Carl Sagan Day- Cosmology Today: Big Experiments, Big Business, Big Science (Grand Rapids)

Presented by Douglas Furton, PhD, Professor of Physics, Grand Valley State University

About the Speaker

Doug Furton is a Professor of Physics at Grand Valley State University, where he has taught physics and astronomy classes and has introduced students to the joys and sorrows of scientific research since 2002. Prior to coming to GVSU, Prof. Furton was an Associate Professor of Physics at Rhode Island College, in Providence, RI. Dr. Furton earned his Ph.D. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Toledo, in Toledo, OH, in 1993.

Prof. Furton’s interest in research began in graduate school when he studied carbonaceous interstellar dust grains observationally and experimentally. More recently, Prof. Furton has combined his interests in “ham” radio and astronomy by establishing an Internet-accessible radio telescope at the Stephen F. Wessling Observatory in Fremont, MI, with support from GVSU and the Newaygo County Dark Sky Astronomers.

Doug Furton also writes a column each Friday about backyard astronomy and space-science current events for the Grand Haven Tribune, which is available online. Watch for a best-of book, tentatively entitled “Glimpses of our Universe”, coming out in the spring.

Doug Furton lives in Grand Haven with his wife Anne Marie and son Simon.

About the Event

Summary with Commentary for the November 9, 2011 meeting of CFI- Michigan.

The title of this meeting’s lecture was Cosmology Today: Big Experiments, Big Business, Big Science. It was presented by Douglas Furton, PhD; Professor of Physics at Grand Valley State University. This presentation on cosmology was an apt one since we were celebrating Carl Sagan Day at this meeting.

Although the title of his talk had many Bigs in it, Dr. Furton began his presentation with a Big that was absent from the title: Big Questions. Cosmology is all about the very big questions, such as what is the fabric of spacetime like? How old is the universe? Since the beginning of the universe also represents the beginning of time and space, it is like asking how old the existence of everything is. When will it all end? How? Professor Furton said that the questions of cosmology were really questions of perception.

We use special tools to aid in our perception of the very small—microscopes to study the micro- level of existence, for instance. We use telescopes to study the opposite end of the realm of reality—the extreme macro realm—the cosmos—which is otherwise perceptually inaccessible for its staggering vastness. The cosmos encapsulates all of existence and all of time and is so immense that it asks the really big questions not just of science but also of philosophy and religion. We deal with universal governing laws that beckon for an impossibly gargantuan Law Maker or Law Giver. But the view from religion is a tepid and feeble one by comparison with what mathematics and science shows us.

Perceptual fallacies also get in our way of interpretation of that which we can finally see as instruments improve. Galileo made wonderful discoveries but he also viewed Saturn as a triplet of space bodies, since the idea of ringing space debris was an unthinkable concept in his time and that was his solution to what his eyes beheld of the pattern. Much later, Mars was thought to provide us with evidence of intelligent life because of a mistranslation of the word channels, used to describe a system of natural surface features seen through the telescope, as canals (or, in other words, a intelligently-built system for a purposeful outcome.) Suddenly, everyone started seeing not only canals but other structures and artifacts of a civilization. Later still, we had stories breaking out of the Face on Mars, which is just an example of pareidolia; combining and synthesizing abstract visual elements into a familiar entity or object. Even the term flying saucers came into being as a result of one person who believed he had seen an extraterrestrial craft who described his experience to a reporter as that of seeing the light bob up and down as it moved, like a saucer skipping across a pond. After that, people began to see saucer-shaped UFOs.

Since space and time are united, the deeper that we plumb the fabric of space, the further back we travel in time as well. With the amazing advances that we have made, we have stretched far back into reality’s birth, where the seething cauldrons of the earliest galaxies were bubbling into existence. The thoughts of cosmologists are ones which make one dizzy in the contemplation of it all.

Dr. Furton discussed models at one point and how they improve yet still fail to capture a full representation of the subject being modeled. I have personally written and spoken on the shortcomings of models as to capturing reality; in a nutshell: the only way to create a faithful representation of the subject is to recreate the subject in scale, scope and detail. Since that would be redundant and impossible to do anyway, our models are approximations of the otherwise unfathomable. The more that our models are made to yield maximum information for our finite human minds, the further they become from the actual real subject that they describe. The closer they come to refashioning the subject, the less comprehensible they become to us. This seems to be an insurmountable paradox.

Humans are storytelling apes and it is through stories that we have always comprehended the incomprehensible. In our pre-scientific past, our stories were myths and legends; fanciful tales to make sense of what was too big and unwieldy to understand. Now, we still must do much the same when the studied subject is simply too vast and the math is too complex to wrap our heads around in any meaningful conceptualization. Our stories are more sophisticated and no longer qualify as true mythologies, but they are stories that can only approximate reality nonetheless.

We developed quantum physics as a tool to unlock the big mysteries of the cosmos as well as the level of reality that is too tiny to be fully understood; but as has been famously stated: If you think you understand quantum physics, then you do not understand quantum physics. At this point, even our models of reality cannot be completely penetrated. Conceptualizing that which is beyond human comprehension transcends the very math that is used to describe the effects and characteristics of the subject being studied! The math works out, and so we know it is a valid phenomenon, but still we are not seeing the subject in our heads. Well, most of us aren’t. Einstein was able to think the thoughts he did because he told himself illustrated stories in his head. What would he see if I was riding a light beam? He was a visual thinker even more than he was a mathematics genius and this synthesis of storytelling, visualization and theoretical physics mastery, culminated in his unprecedented discoveries.

Dr. Furton spoke of an old tribal myth that had been given the title: Pushing Up the Sky. In this story the people took up long poles to push the heavens further up from the land and away from the level that they inhabited. We, in our time, can smirk at this silly fable at first, but really when we stop to think of it, have we not done much the same thing? Isn’t this story a universal one that describes humanity’s attempt to study the cosmos? As we learn more about it and sense in greater detail our place in it, the cosmos pushes back further and further away from us, receding ever more from that we can cognitively absorb. The tribal people who concocted the myth believed that in the earlier days, they could simply climb a tall tree and attain the heavens. The older myths that we are more familiar with due to the ubiquity of the Bible in our society also tell of a universe that can be understood as merely a dome over the Earth and of a tower than could be constructed, whereby humans could reach the realm of God.

As our observations became keener and more sophisticated, we discovered that we are not part of just a single planet with a greater and lesser lights that revolved around us, but instead a solar system; a system of which our planet was only one of several others, and then that our Sun was only a very ordinary (middle-sized and middle-aged) star among countless others. It was our planet that went around the Sun, not the other way around and any of those other stars are as likely as not to have planets ringing them. The perfect circles of the newly understood orbits were later displaced by ellipsis.

Further dethroning of our self- exalted position in the universe and in the mind of a Creator was in store as we learned that our solar system was but one of billions of others within a spiral galaxy. Not only were we not the center of our system of planets and sun but we were ousted even from the center of our Milky Way galaxy; deported to one single unremarkable place within but one of the arms of that galaxy. Worse still for our sense of specialness, even our galaxy was found to be but one of a numberless array of others; other spiral galaxies and others with different shapes and sizes. When distant galaxies were first perceived, they were thought of as single stars fissioning off their material. When astronomers realized that these were clusters of billions of stars instead, the universe lurched exponentially into greater vastness and we shrank in direct proportion. Our galaxy isn’t even special for scope or number of stars contained within it or for type. If we were the point of a Creator’s efforts, He went about showing us this in an odd way, indeed.

Our universe itself is not a shape or size, even. When one thinks of the universe, one is thinking in ways that are counter to the ways that our brains have evolved to contemplate external reality. While there is time since the universe began, there was no time before its inception. There was no outside or space beyond the universe, which expanded at an incomprehensible rate within the Big Bang model of the universe’s origin. It is meaningless to speak of what came before the Big Bang or of spatial characteristics of it.

There are no edges to the universe and, unlike any other explosion that we can conceptualize, there is no center or starting point that can be understood. The universe expands not in a lineal fashion, with radiating lines that can be drawn to a vanishing point between 10 and 15 billion years ago. All matter is moving away from all other matter in the accelerating expansion. One model that I have seen depicts a balloon that expands as it blows up with all the celestial bodies (specks on the balloon model) traveling away from each other all together, rather than racing away from a starting point.

The Big Bang model, as imperfect as it is for a totality of understanding of cosmic evolution, is verified on many fronts (but one being the uniformity of the background radiation in the cosmos) and has great explanatory power for comprehending other features of the universe. That which can connect up disparate fields of study; which has predictability and verifiable aspects and enormous explanatory power is what constitutes a robust theoretical model.

That the universe is expanding at an increasing speed is a fairly recent awareness for us. An earlier model had it that the expansion from the original Big Bang would slow over eons of time until it halted. Then it would begin to condense again, as gravity overcame the stasis. This would continue ultimately into what was being termed a Big Crunch. This was theorized to bring the universe back into a singularity point again that was liable to undergo another Big Bang. It was even posited that perhaps the universe had been going through this cycle of expansion and crunch; expansion and crunch, throughout eternity, with the current state of the universe being but one iteration of the cyclic dynamic. Now we know that there will be an entropic end to the universe eventually.

There are concepts of our universe being but one aspect of a multiverse and where there are other simultaneous universes existing in different dimensions; some (perhaps most) without the proper conditions for life to have emerged. This is one of the ideas that gets us around the Fine Tuning Argument: in an endless expanse of possible universes existing throughout an eternity, that one universe would not emerge that could generate and maintain life would be unthinkable. Given enough time, all combinations of matter and energies become possible. Another concept is that of a cosmic foam, where our universe is likened to a single bubble in a massive sea of foam and with the points of intersection generating dynamic cosmic events, including the creation ad destruction of more bubbles (universes). There is also Brane Theory where our universe is stitched into a sort of cosmic membrane that creates the fabric of spacetime.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter have been proposed to begin to explain characteristics of the universe where the forces and energies cannot be directly detected but must be there in order for the cosmos to operate as it does. It gives one pause to contemplate that the known and detectable matter and energy in the universe is a vanishingly small quantity. Nearly 100% of the cosmos is composed of the mysterious matter and energy that we can only conceptualize through mathematical theory. Space is almost entirely emptiness!

We know infinitely more than the ancients did about the universe, yet we are still merely pushing up the sky. We have gotten to within moments after the original Big Bang in our delving into deep space and therefore deep time—yet this brings us only to another unexplained vista of wonders to be explored. Perhaps like the universe itself, this search is endless and timeless.

Synthesized by Charles LaRue