The mystery of creation has mystified man ever since he started to question the universe's origin and his coming into being. But the answers to his queries have like himself undergone transformations over time. First it was all magical. It was all darkness of ignorance, fear and darkness all around. Zillion forces in the shape of beings with their power to do and undo his dreams and desires inhabited his surroundings. Each phenomenon had its own unseen controller and there were rituals to please it. Gradually with his knowledge about the surroundings increasing, the darkness and the mysteries accompanying them receded. Gradually he grew more articulate about the mysterious surroundings. He started to express his feelings, desires, dreams, expectations and, most of all his needs, in the form of sketches on the cave walls. His primitive form of articulation evolved into language. The language, which was purely oral in the beginning, started to find itself on the skins of animals, clay tablets and papyrus in symbolic forms. And finally, evolved mathematics, the science of measurement. Arithmetic went to keep accounts for transactions, when business among different sections of the population and communities began. Geometry evolved to keep measurement of the houses they built to live in or the plots of land they tilled or the images of their gods or the altars on which they images would stand. In time arithmetic grew more abstract and mathematics and geometry merged. While he was developing his language to communicate and measure, he was also increasing his knowledge of the structure of the material world. He extended his vision beyond the known universe and delved deeper into the heart of the matter. So developed astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology to measure time, space and the stellar systems that make the universe. At the same time, chemistry and physics gave him the inner and deeper insight into mater, the forces that keep its parts together at the microscopic as well as at the cosmic level. Are the forces the ultimate secrets? How many are there? Is there a single source from which all the forces emerged? First the electric and magnetic forces merged to make what we know to be the electromagnetism. There are also the other forces working within the nucleus known as the strong force, the force responsible for keeping the atomic nucleus together. There are also the weak force responsible for nuclear decay and the finally the force of gravitation. Can they be brought under one single roof to describe nature once and for all?
Martin Rees astronomer and president of the Royal Society writes below in the Guardian about the frontiers of science man is now roaming to have a grasp of the essence that makes him and the universe.
Ever since the classical Greek era when earth, air, fire and water were believed to be the substance of the world, scientists have sought a unified picture of all the basic forces and building blocks of nature. They have sought the answer to the question: "What are we, and the world, made of?"
During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, which are, especially in living things, combined together in intricate molecular assemblages. And our scientific reach has now extended not only into the microworld of atoms, but much further out into the cosmos. The "vault of heaven" familiar to the ancients is, we now realise, an immensity of stars and galaxies extending for billions of light years.
A film by Charles Eames and his wife, Ray, called Powers of Ten (tinyurl.com/3vsztj), illustrated the range of cosmic dimensions by showing a family snapshot from successively more remote viewpoints, each 10 times further away than the previous one, before reversing the action and probing the realm of individual atoms with the same breathtaking effect.
Our universe covers a vast range of scales, and an immense variety of structure, stretching far larger, and far smaller, than the dimensions of everyday sensations. We are each made up of between 10 to the power of 28 and 10 to the power of 29 atoms. This human scale is, in a numerical sense, poised midway between the masses of atoms and stars. It would take roughly as many human bodies to make up the mass of the sun as there are atoms in each of us. But our sun is just an ordinary star in a galaxy that contains around a hundred billion stars altogether. There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy. More than 10 to the power of 78 atoms lie within range of our telescope.
All atoms contain protons. The atoms of the 92 naturally occurring elements that make up the periodic table each have a distinctive number of protons (one for hydrogen, 26 for iron, 92 for uranium).
Living organisms are configured into layer upon layer of complex structure. Atoms are assembled into molecules; these react, via complex pathways in every cell, and indirectly lead to the entire interconnected structure that makes up a tree, an insect or a human. We straddle the cosmos and the microworld - intermediate in size between the sun, at a billion metres in diameter, and a molecule, at a billionth of a metre.
Nature attains its maximum complexity on this intermediate scale: anything larger, if it were on a habitable planet, would be vulnerable to breakage or crushing by gravity. We are used to the idea that we are moulded by the micro-world: we are vulnerable to viruses a millionth of a metre in length, and the DNA double-helix molecule encodes our total genetic heritage. And it's just as obvious that we depend on the sun and its power. But what about the still vaster scales?
The nearest stars are millions of times further away than the sun, but we would not exist without them. The 92 elements of the periodic table didn't all emerge from the big bang; they were all synthesised from pristine hydrogen by processes deep inside ancient stars, which died before our solar system came into being. These nuclear processes are well enough understood to explain why oxygen and carbon are common, but gold and uranium are rare, and how these came to be in our solar system. We are "nuclear waste", from the fuel that makes stars shine; indeed each of us contains atoms whose provenance can be traced back to thousands of different stars spread through our Milky Way.
Cosmologists are sometimes berated for being "often in error but never in doubt". But even the more cautious among us are confident that we have now grasped at least the outlines of our entire cosmos, and learned what it is made of. We can trace the evolutionary story back before our solar system formed, back to an epoch, long before there were any stars, when everything sprouted from an intensely hot "genesis event" - the so-called big bang, about 14bn years ago. The first microsecond is shrouded in mystery, but everything that happened since then - the emergence of our complex cosmos from simple beginnings - is the outcome of laws that we can understand, even though the details still elude us. Just as geophysicists have come to understand the processes that made the oceans and sculpted the continents, so astrophysicists can understand our sun and its planets, and indeed the other planets that may orbit distant stars.
But as we've compiled a more complete inventory of what is out in space, something very surprising has emerged. Atoms account for only a small proportion - less than 4 per cent - of the gravitating stuff that holds galaxies together. There has been immense progress in cosmology, but this has revealed a new level of perplexity. This is not an embarrassment; it simply means that our task is just beginning. It is a feature of science that, as we extend the frontiers of our knowledge, then new mysteries, just beyond the frontiers, come into sharper focus.
Other kinds of particles, as yet unknown, must have emerged from the big bang, along with the protons, neutrons and electrons that atoms are made of. Clues to their nature might emerge from the new Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland, but we can also look for them in other ways - for instance, in laboratories deep underground that might detect members of the swarm of such particles that gravitationally bind our galaxy.
Even more mysteriously, there is an extra force latent in space itself. This force is undetectably weak in everyday life; indeed it has no discernable effects anywhere in our solar system. But on the scale of billions of light years, it overwhelms gravity and causes the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. To explain this deep force is a more daunting challenge than to understand the "dark matter". It requires an understanding of the nature of space itself, which most physicists believe has a "grainy" and "atomic" structure. But this structure - "superstrings", "extra dimensions" or "quantum foam" - would be on a scale a trillion trillion times smaller than atoms - 17 more zooms inward from the finest scales we can now probe.
If we ever established contact with intelligent life on another world, there would be barriers to communication. First, they would be many light years away, so signals would take many years to reach them: there would be no scope for quick repartee. There might be an IQ gap. But there would not be an unbridgeable "culture gap". One common culture (in addition to mathematics) would be physics and astronomy. The aliens may live on planet Zog and have seven tentacles, but they would be made of similar atoms to us. Like us, they could trace their origins back to the "big bang" 13.7bn years ago; they would share with us the potentialities of a (perhaps infinite) future.
At its deepest level, physical reality may have a geometric intricacy that would be satisfying to any intelligences on Earth or beyond, just as it would have delighted the Pythagoreans.
Elusive unified theory of everything
Syed Fattahul Alim | Published: June 21, 2008 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00
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