• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2211 0

and Robert Wilson of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey accidentally made one of the most important discoveries of our age when they detected this afterglow of the big bang while working on an antenna intended for use with communication satellites. Subsequent research has refined both theory and experiment, culminating in measurements taken by NASA's COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite in the early 1990s. With these data, physicists and astronomers have confirmed to high precision that the universe is filled with microwave radiation (if our eyes were sensitive to microwaves, we would see a diffuse glow in the world around us) whose temperature is about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, exactly in keeping with the expectation of the big bang theory. In concrete terms, in every cubic meter of the universe—including the one you now occupy—there are, on average, about 400 million photons that collectively compose the vast cosmic sea of microwave radiation, an echo of creation. A percentage of the "snow" you see on your television screen when you disconnect the cable feed and tune to a station that has ceased its scheduled broadcasts is due to this dim aftermath of the big bang. This match between theory and experiment confirms the big bang picture of cosmology as far back as the time that photons first moved freely through the universe, about a few hundred thousand years after the bang (ATB).

Can we push further in our tests of the big bang theory to even earlier times? We can. By using standard principles of nuclear theory and thermodynamics, physicists can make definite predictions about the relative abundance of the light elements produced during the period of primordial nucleosynthesis, between a hundredth of a second and a few minutes ATB. According to theory, for example, about 23 percent of the universe should be composed of helium. By measuring the helium abundance in stars and nebulae, astronomers have amassed impressive support that, indeed, this prediction is right on the mark. Perhaps even more impressive is the prediction and confirmation regarding deuterium abundance, since there is essentially no astrophysical process, other than the big bang, that can account for its small but definite presence throughout the cosmos. The confirmation of these abundances, and more recently that of lithium, is a sensitive test of our understanding of early universe physics back to the time of their primordial synthesis.

This is impressive almost to the point of hubris. All the data we possess confirm a theory of cosmology capable of describing the universe from about a hundredth of a second ATB to the present, some 15 billion years later. Nevertheless, one should not lose sight of the fact that the newborn universe evolved with phenomenal haste. Tiny fractions of a second—fractions much smaller than a hundredth of a second—form cosmic epochs during which long-lasting features of the world were first imprinted. And so, physicists have continued to push onward, trying to explain the universe at ever earlier times. Since the universe gets ever smaller, hotter, and denser as we push back, an accurate quantum-mechanical description of matter and the forces becomes increasingly important. As we have seen from other viewpoints in earlier chapters, point-particle quantum field theory works until typical particle energies are around the Planck energy. In a cosmological context, this occurred when the whole of the known universe fit within a Planck-sized nugget, yielding a density so great that it strains one's ability to find a fitting metaphor or an enlightening analogy: the density of the universe at the Planck time was simply colossal. At such energies and densities gravity and quantum mechanics can no longer be treated as two separate entities as they are in point-particle quantum field theory. Instead, the central message of this book is that at and beyond these enormous energies we must invoke string theory. In temporal terms, we encounter these energies and densities when we probe earlier than the Planck time of 10-43 seconds