A History of the Universe: Volume I: Complexity

By Henry Kong M. D.

Take a mind blowing journey beyond the furthest stars, from the Big Bang to the end of time. Witness the evolution of complexity, from organic chemistry to the Dinosaurs. Probe the deepest recesses of the human mind in search consciousness itself. It's all here in this dazzling first volume of Henry Kong's history of the Universe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 13, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595860227

Henry Kong M. D.

Dr. Henry Kong studied biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, British History at Oxford, and Medicine at Rutgers. He is currently an Internist with a private practice in Toms River, New Jersey.

Book preview

Contents

Foreword

1

Origins

2

Orbits

3

Life

4

Diversity

5

Minds

Dedicated to the memory of Sir Isaac Newton, Fellow of the Royal Society Trinity College, Cambridge, Class of 1664 The greatest physicist of all time.

Dedicated to the memory of Charles Darwin, Fellow of the Royal Society Christ’s College, Cambridge, Class of 1831 The greatest biologist of all time.

Dedicated to Anne Treisman, Fellow of the Royal Society Newnham College, Cambridge, Class of 1957 The greatest psychologist of all time.

Foreword  

In his second book Henry Kong departs from his previous autobiographical and scientific exploration of autism in More Self than Self: At Autism’s Edge. His ambitious undertaking now is nothing less than a history of the universe, of which this first volume, Complexity, covers the period from the Big Bang to the evolution of human consciousness. The solar system, the origin of life, and its diversity are covered along the way. Dr. Kong intersperses his narrative with biographical vignettes about the scientists who made the key discoveries, and also includes a counterfactual question in each chapter, stimulating us to wonder what would have happened if history had been just a little bit different.

This volume will appeal to anyone with a sense of curiosity about the universe, our planet or the life forms that inhabit it. The style is accessible and engaging to the lay person without sacrificing accuracy. The story moves from physics to biology to psychology, the three major branches of science, allowing Dr. Kong to demonstrate his wide-ranging knowledge and interests. Future volumes will focus on human history, especially in the West. Dr. Kong’s goal is to make science and history comprehensible to everyone, and his enthusiasm for the subject material is contagious.

Dr. Jessica Treisman Professor of Developmental Genetics NYU School of Medicine

1

Origins  

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In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

—Genesis 1; 1-3

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire; But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

—Robert Frost

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.

—W. H. Auden ‘The More Loving One’

A blood red sun sets across the vastness of the Australian outback. Deep orange shadows carve into ancient sandstone crags of the towering monolith. The sky turns a melancholy purple, then deep indigo, then black. We are soon engulfed in a chilly twilight. It is May, 1995: dreamtime in Ulura.

I am joined at the Ayers Rock sunset viewing site by a hundred other tourists. We relax with glasses of champagne as a guide tells us aboriginal creation stories. People first arrived at this spot 40,000 years ago. They must have been awed at the sight of the giant rock rising out of the nearly featureless plain. Who could have created it? How did it get there? Perhaps it came from the gods above, who dream such dreams amongst the stars.

We look up into the sky. The stars are beautiful tonight. Thousands are twinkling all around. I have never seen so many back home. Our guide points out the creamy haze of the Milky Way, the view directly into the edge of our own galaxy. Then we spot the constellations: Sculptor, Aquarius, Sagittarius, Orion the hunter, Canis major the dog, and, nestled within Centarus, the Southern Cross.

Squinting through thick glasses, I try to make out the fainter stars of the Cross. I imagine I can see some of them, but then they disappear. Our long gone Aboriginal cousin saw about as much all those thousands of years ago. To him, this was the entire universe: the unforgiving desert that gave life and took it away, the hot sun, the bare rocks, the azure sky, and the twinkling stars of the night.

The Aboriginal people believed that the lights they saw in the nighttime were very old, the products of an ancient dream. What they did not realize was that they were actually looking back to that time. Light is very fast (300 million meters per second), but it is not infinitely fast. Nuclear reactions in those stars generate tiny particles called photons that make up starlight. The light travels outward in an expanding sphere at 300 million meters every second. When the photon shock front hits the back of the eye of an observer at Ayers Rock, she sees the stars as they were when that light left the inside of the star tens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of years ago. The stars are so very far away, that every time we look up, we are looking far back in time. For all we know, some of those stars I try so hard to see may not even be there anymore. Information can only travel as fast as a beam of light. If today we see a star 40,000 light years away explode, it actually happened when an Aborigine astronomer first saw it from Ayers Rock.

On that magical night, I saw thousands of stars. So did the first Australians. Modern astronomers can see a lot more. They have telescopes whose lenses concentrate light far too faint to see otherwise. They have machines that are sensitive to light whose wavelengths are too long or too short for our rods and cones. These include gamma rays, x-rays, microwaves, and radio waves. And they have ways of recording these images on paper, videotape, or computer drives that allow them to analyze the stars indoors, in broad daylight, automatically.

The first telescopes (built by Dutch lens grinders in the early seventeenth century) revealed the sky to be full of stars invisible to the unaided eye. But there was more. Faint fuzzy shapes were scattered about. Many were irregular blobs, but others traced neat ovals, circles, and spirals. For the next three hundred years, astronomers did not know what to make of them, largely because they couldn’t figure out how far away the things were. The standard means of calculating distance in those days was triangulation or ‘parallax’. It works by comparing the position of an unknown object from two different vantage points whose distance is known. In 1672, parallax was successfully used to determine the distance to Mars (between 100 million and 390 million kilometers depending on the location of the two planets in their orbits) by comparing its position in the sky from two different points separated by 8000 kilometers (Paris and French Guyana) simultaneously. Then, by using Kepler’s third law (which relates an object’s orbital period to its orbital radius), astronomers were able to calculate the size of the Martian orbit, and from that extrapolate the orbits of all the other known planets. They even used parallax to measure the distances to some of the nearby stars using the now known distances to the other planets as the yardstick. Even the nearest stars were found to be very very far away.

The nearest stars, Alpha and Proxima Centauri, are about four light years away. The stars of the Southern Cross are from 15 to 100 light years away. But how far away are those fuzzy ‘nebulae’? Most are too far away for even the parallax method. Some astronomers thought they were relatively close clouds of dust in the Milky Way. Others believed they were huge collections of stars far beyond our galaxy. The debate dragged on into the early years of the twentieth century. By then, new methods of measuring distances were devised. One uses the brightness of certain stars called Cepheid variables. All Cepheids are equally bright at any given distance. This makes them, in effect, ‘standard candles’. By comparing the brightness of a nearby Cepheid of a known distance (gauged by parallax) with that of unknown distance, astronomers could eventually tell how far away all the Cephids were. In the early 1920’s, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble found Cepheid variables inside some of these spiral nebulae. They were millions of light years away. This conclusively proved that although some of the nebulae were gas clouds within our own galaxy, others were galaxies in their own right.

Using distance markers to the stars and galaxies, we can map our position relative to the Milky Way and beyond. Let’s take an imaginary trip on a beam of light. We depart the Ayers Rock observation post at 300 million meters a second. In a tiny fraction of a blink of an eye, we zoom through the atmosphere. Looking down, we see the lights of Alice Springs, then Sydney, then the outline of Australia itself quickly recede away. The entire earth becomes a shrinking pale blue dot studded with wispy white clouds and gray continents. Within a second and a half, we pass the moon. Over the next few hours, we cross the orbits of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. A few days later, we have left the solar system (although we will still feel the pull of the sun’s immense gravity for the next year). Now the view is pretty much like it was from Ayers Rock, except for the absence of the planets, and the addition of a particularly bright point of light, our sun, in a starry background.

At this point, we pass through a very dilute cloud of comets slowly orbiting the sun hundreds of billions of miles out. We continue to travel along the orbital disk of the solar system (called the plane of the ecliptic). Because the ecliptic plane is roughly perpendicular to the orbital plane of the Milky Way (the galactic plane), we will eventually rise above our own galaxy. But first we need to get past the nearby stars. This takes a few years. If we can contract the elapsed time (which is what actually happens—more on this later), the Southern Cross slowly becomes distorted and eventually passes away from view one star at a time. We zoom past star clusters, vast gas clouds, and supernova remnants within the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. This structure is composed of a hundred million stars (including our own) stretched over a thousand light years in thickness and 12,000 light years in length. Just like the swirls of a tornado or the water going down your kitchen drain, it is formed by tidal forces. The Orion Arm gently arcs along the galactic plane at 30,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way. If we travel for tens of thousands of years, the entire galaxy begins to come majestically into view. It is a heartbreakingly beautiful sight: an unbelievably vast pointillist painting of a hundred billion suns arranged in a slowly revolving blue-white pinwheel 100,000 light years in diameter surrounding a bright orange bulge of cosmic gas. In the very center lurks a monstrous black hole 2.6 million times more massive than the sun.

Let’s continue our journey for a million more years. The view doesn’t change much. We pass through a vast amount of seemingly empty intergalactic space, punctuated by an occasional small galaxy. These are among the dozen satellite galaxies of our Milky Way. Two million light years away is the brilliant Andromeda, a larger spiral. The Andromeda and the Milky Way are approaching each other at 300 kilometers per second locked in a vast elliptical orbit around their common center of mass. These two large spirals along with about 30 smaller galaxies make up our ‘Local Group’.

The Local Group itself is part of a larger cluster of hundreds of galaxies slowly revolving around each other through gravitational pull. About 60 million light years away is a richer conglomeration of over 1000 galaxies, the Virgo Cluster. Near the center of Virgo is a galaxy our astronomers have called M87, which contains a super massive black hole of a billion stellar masses. The Local Group lies at the periphery of an even larger structure centered on the Virgo Cluster. Unimaginatively, this is called the Virgo Supercluster. It is a truly majestic aggregation of perhaps 10,000 galaxies straddling 150 million light years.

But wait. We are not yet finished. Like an absurd Russian doll, the Virgo Supercluster is actually embedded in a loose network of other nearby superclusters making up a gigantic unnamed sheet of millions of galaxies stretching out over a billion light years. This is over 5 percent of the entire observable universe. These galactic sheets are connected to each other by gently curving tendrils that enclose bubbles of empty space. Each bubble is hundreds of millions of light years in diameter. These truly vast empty spaces are lonely beyond comprehension. This is the actual macroscopic architecture of the cosmos. The American astronomer George Smoot, who helped map the microwave background portrait of the universe seen on the cover of this book, likened it to gazing upon the face of God. Others say it looks like a piece of Swiss cheese or a sponge.

What lies beyond all the Christmas lights and Swiss cheese? When we point the most powerful telescopes as far out as they can go, we see the light from very young galaxies. These galaxies were formed within the first billion years of the creation event, and their light has had to travel for 12 billion years to reach us. When the Hubble space telescope took close up photos of these distant objects, they appeared to be rather small but bright galaxies full of newborn stars whose light was shifted to the far red end of the electromagnetic spectrum. They are called quasars, and at their cores are massive black holes. But the Hubble took very old portraits. Who knows what these things look like now? We would have to wait another 12 billion years to find out.

Visible light is made up of photons vibrating at a particular frequency. When stimulated by an external energy source, the photons vibrate more frequently. This shortens their wavelength. The higher the energy, the faster the vibration, the shorter the wavelength. Conversely, the lower the energy, the slower the vibration, the longer the wavelength. Gamma rays, x-rays, and ultraviolet rays have short wavelengths. Infrared, microwaves, and radiowaves have long wavelengths. In between is visible light. Visible light itself is made up of components vibrating at different rates. Isaac Newton pointed this out by shining white light through a prism. We see the different components as the colors of the rainbow. Each color is produced by photons of a specific wavelength. Red light is the least energetic, and thus has the longest wavelength (about 0.000 000 64 meters or 640 nanometers), while violet light has the shortest wavelength (400 nanometers). Unlike certain animals and special telescopes, our eyes are not sensitive to light radiation longer than red (infrared) or shorter than violet (ultraviolet).

The faster an object is moving away from an observer, the more shifted its light is towards the red end of the spectrum. This is because the light waves given off by the object are stretched out. On the other hand, if an object is moving towards the observer, its light is scrunched together into shorter wavelengths. It will appear bluish. This is called the Doppler effect. Interestingly, the further out an object is in space, the more its light is shifted to red (quasars billions of light years away have some of the largest red shifts). This must mean that the more distant the object, the faster it is receding away. By quantifying the amount of red shift, scientists can calculate an object’s speed. Astronomers have found that the entire universe has a red shift; the cosmos is expanding.

In 1965, the radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were conducting a routine check on a receiving dish at Bell Labs in New Jersey, when they unexpectedly detected a faint microwave signal coming from all directions in the sky. After ruling out all possible man made sources, they concluded that this ‘microwave background’ radiation originated in deep space. In fact, it is coming from the very edge of space and time.

The cosmic microwave background has a temperature of 2.7 degrees Kelvin, or 2.7 degrees above the coldest possible temperature. [The Kelvin scale, named in