06/19/2002
A Cyclic Universe and Pussycats
Last week our good friend Margaret from California visited us. When asked what she wanted to see during her stay her answer was, "Of course Ground Zero." Most people I know in our area of New Jersey have neither seen, nor wanted to see Ground Zero because of its painful associations. However, I drove in to New York and Margaret and I took our turn on the viewing platform. Although I''d been in the World Trade Center a couple of times, I found it hard to imagine that those imposing Twin Towers had stood in the empty space in front of us. We could not see into the bottom of the pit but the damage to the surrounding buildings was quite apparent. The dimensions of the tragedy were hard to comprehend. There were, however, an overwhelming number of messages, pictures, mementos, banners and fresh flowers lining the walls along the entrance and exit from the viewing platform. These helped bring the dimensions of 9/11 down to a human scale that one could comprehend and reflect upon.
After visiting Ground Zero, I came home determined to follow through on my promise last week to deal with deeper subjects than making foul shots or highway pavement. I specifically had promised to consider the new theory of the creation and future of the universe that made such a big splash in the media a month or so ago. But first, let''s set the stage. Back in March of this year, I wrote about Guth''s theory of "inflation", which postulates that the universe expanded furiously in a tiny fraction of the first second after the Big Bang. In this teensy fraction of a second the universe inflated from a ridiculously tiny speck to the size of a marble, a remarkable increase in size over such a short time. Data from the Hubble telescope and various other sources strongly supported this theory. The initial speck was thought to have resulted from a random quantum fluctuation out of nothing, as I described in the March 14 column (see archives). I felt that, even though I couldn''t comprehend the theory, I could accept it in the belief that vastly superior intellects understood such things.
The inflation model explained a couple of major problems. One was the formation of ripples in the composition of the universe that led to the formation of stars and galaxies. Also explained was the fact that our universe is "flat" and not "closed". (One characteristic of a flat universe is that two rays of light that start out parallel to each other will stay parallel. In a closed universe these rays of light will converge and I gather we might actually be able to see ourselves if we lived long enough for the light rays to curve back to us.) Another profound implication of the Big Bang/inflation model is that time itself began at the moment of the Bang. Everything seemed to be falling into place.
After that rapid inflation, the universe expanded at the more reasonable, though still mind-boggling, rate that we have today. At least that''s what was thought to be the case. However, a few years ago, there was the disturbing finding that our universe was actually expanding at an accelerating rate. This newly found second period of "inflation" was not anticipated in the inflation model. Soon you began hearing about "dark energy", the unknown force that was speeding up our expanding universe.
Now, just a month or so ago, comes a theory that could topple the inflation scenario and that gives a much different picture of our past and future. Needless to say, I was all shook up, having convinced myself that I could rest easy in my belief that someone had truly understood our ultimate origins. So it was with much trepidation that I picked up my May 24 2002 issue of Science, determined to actually read the articles in the special section with the daunting title "Spacetime, Wrapped Branes and Hidden Dimensions". After reading the three introductory review articles in this special section, my brane-addled brain was reeling. However, I decided to plow ahead to the article by Paul Steinhardt of Princeton and Neil Turok of Cambridge that caused all the media stir.
However, when I turned the page to go on, there was a one-page article that I suspect the editor of Science put there to provide some comic relief from the difficult material surrounding it. The article, by Denis Burnham and co-workers from Australia, was titled "What''s New, Pussycat? On Talking to Babies and Animals"! Aha, I thought - this is a subject I can understand. However, this paper wasn''t as simple as I anticipated. There were terms such as "affect" and its characterization by measurement of ''low-pass-filtered speech"; hyperarticulation of the "corner" vowels with associated plots in F1-F2 space.
I was out of my league, but having brought up the subject, I should tell you what the article concluded. First, mothers talk differently to babies than to adults. But you already knew that, didn''t you? The authors studied 12 mothers talking to babies, pet dogs or cats and to adults. They found certain distinct patterns. When the mothers talked to their babies or pets, they raised their pitch and affect (intonation and rhythm) compared to when they talked to an adult. However, they did not exaggerate their vowels for either their pets or an adult. This was taken to mean that one intuitively perceives the emotional and linguistic needs of one''s audience. The baby, but not the pet or adult, is presumed to need the exaggerated vowel delivery to assist it in its own language development.
I was hoping the "pussycat" article might provide sufficient material to fill this column but no such luck. So it''s on to the paper by Steinhardt and Turok entitled "A Cyclic Model of the Universe". Surprisingly, this monumental paper was not even four pages long, with just one figure and 7 equations. I understood none of the equations. However, I''ll take a stab at conveying some of the essence of the cyclic model.
In this cyclic model, there is still a Big Bang. Thank goodness for that! Let''s put off for the moment how the Big Bang started. Instead, let''s begin with where we are now, some 14 billion years or so since the Big Bang, in a universe that is expanding at a faster and faster rate. Steinhardt and Turok expect that this expansion will go on for trillions and trillions of years, past the time when our night sky will be completely black, all the other stars and galaxies so far away that we can no longer see them. But that''s only the beginning. The universe keeps on expanding until it is essentially as empty as "nothing" - so empty that there''s only one particle in a "Hubble volume". (From what I can gather on the Web a "Hubble volume" is the size of our visible universe. That''s pretty big to contain just one particle!) At about this point, expansion stops and contraction begins.
Now, the nature of this contraction eludes me, to be perfectly frank. While there is mention of a "crunch", it''s apparently different from the old notion that all the stars and galaxies come back together in a big crunch that starts things off again. Instead, the theorists think that our universe lies in a 4-dimensional "brane". "Brane" is short for membrane and the analogy is akin to a thick 3-dimensional rubber sheet or membrane. This brane, however, is in 4 dimensions, which makes it hard to visualize for any normal human being. Obviously, the brane has to be huge to contain our universe. But that''s not all. There seems to be an important 5th dimension that connects our own brane with another brane. Our brane contains all the normal kinds of stuff we know and love. The other brane contains weird stuff connected with gravity and dark matter. Sometime during the contraction phase, the 5th dimension collapses for a moment and the two branes bump into each other and "bounce" off. Voila! This bump-bounce initiates another Big Bang and our universe is again off and running.
I don''t pretend to understand all this but let''s look at some of the conclusions if the cyclic model of the universe is correct. One concerns the beginning of time. Time began with the Big Bang under the inflation model. The cyclic model says that, since the process of expansion and contraction is a continuous process, there is no beginning or end of time. Time just is. Heady stuff indeed! In the cyclic model, the newly discovered dark energy that''s pushing our universe apart arises naturally out of the model. Also, there are not two periods of inflation, just the one that we''re in now. The Big Bang does not originate from random quantum fluctuations in the cyclic model. Instead, it arises from the colliding branes and no weird quantum gravity effects are needed. Some of you might be saying, "Hey, those branes are pretty weird themselves!" I certainly agree.
So, we have these two conflicting pictures of how the Big Bang came to pass and of what our universe''s future will be. Which is correct? It seemed as though the inflation model was a lock until this theory arose. Steinhardt and Turok say that there will be ways to decide definitively between the two alternatives through measurements of gravitational waves and the properties of dark energy. The two theories predict different wavelengths and such. Since it will take the utmost in instrumental and scientific expertise to even make these measurements, we may have to wait for many years for the answer.
Allen F. Bortrum
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