Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves (32 page)

We were both excited about even newer data. In 2013, he had made world headlines by finding the fastest and farthest galaxy ever. And I had just spoken with Shirley Ho, part of the team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that in 2012 had finished measuring data from an astonishing nine hundred thousand galaxies. They’d used sound waves propagating through the younger, denser cosmos—called baryon acoustic oscillations—to gain groundbreaking information, which these days pours in at a rate previously seen only in science fiction movies.

“They show, without a doubt,” she’d said to me, “that space has a flat topology.”

Dan Kelson and I now discussed this with excitement. You see, if the entire expanding universe is finite, with a specific limited inventory of stars and galaxies and energy, it would warp space itself. Light traveling long distances would gradually curve. But this new data supports Carnegie’s previous findings: light doesn’t curve. It travels in laser-straight lines. On the largest scales, space has a flat topology.

This strongly suggests an infinite universe. That there’s no end to the galaxies. And—back to motion—that speeds just keep getting faster and faster the farther you look, without any terminal point.

We already observe galaxies that are essentially flying away at the speed of light. And of course we’re observing them as they were in the distant past, nearly thirteen billion years ago, when their light started out on their long journey to our eyes. Projecting where they must be today, we conclude that they are currently zooming away far faster than light speed.

And it just keeps going. How can anyone comprehend this?1

I asked the president of the American Astronomical Society, Debra Elmegreen.

“Yes, we may indeed have a flat topology and an infinite universe,” she acknowledged, echoing what Shirley Ho had said a week earlier. “But even if we can only observe a tiny fraction of the whole thing, that still amounts to two hundred billion galaxies. It’s quite enough to keep us busy.”

No doubt. But she slightly misspoke. “Infinite” space doesn’t mean “very large.” It doesn’t mean that everything we observe is “a tiny fraction” of the actual universe. Any percentage of infinity is zero. So all we can ever observe is zero percent of the cosmos.

I felt like Alice, endlessly tumbling. Can it be that the entire tapestry we observe is not even a few brushstrokes of the entire cosmic masterpiece? I contacted Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, who cautiously said that while our observations would be able to prove a finite universe if it existed, you can never prove infinity. Nonetheless, given the current data, he believes that “the universe probably is infinite.”

What does that mean regarding cosmic motion and everything else? Well, he said, “either an infinite number of different things happen or a finite number of things happen an infinite number of times. Either of those possibilities is pretty mind-boggling.”

An infinite universe—the increasingly likely reality—also means that the most energetic motion event of which we’re aware, the big bang, was probably just a local happening, a big to-do in the ’hood, confined to the observable universe. As for the larger universe beyond, no one can do more than speculate. Does it simply exist forever? Did it “start” smaller and, thanks to the mysterious dark energy that continuously inflates its expansion rate, ultimately grow into what will become infinite size? If one had to bet the farm on it, smart money would wager that the cosmos never even had a birth. Which means Aristotle was right: we’re part of an eternal entity.

I phoned University of Chicago cosmologist Rocky Kolb to get his take on all this. He just chuckled. An infinite universe, he said, would have “started out everywhere at once, as infinite from the beginning.”

He confirmed that, given the likelihood of infinity, the speed of receding stars and galaxies is limitless. For simplicity’s sake let’s call everything we can observe, to a distance of thirteen billion light-years, “one universe,” or 1 u. Infinite expansion, in which speeds increase exponentially with distance, as we’re already observing, means that at some faraway location galaxies currently increase their separation from us by one universe per second. Call it 1 ups.

We created our original units of measurement based on human experience. A foot was very nearly the length of a man’s shoe, a yard was a long step. A mile was how far a person walks in twenty minutes. Even by these clumsy standards, we are able to state—and perhaps even grasp—that the most distant observed galaxies are something like 170,000 miles farther away from us each second.

But unseen multitudes growing one universe farther away per second? And, say astrophysicists, who grasp that the visible cosmos is barely the iceberg’s tip of all that exists, this still isn’t the end. There must be far more galaxies zooming at the speed of one million ups. One million universes per second. And that’s not the end, either.

We’ve seen the lower terminus of speed. It’s absolute zero, where even atoms stop moving except for some subtle quantum effects. You can’t go any slower than stopped. But the upper limit, long thought to be light speed, has now been penetrated with a vengeance. The gap between ourselves and those unobservable distant galaxies grows in ways we can never visualize because nobody can picture infinite speed. Exploring cosmology is starting to resemble the medieval study of magic. There’s no answer to it.

Is that the last word? Ever-increasing accelerations of limitless objects? All of which are forever unobservable? Fathomless oceans of mysterious entities whose mere contemplation is an encyclopedia of futility? What do we do with this? Should we feel titillated or suicidal?

Happily, there’s a catch. Physics shows us that space itself may be real on some levels but not others. Maybe there’s something fishy about all this distance and velocity in ways our science has yet to fully grasp. Looking at millennia of cataclysmic changes, of bedrock certainties overthrown even in our lifetimes, we see that virtually everything we now know about movement through the cosmos seems alterable.2

“All scientific theories are models of nature based on observation,” explained my friend Tarun Biswas, a relativist and physics professor at the State University of New York. “The problem with cosmology is that its current model is based on negligible observational data. It would still not be a problem if people did not take it so seriously—if they understood that it is only a starter model.” If we can remember that we are still taking our first baby steps in visualizing the cosmos and its contents and its motions, we may be less frustrated by the mad superluminal recession at its fringes.

The fastest speeds, remember, are not those of material objects being accelerated but that of the empty space expanding between us and them. The modern physics chronicle has a certain disconcerting quality: in the quantum phenomenon of tunneling, objects pass through supposedly impenetrable barriers and blithely materialize on the other side. And in the particle entanglement we explored in the previous chapter, something—some knowledge or influence or unknown entity—penetrates unlimited depths of space in zero time. All these suggest that space is a funny thing, with travel possibilities we are only beginning to understand.

We’ve come a long way since Galileo sent metal balls rolling down ramps. We’ve explored the speeds and vagaries of nearly every kind of object in all areas of nature. As for these superluminal galaxies exceeding the limits of our understanding, well, such off-the-scale speeds numb the mind today, but—count on it—they will mean something else to our grandchildren.

A sudden breeze blew the curtain on my office window inward, knocking over a vase overfilled with dried flowers. I swallowed an oath before it even moved past my lips, my eyes drawn to the blowing branches outside the window. Was that you, Torricelli, conjuring some sort of closing statement?

Silly thoughts. I shook them off.

After all, it’s looking more and more like Aristotle and Alhazen were right: motion never began.

There can be no final curtain.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Jane Weinberg for her invaluable help. And to my editors, John Parsley and Barbara Clark, who made everything better.

About the Author

BOB BERMAN, one of America’s top astronomy writers, contributed the popular “Night Watchman” column to Discover for seventeen years. He is the author of The Sun’s Heartbeat and is currently a columnist for Astronomy, a host on Northeast Public Radio, and the science editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac. He lives in Willow, New York.

ALSO BY BOB BERMAN

The Sun’s Heartbeat

Biocentrism (with Robert Lanza, MD)

Shooting for the Moon

Strange Universe

Cosmic Adventure

Secrets of the Night Sky

APPENDIX 1

Table of Selected Natural Speeds

VERY SLOW (NOT VISUALLY DISCERNIBLE)

Stalactites 1 inch / 500 years

Tectonic plates 1–4 inches / year

Mountains 1/7 inch–2.4 inches / year

Sea level (twenty-first century) 2 inches / decade

Toenails 1/2 inch / year

Fingernails 1/8 inch / month

Hair 1/2 inch / month

Trees 1–2 inches / month

Fastest-growing plant (bamboo) 1 inch / hour

Bacteria (typical) 6 inches / hour

Germs (fastest) 1 foot / hour

Undisturbed airborne dust 1 inch / hour

Sperm 1 inch / 4 minutes

Snails (typical) 1 inch / 50 seconds

SLOW BUT VISIBLE

Snails (fastest) 40 feet / hour

Sloths 2 inches–1.7 feet / second

Ants 0.20 miles / hour

Giant tortoises 0.23 miles / hour

VISIBLE

Rivers 3 miles / hour

Human swimmer (fastest) 4–5 miles / hour

Drizzle (salt-grain-size rain) 4–5 miles / hour

Large raindrops (house-fly-size) 22 miles / hour

Cumulus clouds (typical) 20–30 miles / hour

Sharks 30 miles / hour

Greyhounds 45 miles / hour

Ocean waves 45 miles / hour

Fastest land animal (cheetah) 60–70 miles / hour

Large hailstones 105 miles / hour

Meteorite striking rooftop 250 miles / hour

Tsunami at sea 500 miles / hour

SUPERSONIC

Sound through air (thunder) 1/5 mile / second

Earthquake waves 5 miles / second

Earth around sun 18.5 miles / second

Meteoroid entering Earth’s atmosphere 5–40 miles / second

Sun and Earth around galaxy center 140 miles /second

Solar wind particles 300 miles / second

Light through glass 139,600 miles / second

Light through space 186,282.4 miles / second

All are consensus or average values.

APPENDIX 2

A Note on Accuracy and Choice of Units

In a number of cases, authoritative sources cite conflicting information. How fast does Mount Everest rise annually? Some say 3.9 inches, others say 0.15 inch. I have contacted three university geology professors and received conflicting information even from them! What’s the top speed of a sloth? Seemingly reputable sources cite figures that range from one hundred feet a minute to five feet a minute. In such cases of wild disagreement I have included the range of accepted data. In others, where the disagreement was smaller, I have simply listed the average.

While nearly all the world, including the entire science community, exclusively employs metric units, this book mostly expresses itself in US or Imperial units. The choice was deliberate and the reason simple: for the vast majority of Americans as well as many in Great Britain, the content will be more meaningful if expressed in familiar terms. For example, when we reveal the speed of falling rain, few would find “9.8 meters per second” as clear and meaningful as “twenty-two miles per hour.”

Bibliography

The data in this book come from hundreds of sources. For example, a single sentence about the respective growth rates of willow trees and maple trees comes from a poster for homeowners published by a Florida utility company, which obtained the information from the Arbor Day Foundation. For this bibliography, the twenty-one data resources listed below contain trustworthy, meaty content for follow-up explorations.

Books

Bagnold, R. A. The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2005.

Bova, Ben. The Story of Light. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2001.

Considine, Glenn D., ed. Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia. 9th ed. 2 vols. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Interscience, 2002.

Gosnell, Mariana. Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

Leonardo da Vinci. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Edited by Edward MacCurdy. Old Saybrook, Conn.: Konecky & Konecky, 2003.

McLeish, Kenneth. Aristotle. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Meeus, Jean. Astronomical Tables of the Sun, Moon, and Planets. 2nd ed. Richmond, Va.: Willmann-Bell, 1995.

Pliny the Younger. Letters. Translated by William Melmoth. Revised by F. C. T. Bosanquet. Harvard Classics vol. 9, part 4. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14.

Weisberg, Joseph S. Meteorology: The Earth and Its Weather. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Websites

Casio Computer Co., Ltd. Keisan Online Calculator. http://keisan.casio.com/has10/Menu.cgi?path=06000000.Science&charset=utf-8.

Darling, David. The Encyclopedia of Science. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/ETEmain.html.

Elert, Glenn, ed. The Physics Factbook: An Encyclopedia of Scientific Essays. http://hypertextbook.com/facts/.

Goklany, Indur M. “Death and Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events: Global and U.S. Trends, 1900–2004.” Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado at Boulder. http://cstpr.colorado.edu/sparc/research/projects/extreme_events/munich_workshop/goklany.pdf.

Heidorn, Keith C. “The Weather Legacy of Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort.” http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/history/beaufort.htm.

Heron, Melonie. “Deaths: Leading Causes for 2008.” National Vital Statistics Reports 60, no. 6 (June 6, 2012). United States Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_06.pdf.