The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality Page 2

  The central concern of this book is to explain some of the most prominent and pivotal of these revisions to our picture of reality, with an intense focus on those that affect our species' long-term project to understand space and time. From Aristotle to Einstein, from the astrolabe to the Hubble Space Telescope, from the pyramids to mountaintop observatories, space and time have framed thinking since thinking began. With the advent of the modern scientific age, their importance has only been heightened. Over the last three centuries, developments in physics have revealed space and time as the most baffling and most compelling concepts, and as those most instrumental in our scientific analysis of the universe. Such developments have also shown that space and time top the list of age-old scientific constructs that are being fantastically revised by cutting-edge research.

  To Isaac Newton, space and time simply were—they formed an inert, universal cosmic stage on which the events of the universe played themselves out. To his contemporary and frequent rival Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, "space" and "time" were merely the vocabulary of relations between where objects were and when events took place. Nothing more. But to Albert Einstein, space and time were the raw material underlying reality. Through his theories of relativity, Einstein jolted our thinking about space and time and revealed the principal part they play in the evolution of the universe. Ever since, space and time have been the sparkling jewels of physics. They are at once familiar and mystifying; fully understanding space and time has become physics' most daunting challenge and sought-after prize.

  The developments we'll cover in this book interweave the fabric of space and time in various ways. Some ideas will challenge features of space and time so basic that for centuries, if not millennia, they've seemed beyond questioning. Others will seek the link between our theoretical understanding of space and time and the traits we commonly experience. Yet others will raise questions unfathomable within the limited confines of ordinary perceptions.

  We will speak only minimally of philosophy (and not at all about suicide and the meaning of life). But in our scientific quest to solve the mysteries of space and time, we will be unrestrained. From the universe's smallest speck and earliest moments to its farthest reaches and most distant future, we will examine space and time in environments familiar and far-flung, with an unflinching eye seeking their true nature. As the story of space and time has yet to be fully written, we won't arrive at any final assessments. But we will encounter a series of developments—some intensely strange, some deeply satisfying, some experimentally verified, some thoroughly speculative—that will show how close we've come to wrapping our minds around the fabric of the cosmos and touching the true texture of reality.

  Classical Reality

  Historians differ on exactly when the modern scientific age began, but certainly by the time Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton had had their say, it was briskly under way. In those days, the new scientific mind-set was being steadily forged, as patterns found in terrestrial and astronomical data made it increasingly clear that there is an order to all the comings and goings of the cosmos, an order accessible to careful reasoning and mathematical analysis. These early pioneers of modern scientific thought argued that, when looked at the right way, the happenings in the universe not only are explicable but predictable. The power of science to foretell aspects of the future—consistently and quantitatively—had been revealed.

  Early scientific study focused on the kinds of things one might see or experience in everyday life. Galileo dropped weights from a leaning tower (or so legend has it) and watched balls rolling down inclined surfaces; Newton studied falling apples (or so legend has it) and the orbit of the moon. The goal of these investigations was to attune the nascent scientific ear to nature's harmonies. To be sure, physical reality was the stuff of experience, but the challenge was to hear the rhyme and reason behind the rhythm and regularity. Many sung and unsung heroes contributed to the rapid and impressive progress that was made, but Newton stole the show. With a handful of mathematical equations, he synthesized everything known about motion on earth and in the heavens, and in so doing, composed the score for what has come to be known as classical physics.

  In the decades following Newton's work, his equations were developed into an elaborate mathematical structure that significantly extended both their reach and their practical utility. Classical physics gradually became a sophisticated and mature scientific discipline. But shining clearly through all these advances was the beacon of Newton's original insights. Even today, more than three hundred years later, you can see Newton's equations scrawled on introductory-physics chalkboards worldwide, printed on NASA flight plans computing spacecraft trajectories, and embedded within the complex calculations of forefront research. Newton brought a wealth of physical phenomena within a single theoretical framework.

  But while formulating his laws of motion, Newton encountered a critical stumbling block, one that is of particular importance to our story (Chapter 2). Everyone knew that things could move, but what about the arena within which the motion took place? Well, that's space, we'd all answer. But, Newton would reply, what is space? Is space a real physical entity or is it an abstract idea born of the human struggle to comprehend the cosmos? Newton realized that this key question had to be answered, because without taking a stand on the meaning of space and time, his equations describing motion would prove meaningless. Understanding requires context; insight must be anchored.

  And so, with a few brief sentences in his Principia Mathematica, Newton articulated a conception of space and time, declaring them absolute and immutable entities that provided the universe with a rigid, unchangeable arena. According to Newton, space and time supplied an invisible scaffolding that gave the universe shape and structure.

  Not everyone agreed. Some argued persuasively that it made little sense to ascribe existence to something you can't feel, grasp, or affect. But the explanatory and predictive power of Newton's equations quieted the critics. For the next two hundred years, his absolute conception of space and time was dogma.

  Relativistic Reality

  The classical Newtonian worldview was pleasing. Not only did it describe natural phenomena with striking accuracy, but the details of the description—the mathematics—aligned tightly with experience. If you push something, it speeds up. The harder you throw a ball, the more impact it has when it smacks into a wall. If you press against something, you feel it pressing back against you. The more massive something is, the stronger its gravitational pull. These are among the most basic properties of the natural world, and when you learn Newton's framework, you see them represented in his equations, clear as day. Unlike a crystal ball's inscrutable hocus-pocus, the workings of Newton's laws were on display for all with minimal mathematical training to take in fully. Classical physics provided a rigorous grounding for human intuition.

  Newton had included the force of gravity in his equations, but it was not until the 1860s that the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell extended the framework of classical physics to take account of electrical and magnetic forces. Maxwell needed additional equations to do so and the mathematics he employed required a higher level of training to grasp fully. But his new equations were every bit as successful at explaining electrical and magnetic phenomena as Newton's were at describing motion. By the late 1800s, it was evident that the universe's secrets were proving no match for the power of human intellectual might.

  Indeed, with the successful incorporation of electricity and magnetism, there was a growing sense that theoretical physics would soon be complete. Physics, some suggested, was rapidly becoming a finished subject and its laws would shortly be chiseled in stone. In 1894, the renowned experimental physicist Albert Michelson remarked that "most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established" and he quoted an "eminent scientist"—most believe it was the British physicist Lord Kelvin—as saying that all that remained were details of determining some numbers to a greater number of
decimal places. 1 In 1900, Kelvin himself did note that "two clouds" were hovering on the horizon, one to do with properties of light's motion and the other with aspects of the radiation objects emit when heated, 2 but there was a general feeling that these were mere details, which, no doubt, would soon be addressed.

  Within a decade, everything changed. As anticipated, the two problems Kelvin had raised were promptly addressed, but they proved anything but minor. Each ignited a revolution, and each required a fundamental rewriting of nature's laws. The classical conceptions of space, time, and reality—the ones that for hundreds of years had not only worked but also concisely expressed our intuitive sense of the world— were overthrown.

  The relativity revolution, which addressed the first of Kelvin's "clouds," dates from 1905 and 1915, when Albert Einstein completed his special and general theories of relativity (Chapter 3). While struggling with puzzles involving electricity, magnetism, and light's motion, Einstein realized that Newton's conception of space and time, the corner-stone of classical physics, was flawed. Over the course of a few intense weeks in the spring of 1905, he determined that space and time are not independent and absolute, as Newton had thought, but are enmeshed and relative in a manner that flies in the face of common experience. Some ten years later, Einstein hammered a final nail in the Newtonian coffin by rewriting the laws of gravitational physics. This time, not only did Einstein show that space and time are part of a unified whole, he also showed that by warping and curving they participate in cosmic evolution. Far from being the rigid, unchanging structures envisioned by Newton, space and time in Einstein's reworking are flexible and dynamic.

  The two theories of relativity are among humankind's most precious achievements, and with them Einstein toppled Newton's conception of reality. Even though Newtonian physics seemed to capture mathematically much of what we experience physically, the reality it describes turns out not to be the reality of our world. Ours is a relativistic reality. Yet, because the deviation between classical and relativistic reality is manifest only under extreme conditions (such as extremes of speed and gravity), Newtonian physics still provides an approximation that proves extremely accurate and useful in many circumstances. But utility and reality are very different standards. As we will see, features of space and time that for many of us are second nature have turned out to be figments of a false Newtonian perspective.

  Quantum Reality

  The second anomaly to which Lord Kelvin referred led to the quantum revolution, one of the greatest upheavals to which modern human understanding has ever been subjected. By the time the fires subsided and the smoke cleared, the veneer of classical physics had been singed off the newly emerging framework of quantum reality.

  A core feature of classical physics is that if you know the positions and velocities of all objects at a particular moment, Newton's equations, together with their Maxwellian updating, can tell you their positions and velocities at any other moment, past or future. Without equivocation, classical physics declares that the past and future are etched into the present. This feature is also shared by both special and general relativity. Although the relativistic concepts of past and future are subtler than their familiar classical counterparts (Chapters 3 and 5), the equations of relativity, together with a complete assessment of the present, determine them just as completely.

  By the 1930s, however, physicists were forced to introduce a whole new conceptual schema called quantum mechanics. Quite unexpectedly, they found that only quantum laws were capable of resolving a host of puzzles and explaining a variety of data newly acquired from the atomic and subatomic realm. But according to the quantum laws, even if you make the most perfect measurements possible of how things are today, the best you can ever hope to do is predict the probability that things will be one way or another at some chosen time in the future, or that things were one way or another at some chosen time in the past. The universe, according to quantum mechanics, is not etched into the present; the universe, according to quantum mechanics, participates in a game of chance.

  Although there is still controversy over precisely how these developments should be interpreted, most physicists agree that probability is deeply woven into the fabric of quantum reality. Whereas human intuition, and its embodiment in classical physics, envision a reality in which things are always definitely one way or another, quantum mechanics describes a reality in which things sometimes hover in a haze of being partly one way and partly another. Things become definite only when a suitable observation forces them to relinquish quantum possibilities and settle on a specific outcome. The outcome that's realized, though, cannot be predicted—we can predict only the odds that things will turn out one way or another.

  This, plainly speaking, is weird. We are unused to a reality that remains ambiguous until perceived. But the oddity of quantum mechanics does not stop here. At least as astounding is a feature that goes back to a paper Einstein wrote in 1935 with two younger colleagues, Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky, that was intended as an attack on quantum theory. 3 With the ensuing twists of scientific progress, Einstein's paper can now be viewed as among the first to point out that quantum mechanics— if taken at face value—implies that something you do over here can be instantaneously linked to something happening over there, regardless of distance. Einstein considered such instantaneous connections ludicrous and interpreted their emergence from the mathematics of quantum theory as evidence that the theory was in need of much development before it would attain an acceptable form. But by the 1980s, when both theoretical and technological developments brought experimental scrutiny to bear on these purported quantum absurdities, researchers confirmed that there can be an instantaneous bond between what happens at widely separated locations. Under pristine laboratory conditions, what Einstein thought absurd really happens (Chapter 4).

  The implications of these features of quantum mechanics for our picture of reality are a subject of ongoing research. Many scientists, myself included, view them as part of a radical quantum updating of the meaning and properties of space. Normally, spatial separation implies physical independence. If you want to control what's happening on the other side of a football field, you have to go there, or, at the very least, you have to send someone or something (the assistant coach, bouncing air molecules conveying speech, a flash of light to get someone's attention, etc.) across the field to convey your influence. If you don't—if you remain spatially isolated—you will have no impact, since intervening space ensures the absence of a physical connection. Quantum mechanics challenges this view by revealing, at least in certain circumstances, a capacity to transcend space; long-range quantum connections can bypass spatial separation. Two objects can be far apart in space, but as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, it's as if they're a single entity. Moreover, because of the tight link between space and time found by Einstein, the quantum connections also have temporal tentacles. We'll shortly encounter some clever and truly wondrous experiments that have recently explored a number of the startling spatio-temporal interconnections entailed by quantum mechanics and, as we'll see, they forcefully challenge the classical, intuitive worldview many of us hold.

  Despite these many impressive insights, there remains one very basic feature of time—that it seems to have a direction pointing from past to future—for which neither relativity nor quantum mechanics has provided an explanation. Instead, the only convincing progress has come from research in an area of physics called cosmology.

  Cosmological Reality

  To open our eyes to the true nature of the universe has always been one of physics' primary purposes. It's hard to imagine a more mind-stretching experience than learning, as we have over the last century, that the reality we experience is but a glimmer of the reality that is. But physics also has the equally important charge of explaining the elements of reality that we actually do experience. From our rapid march through the history of physics, it might seem as if this has already been achieved, as if ordinary experi
ence is addressed by pre-twentieth-century advances in physics. To some extent, this is true. But even when it comes to the everyday, we are far from a full understanding. And among the features of common experience that have resisted complete explanation is one that taps into one of the deepest unresolved mysteries in modern physics—the mystery that the great British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington called the arrow of time. 4

  We take for granted that there is a direction to the way things unfold in time. Eggs break, but they don't unbreak; candles melt, but they don't unmelt; memories are of the past, never of the future; people age, but they don't unage. These asymmetries govern our lives; the distinction between forward and backward in time is a prevailing element of experiential reality. If forward and backward in time exhibited the same symmetry we witness between left and right, or back and forth, the world would be unrecognizable. Eggs would unbreak as often as they broke; candles would unmelt as often as they melted; we'd remember as much about the future as we do about the past; people would unage as often as they aged. Certainly, such a time-symmetric reality is not our reality. But where does time's asymmetry come from? What is responsible for this most basic of all time's properties?