On the Origin of Time

Chapter 1

A Paradox

Es könnte sich eine seltsame Analogie ergeben, daß das Okular auch des riesigsten Fernrohrs nicht größer sein darf, als unser Auge.

A curious correlation may emerge in that the eyepiece of even the biggest telescope cannot be larger than the human eye.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen

The late 1990s were the culmination of a golden decade of discovery in cosmology. Long regarded as a realm of unrestrained speculation, cosmology—the science that dares to study the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe as a whole—was finally coming of age. Scientists all over the world were buzzing with excitement about spectacular observations from sophisticated satellites and Earth-based instruments that were transforming our picture of the universe beyond recognition. It was as if the universe was speaking to us. These developments posed quite a reality check for theoreticians, who were told to rein in their speculation and flesh out the predictions of their models.

In cosmology we discover the past. Cosmologists are time travelers, and telescopes their time machines. When we look into deep space we look back into deep time, because the light from distant stars and galaxies has traveled millions or even billions of years to reach us. Already in 1927 the Belgian priest-astronomer Georges Lemaître predicted that space, when considered over such long periods of time, expands. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that advanced telescope technology made it possible to trace the universe’s history of expansion.

This history held some surprises. For example, in 1998 astronomers discovered that the stretching of space had begun to speed up around five billion years ago, even though all known forms of matter attract and should therefore slow down the expansion. Since then, physicists have wondered whether this weird cosmic acceleration is driven by Einstein’s cosmological constant, an invisible ether-like dark energy that causes gravity to repel rather than to attract. One astronomer quipped that the universe looks like Los Angeles: one-third substance and two-thirds energy.

Obviously, if the universe is expanding now, it must have been more compressed in the past. If you run cosmic history backward—as a mathematical exercise, of course—you find that all matter would once have been very densely packed together and also very hot, since matter heats up and radiates when it is squeezed together. This primeval state is known as the hot big bang. Astronomical observations since the golden 1990s have pinned down the age of the universe—the time elapsed since the big bang—to 13.8 billion years, give or take 20 million.

Curious to learn more about the universe’s birth, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a satellite in May 2009 in a bid to complete the most detailed and ambitious scanning of the night sky ever undertaken. The target was an intriguing pattern of flickers in the heat radiation left over from the big bang. Having traveled through the expanding cosmos for 13.8 billion years, the heat from the universe’s birth reaching us today is cold: 2.725 K, or about –270 degrees Celsius. Radiation at this temperature lies mainly in the microwave band of the electromagnetic spectrum, so the remnant heat is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB radiation.

ESA’s efforts to capture the ancient heat culminated in 2013 when a curious speckled image resembling a pointillist painting decorated the front pages of the world’s newspapers. This image is reproduced in figure 2, which shows a projection of the entire sky, compiled in exquisite detail from millions of pixels representing the temperature of the relic CMB radiation in different directions in space. Such detailed observations of the CMB radiation provide a snapshot of what the universe was like a mere 380,000 years after the big bang, when it had cooled to a few thousand degrees, cold enough to liberate the primeval radiation, which has traveled unhindered through the cosmos ever since.

The CMB sky map confirms that the relic big bang heat is nearly uniformly distributed throughout space, although not quite perfectly. The speckles in the image represent minuscule temperature variations indeed, tiny flickers of no more than a hundred-thousandth of a degree. These slight variations, however small, are crucially important, because they trace the seeds around which galaxies would eventually form. Had the hot big bang been perfectly uniform everywhere, there would be no galaxies today.

The ancient CMB snapshot marks our cosmological horizon: We cannot look back any farther. But we can glean something about processes operating in yet earlier epochs from cosmological theory. Just as paleontologists learn from stone fossils what life on Earth used to be like, cosmologists can, by deciphering the patterns encoded in these fossil flickers, stitch together what might have happened before the relic heat map was imprinted on the sky. This turns the CMB into a cosmological Rosetta Stone that enables us to trace the universe’s history even farther back, perhaps as far back as a fraction of a second after its birth.

And what we learn is intriguing. As we will see in chapter 4, the temperature variations of the CMB radiation indicate that the universe initially expanded fast, then slowed down, and, more recently (about five billion years ago), began accelerating again. Slowing down appears to be the exception rather than the rule on the scales of deep time and deep space. This is one of those seemingly fortuitous biofriendly properties of the universe, for only in a slowing universe does matter aggregate and cluster to form galaxies. If it hadn’t been for the extended near-pause in expansion in our past, there would, again, be no galaxies and no stars, and thus no life.

In effect, the universe’s expansion history was at the center of one of the very first moments in which the conditions for our existence slipped into modern cosmological thinking. This moment occurred in the early 1930s, when Lemaître made a remarkable sketch in one of his purple notebooks of what he called a “hesitating” universe, one with an expansion history much like the bumpy ride that would emerge from observations seventy years later (see insert, plate 3). Lemaître embraced the idea of a long pause in the expansion by considering the universe’s habitability. He knew that astronomical observations of nearby galaxies pointed to a high expansion rate in recent times. But when he ran the evolution of the universe backward in time at this same rate, he found that the galaxies must all have been on top of one another no more than a billion years ago. This was impossible, of course, for Earth and the sun are much older than that. To avoid an obvious conflict between the history of the universe and that of our solar system, he imagined an intermediate era of very slow expansion, to give stars, planets, and life time to develop.

In the decades since Lemaître’s pioneering work, physicists have continued to stumble across many more such “happy coincidences.” Make but a small change in almost any of its basic physical properties, from the behavior of atoms and molecules to the structure of the cosmos on the largest scales, and the universe’s habitability would hang in the balance.

Take gravity, the force that sculpts and governs the large-scale universe. Gravity is extremely weak; it requires the mass of Earth just to keep our feet on the ground. But if gravity were stronger, stars would shine more brightly and hence die far younger, leaving no time for complex life to evolve on any of the orbiting planets warmed by their heat.

Or consider the tiny variations, one part in a hundred thousand, in the temperature of the relic big bang radiation. Were these differences slightly larger—say one part in ten thousand—the seeds of cosmic structures would have mostly grown into giant black holes instead of hospitable galaxies with abundant stars. Conversely, even smaller variations—one millionth or less—would produce no galaxies at all. The hot big bang got it just right. One way or another it set off the universe on a supremely biofriendly trajectory, the fruits of which would not become evident until several billion years later. Why?

Other examples of such happy cosmic coincidences abound. We live in a universe with three large dimensions of space. Is there anything special about three? There is. Adding just a single space dimension renders atoms and planetary orbits unstable. Earth would spiral into the sun instead of tracing out a stable orbit around it. Universes with five or more large space dimensions have even bigger problems. Worlds with only two space dimensions, on the other hand, may not provide enough room for complex systems to function, as figure 3 illustrates. Three dimensions of space seems just right for life.

Moreover, this uncanny fitness for life extends to the universe’s chemical properties, which are determined by the properties of elementary particles and the forces acting between them. For example, neutrons are a tad heavier than protons. The neutron-to-proton mass ratio is 1.0014. Had it been the other way around, all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. But without protons there would be no atomic nuclei and hence no atoms and no chemistry.