Field Theory. This would be an explanation of how the four forces in nature (gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear) worked together. Ultimately it would explain everything. He was never able to do this. Part of the problem is that quantum mechanics, the theory of the infinitesimal, is not consistent with relativity. In the years since, many new theories explaining forces and matter have been put forward. Each new theory fixes the problems of its predecessor but introduces flaws of its own. For a while it looked like string theory might have all the answers but soon problems began to appear. Einstein’s universe had 4 dimensions: three physical and one time. String theory has ten dimensions. The introduction of an eleventh dimension seems to have corrected all the problems of string theory and, as of this writing, has not introduced any of its own. This new theory is called M-Theory (for Membrane). The strings are now membranes. Since this new theory seems to be holding together, the ultimate test is to see if it can explain the beginning of the universe. That is, how did the Big Bang occur? It does seem to do that. It may really be the theory of everything. It seems that before the big bang there were many membranes floating around and the big bang was the result of a collision between two of them. As it turns out the big bang was nothing special. We are trapped in the universe created by the big bang but it seems reasonable that these collisions go on all the time and our universe may be only one of a great myriad of universes. Is this not amazing? It reminds me of a thought I had long ago: What if our universe is nothing more than a miniscule piece of some kid’s toy in a long-since forgotten toy box in his room? What would happen if he suddenly remembered the toy and started playing with it?