Insignificant but Special: The Story of Life on Earth

By Bruce Sanford

Life is a rarity. We know of no other planet where life exists other than on Earth. Life started out in a most simple form, then proceeded along a labyrinth of evolutionary pathways that resulted in extraordinary and unfathomable designs. This is a journey, from the beginning of time to this very day, guided by circumstances, contingencies, and chaos that has governed Earth's living assemblage. But life's presence was not destined to just happen. If it wasn't for our moon, which gave Earth orbital and rotational stability, life would not be as we know it today. If it wasn't for volcanic eruptions, Earth would be an ice-clad, frozen globe. If it wasn't for one of the tiniest of living organisms that produced a toxic gas, complex life would not have arisen. If it wasn't for one particular extinction event, Homo sapiens would not be walking this planet, and you would not be reading this now. If it wasn't for a million other things, life would be much different, or not at all. Earth made life, from the meek to the monstrous, from the banal to the bizarre, from the humblest to the haughtiest. Strap yourself in alongside a window seat and witness the passing of time, to view the episodes of change, and how the making of life became the greatest story on Earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886541755

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Insignificant but Special

The Story of Life on Earth

Bruce Sanford

Copyright © 2022 Bruce Sanford

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 979-8-88654-173-1 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88654-175-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

A Short Preface

Coming Together

Time

The Beginning

Singularity Happens

Microwave Background Radiation

Cities of Stars

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, How I Wonder What You Are…

Energy and Entropy

A Shot from Afar

The Joining of Our Companion (Bodily Meeting)

Collections of Rocks

Fire and Brimstone

The Rocky Ones

Water, Water Everywhere

Life?

Back in Time

Uplifting the Past

Deep Time

Fire and Ice

Why?

It's All About Time

Benefits of War

Undersea Mountains

Living Tectonics

In a Single Drop

The Elements of Cycling

The Making of Minerals

Rise of the Free Radicals

It's All Connected

What Is Life?

Life's Origin

Environmental Stabilization

Snowball Earth

Meeting of the Minds

Telltale Outcrops

Cyclopentanoperhydrophenanthrenes

Predators from the Swamp

The Second Coming

Evolution and Extinction

No One in Charge

Tribute to Poop

The Light Cocktail

The New and the Weird

From Mud to Shale

The Assumption and the Theory

The Other Guy

The Other Guy

Alternation of Generation

Millipedes, Spiders, and Scorpions, Oh My!

Missing Links

Finding Fossils

Nature's Solar Panel

Time of Change

The Permian Extinction

On Land and in the Air

Blind White Fish of Persia

Evolution and Extinction

The New World

Number Four

Size Matters

Dinosaur Dominance

The Colors of Land

Look! Up in the Sky! It's A…

In the Meantime

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Past to Present

Bridging the Fifth

Flowers and Insects

Home on the Range

Back to the Sea

In the Shadow of Primates

Anthropocene March

What's Next?

References

About the Author

A Short Preface

Life on earth is not just about biology. It's about everything—from the making of the universe to the preening of an egret and to the hands that brew a cup of coffee. The study of life takes in all the disciplines, from astronomy to zoology, including some disciplines that have not yet acquired a name. With that in mind, I wasn't sure how to start this book. I didn't want to write it like a science textbook. I wanted more freedom to explore the various topics in a different way, keeping it not just informative but also entertaining, hoping you, the reader, will continue to turn the pages, as I poke at curiosities, things that seemingly have nothing to do with the subject, but making it come together since everything is connected.

As I started writing, I found that the contingencies that directed life's progression were innumerable. Thus, the question became Where do I stop? I could have included many, many more, but I decided to include only what I thought to be the major drivers of life, ones that were, at least, somewhat measurable toward the making, and the unmaking, of life.

Nonetheless, my main goal was to impart an appreciation of our planet. Earth was forged with all the ingredients to make life, not just simple life, but complex life, brought to you in amazing designs, fashioned by the contingencies of time. Nowhere else in the universe would life proceed exactly as it has on earth. And perhaps the most amazing thing is that we, as cognitive organisms, are here to witness it. We can ponder the evolution of life, from the simple to the complex, its strangeness and its beauty, and look upon it not just with wonder but with contemplative thought as to how it came to be.

Major Geological Divisions of Earth's History

Major Geological Division of the Phanerozoic Eon

Mya (million years ago)

Section 1

Coming Together

Time

I wish it need not have happened in my time, said Frodo. So do I, said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such time. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

Time is embedded in us—in our daily lives, activities, thoughts, and language, the words and phrases we use every day, such as sometimes, anytime, all the time, buying time, springtime, right on time, timing is everything, time waits for no one, we're out of time, once upon a time, it's about time, one day at a time, time after time.

The meaning of time is different for different organisms. I'm sure bacteria don't ponder time. If they did, they would worry too much, since their lives are so short. A tree exists, and it can live for many years, but it's not likely that a tree is aware of the passage of time. I have two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. Both of them are old. They sleep a lot. Now I'm pressing it to say that they are aware of their existence, but I often wonder how they perceive time. Indeed, they have some perception of the past (like the walks they enjoyed) and some inkling of the near future (like walks they will be going on). But mostly, they live for the present, not thinking about what's ahead. I'm sure I think more about their inevitable mortality than they do. But creatures of the genus and species Homo sapiens spend much time (there we go again) thinking about the past, present, and future. We are conscious animals. We are aware. But this awareness is limited to how we perceive time.

Time moves in one direction—past to future, often referred to as the Arrow of Time. Without time, nothing would change, but with change, time exists. Regardless of Hollywood's love of time travel movies, time is irreversible. However, that doesn't stop them from making movies about time machines and time travel. I clicked on the internet to see how many time travel movies are out there. The first site gave a list of 770 films (OMG), including ones such as Back to the Future (three versions), Star Wars (lots of versions), Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Planet of the Apes, and Groundhog Day, just to name a few. One of the classics is The Time Machine with Rod Taylor. Then there's Somewhere in Time starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. That was kind of a dumb one, but it had great music.

Stephen Hawking once asked a simple question: If time travel is possible, then where are the tourists from the future?

Anyway, let's get back to the present.

Time is not reversible, regardless of what science fiction portrays. Time moves from past to future. In doing so, changes happen that are in accord with the laws of thermodynamics. There are four laws, but we're just concerned about the first two. Here they are as defined by Wikipedia.

First law: The law of the conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another but can be neither created nor destroyed.

Second law: The second law indicates the irreversibility of natural processes and, in many cases, the tendency of a natural process to lead toward spatial homogeneity of matter and energy, and especially of temperature. It can be formulated in a variety of interesting and important ways.

The first law is reasonably self-explanatory, and it says that energy cannot be created or destroyed. For example, if you boil water in a saucepan, energy from the gas flame (or electric burner) is transmitted into the pan of water. When water begins to boil (if you don't stand there watching it; otherwise, time will slow down), steam rises and dissipates into the air. You might think that energy was lost, but not so. The heated pan of water, together with the heat that radiated into the air, was equivalent to the energy produced by the stove. There was a loss of usable or potential energy, but not total energy. That dissipation, or radiation of heat, is carried away as kinetic energy.

The second law needs a bit more explanation. The term spatial homogeneity is another way of saying entropy, which is essentially the process of order moving toward disorder, or spatial homogeneity. Total energy still exists, but some of it is no longer useful. It's a change that takes place over a certain amount of time. Entropy can simply mean the change that results in the loss of usable energy. The amount of loss of usable energy is dependent upon the action. That action can be the making of the universe or boiling water in a saucepan. If the pan of water is left to cool back down to ambient temperature, then all usable energy is lost. Energy went into spatial homogeneity, where temperatures are cold enough, and atoms are far enough apart that they no longer react with one another. Both potential and kinetic energy are lost.

There is a universal tendency toward randomness, entropy going from a low state to a high state, order to disorder. Entropy will eventually do us all in. The universe's ultimate fate will eventually reach total randomness or disorder; no further actions happen; changes no longer occur.

Does that mean time will no longer exist?

Not an uplifting thought, but don't worry; that's a long way off, trillions and trillions of years from now. In the meantime, let's define time as changes going from the past into the future, or another way of putting it would be entropy going from a lower state into a higher state, order to disorder. Time is irreversible, meaning we can't go back into the past, but we can go into the future. We are all on that ride right now.

For life to emerge and evolve, conditions need to occur to advance this process. There is no time arrow or road map that assures conditions will be suitable for life. Time has no direction other than moving from past to present, and for life to begin, one might call it accidental, random, lucky, or fortunate. But with the billions of stars in our galaxy, let alone the billions of galaxies in the universe with their billions of stars, and all the planetary systems that have formed around the stars, the odds are pretty good that the right conditions, circumstances, and contingencies will lead to life somewhere. Earth just happened to be one of those planets.

But it's not just having all the right conditions come together. Life is also dependent on stability and time enough to keep things going, from a single-cell organism to multicellular levels, even perhaps toward complex organisms, and maybe, just maybe, to levels of self-awareness and potential intelligence.

Let's follow the process from the beginning and identify some critical cosmological and astronomical elements for this to happen. First off, we need a universe.

The Beginning

One thing is certain—the only thing consistent about time is change.

We, as conscious animals, are always searching for beginnings: beginnings of ourselves as individuals, a search for our ancestors, origins of the human race, and life itself. Beyond those beginnings, we dwell on Earth's cosmological origins, our solar system, stars, galaxies, and ultimately, the universe. This search for the roots keeps us really busy since it's a continuous learning process. The more we know, the more we don't know. New dimensions are revealed, many beyond our understanding and comprehension. Nevertheless, we tend to fill in the gaps, sometimes with truth, sometimes with stories, sometimes with both.

Each civilization has its own creation tales, stemming from the earliest of times when the first humans pondered their existence to the present day. Existence is what we pondered. Why is it the way it is? Some myths tell about a cosmic egg, such as the Chinese creation myth where the god PaGu takes an ax to break out of his confinement inside a cosmic egg. He dies doing so, but his death creates the wind, mountains, land, and rushing waters.

One from the Marshall Islands goes like this: Long, long ago, there wasn't any land at all, only the ocean. But there was a god named Lowa who came down to the island. This god made a command followed by a magical sound, Mmmmmm, and all the islands were erected. He went back to heaven and sent down men to this island. Each man had duties to perform—producing all living things, looking after the winds, and taking care of all death. There's more to this story, but that's as far as I'll go.

The Cherokee have several myths that explain the beginning of Earth. One of them tells of a great island floating on the ocean, which was attached to four thick ropes tied to a rock in the sky. It was also a time of perpetual darkness, and all the animals could not see. But the Great Spirit told the animals to stay awake for seven days and seven nights. (From here, it gets a little confusing.) The animals couldn't stay awake that long, but the plants could and were able to stay green all year long. (Then the story throws in an owl and mountain lion, which really spins out into a tangent. I'll leave this one for you to figure out.)

Then there's the biblical genesis, whereby God created the universe in seven days.

And God said, Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear. And it was so. God called the dry ground land, and the gathered waters he called seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds. And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day (Gen. 1:9–13 NIV).

This version keeps things very simple without the need to go into any detail.

*****

Many early thinkers believed the universe has always been here, with no beginning and no end; the stars have always been in the same place with perpetual cosmic stability. Isaac Newton saw God as the first cause in assembling the universe, and since then, it was in an unchanging, steady state.

Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, was one of the central thinkers during the Enlightenment Period, with comprehensive and systematic works in transcendentalism, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthesis. One of his works dealt with the idea that perpetual peace could be attained through universal democracy and international cooperation. (Certainly, he was way ahead of his time—and ours, for that matter.) Kant marveled about the universe, and in his 1755 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, he suggested that some of the nebulae are galaxies like our own. However, that remained only an idea, since telescopes at that time were not powerful enough to discern celestial detail.

Even in the early 1900s, cosmology was still in its early stages of discovery. In 1917, when Einstein published his theory of relativity, it was generally thought that the Milky Way was the universe since there was no evidence of any other galaxies. It was also the general scientific belief that the universe is homogenous and isotropic. It had no beginning, nor would it have an end, and it was in an unchanging, steady-state universe. This thinking changed with the observations of Edwin Hubble.

Hubble was an American astronomer who played a critical role in developing extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology. He started out as a law student at the University of Chicago, where he received a bachelor of science in 1910. Afterward, Hubble went onto Queen's College in Oxford, earning other bachelors. After returning to the States, he abandoned law and entered graduate school, studying astronomy.

Typical for the time, his studies were interrupted by the First World War. He volunteered for the US Army, where he eventually rose to major. Although stationed overseas, his Eighty-Sixth Division never saw combat. After the war, he spent a year at Cambridge University, renewed his studies in astronomy, and was offered a position at the Carnegie Institute for Sciences at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. There he had access to the world's largest telescope at the time, the 100-inch (2.5 meters) Hooker Telescope.

Hubble's primary focus was observing faint, fuzzy objects, which, at that time, were thought to be distant nebulae, clouds of gaseous elements and particles. But the telescope revealed them to be distant galaxies. This was the discovery that opened up the universe, extending it well beyond our galaxy—not just a few new galaxies, but hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands. Hubble classified galaxies by their appearance from photographic images taken by the telescope. He also analyzed spectral characteristics and found a linear relationship between distance and radial speed, referring to the speed of the galaxies as they were moving away from our point of view.

Like sound waves that differ when the source moves toward or away from the observer, such as the sirens of an approaching emergency vehicle, the change in pitch as it goes by changes from a high frequency (shorter wavelengths) to a lower frequency (longer wavelengths). This is known as the Doppler effect. With light, it works the same way. Objects (galaxies) that are moving toward us are blue-shifted, while objects moving away are red-shifted. Hubble observed that the farthest galaxies were more red-shifted, meaning that they were moving away from us faster than closer galaxies. Using brightness and luminosity values to achieve initial distances, Hubble compared the distance to galaxies with recessional velocities. With this correlation, he could calculate distances simply by observing their redshifts. This was the basis of Hubble's remarkable discovery, now known as Hubble's law.

Einstein believed in a steady-state, unchanging universe, even though it wasn't fitting in with his theory of general relativity. But to account for the difference, Einstein introduced what he called a cosmological constant (fudge factor) to make it so. However, when he learned of Hubble's redshift, he realized his mistake, saying that changing his equations with this constant was the biggest blunder of [his] life.

As papers were published and the news got around about the expanding universe, there were mixed feelings among other scientists. Among them was the English astronomer Fred Hoyle, who is best known for his theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, which is the fusion of heavier elements from exploding stars. Hoyle was convinced of a universe with no beginning and end and bound within an unchanging, steady state. However, when it was observed that the universe was expanding, Hoyle modified his theory, claiming that new matter was being created continuously, filling in gaps of space. He even went on to say that all it would take would be the creation of one atom of hydrogen per one cubic meter of space per billion years to fill that requirement. Of course, that was not something that could ever be tested or observed. Furthermore, it violated the first law of conservation of energy.

But one both spiritually and scientifically minded individual by the name of George Lemaitre had different thoughts. At seventeen, Lemaitre began studying engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. The First World War interrupted his studies, and he joined the army as a volunteer. He received the Belgian War Cross for his efforts during the Battle of the Yser. That experience reinforced his need to reconcile his religious and scientific vocations. He returned to school after the war but abandoned engineering, taking up physics and mathematics, eventually receiving both a doctorate in mathematics and bachelor's degree in Thomistic philosophy. (That's the study of the teaching of Thomas Aquinas.) Three years later, he was ordained a priest and received a scholarship from the Belgian government to study abroad.

Lemaitre was fascinated by Einstein's theory of relativity and set off for Cambridge, England, where he studied astronomy under the famous astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington. Afterward, Lemaitre joined Harvard College Observatory studying nebulae, which are interstellar clouds, and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he began a thesis on gravitational fields and general relativity. Lemaitre was the first to theorize that the recession of nearby galaxies was due to the expansion of the universe, although Hubble got the credit since his work was based on actual observation.

What Lemaitre was best known for was his hypothesis of the primeval atom. Put forth in 1931, he believed that if the universe is presently expanding and that it will continue to do so, then celestial bodies must have been closer together in the past and that at some point in time, the universe was compressed into a primeval atom, or what Lemaitre referred to a cosmic egg. Somehow that cosmic egg hatched, if you will, and out came the elemental particles that gave rise to the universe. This almost sounds like a creation myth, but it had some merit; maybe not as a primeval atom or cosmic egg, but as what is called today as a singularity.

This theory did not sit well with the scientific dogma at the time. Hoyle outright rejected this theory, and during a BBC interview, he mocked the thought of an exploding universe by referring to it as the big bang. Oddly, the most vocal critic of the big bang gave it its name. And it stuck.

Singularity Happens

Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in.

—Henry David Thoreau

A singularity could be considered simply as a point, not a point of substance or even a point in space. Some have referred to it as a universe that happened from nothing. What caused this is still uncertain. Possibly it has something to do with matter-antimatter, where antimatter at some point succumbed to matter, thus creating the universe we know. Stephen Weinberg explains in his book The First Three Minutes: In the beginning, there was an explosion. Not an explosion like those familiar on earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion that occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all the space from the beginning, with every particle of matter, rushing apart from every other particle. Consider it the rapid expansion of existing space.

So the big bang did not come into existence with a big blast and a blinding flash of light with thunder all around, although that would be an excellent opening scene for a Hollywood movie with Charlton Heston emerging from all the smoke.

Instead, it started as homogeneous energy, not in particles, but as a glowing, opaque plasma, scorching, in the tens of billions of degrees, maybe one hundred billion degrees, and unimaginably dense in what is called thermal equilibrium. Within the first fraction of a second after the initial event, elementary particles came into existence, particles like leptons, quarks, positrons, neutrinos, and photons, along with antiparticles; and still within the first fraction of a second, quarks combined in pairs and triplets to form protons and neutrons. As the universe expanded, particles, antiparticles, and photons existed in equilibrium, but at the same time, particle-antiparticle pairs annihilated each other, creating high-energy photons. After about a tenth of a second, the temperature would have fallen to thirty billion degrees Kelvin, conditions similar to the interior of stars, with a mass density of nearly four hundred thousand times that of water.

One second after the big bang, the temperature was ten billion degrees Kelvin, cool enough that photons no longer had sufficient energy to continue to create particle-antiparticle (electron-positron) pairs. What was left was a very slight asymmetry in the particle-antiparticle pairings, with an excess (one part in a billion) of positive particles. This tiniest of asymmetry resulted in matter over antimatter. Why this excess of positive particles? It's simply not known. But if there had been no excess, the universe as we see it today would not exist. (In fact, we would not be around to see anything at all.)

Throughout this early time, the universe was essentially a hot, ionized, fog-like plasma, so dense that photons could not escape since whatever direction they took, they ran into other particles, bouncing off each other and essentially going nowhere. As temperatures dropped, particles lost energy; they moved more slowly. After 380,000 years, when temperatures cooled to about three thousand degrees Kelvin, electrons were moving slow enough to be captured by protons, forming neutral hydrogen atoms (and a few helium atoms), a process known as recombination. (This is an awkward term since atoms had never before combined. This was a first-time happening, but that's what physicists call it.) This young universe was changing from a radiation-dominant to a matter-dominant universe. Captive photons that had been bouncing around in opaque plasma were now free to travel unchecked, and the universe became transparent.

*****

Quick Note

The Kelvin temperature scale was the brainchild of British inventor William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin. His scale is used because it has no negative numbers like Celsius (centigrade) or Fahrenheit, making it easier to perform calculations. Absolute zero on the Kelvin scale is equivalent to no atom movement, none at all, where a volume of gas becomes zero on the Kelvin scale, which is equivalent to minus 273.15 degrees Celsius. However, that's theoretical, since absolute zero has never been achieved. So, the freezing point of water is 273 Kelvin, while it's zero degrees on the Celsius scale and minus 32 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale.

Pop Quiz

In 1724, the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit developed the temperature scale we now call Fahrenheit. What was the name of the person who developed the centigrade temperature scale?

About the Book

It takes much longer to read Weinberg's book than three minutes.

Microwave Background Radiation

Past contingencies result in present circumstances, which aim at potential futures.

—Anon

The universe expanded as a homogeneous and isotropic universe, with particles and elements evenly spaced apart and uniform in all orientations. The density was the same throughout. If it continued that way, nothing else would have happened. No stars, no planets, no galaxies would have ever formed. Life would have never evolved. Perhaps this could be considered the perfect universe, assuming there was someone around to view it. But accidents happen. As the universe continued to expand, disturbances set in where densities started to vary, slightly at first, ripples of space, resulting in variations, growing in clumps, initiating one of the four forces of nature: gravity.

However, an expanding universe does not necessarily confirm the big bang, and many still believed that the steady-state theory was the correct one. But thoughts of an expanding universe starting with a singularity only fermented questions and speculation that the big bang should have left something behind, like an echo or an afterglow. Astronomers and astrophysicists put out theories, but there was no empirical evidence, no actual observation that could confirm speculations.

But serendipitously, a series of events did occur, providing insight toward an answer.

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, working for the Bell Telephone Laboratory, gained access to a radio antenna, originally used to communicate with the Echo satellite. It was a huge, twenty-foot horn reflector located on Crawford Hill at Holmdel, New Jersey. Unlike optical telescopes, this was a radio telescope that gathered information from radio waves. Penzias and Wilson had free rein for its use and measured radio waves within high galactic latitudes, away from the Milky Way plane. They were not cosmologists, they were techno-wizards, with the primary goal of opening up a new channel of communications for AT&T.

To prepare the antenna, they needed to eliminate as much interference of extraneous noise as possible. They cooled the receiver down to 3.5 degrees Kelvin. They began observations using a short wavelength setting of 7.35 centimeters since that would tell them if there was any interference originating from the antenna itself. (Wavelengths this short and up to a meter are within the microwave band. Comparable to wavelengths used in microwave ovens.) They got rid of most of the noise except for a bit of static, a noise that was present regardless of where they pointed the antenna. They tried all kinds of things to eliminate the noise, including removing a bunch of pigeons roosting inside the horn. They shooed away three of them, but two pigeons were stubborn to leave. They trapped the pair and sent them far, far away, but within a few days, they returned. Unfortunately for the pigeons, Penzias and Wilson corrected the situation with a shotgun. But there were still problems with the menacing hiss, so they dismantled the antenna throat and cleaned out what they observed to be a white dielectric material, otherwise known as pigeon poop. But that didn't help either. The noise was still there.

Penzias and Wilson went back to scanning the skies, trying to determine the source of the noise. They were aware that any sort of a body above absolute zero would emit radio noise, and the wavelength of the noise depended on the temperature of the source. Therefore, it was possible to determine the temperature of the source by the intensity of the radio noise at any given wavelength; the higher the temperature, the more intense the static. Of course, radio telescopes are not thermometers, but they can measure the strength of radio waves, giving a close approximation of the source's temperature. This is known as equivalent temperature. Penzias and Wilson found that this strange radio noise's equivalent temperature was about 3.5 degrees above absolute zero. This was a real noise, coming from everywhere, but they had no clue about its source.

The following passage from Steven Weinberg best describes what happened next:

The meaning of the mysterious microwave noise soon began to be clarified through the operation of the invisible college of astrophysicists. Penzias happened to telephone a fellow radio astronomer, Bernard Burke of M.I.T., about other matters. Burke had just heard from yet another colleague, Ken Turner of the Carnegie Institution, of a talk Turner in turn had heard at John Hopkins, given by a young theorist from Princeton, P.J.E. Peebles. In his talk Peebles argued that there ought to be a background of radio noise left over from the early universe, with a present equivalent temperature of roughly 10 degrees Kelvin. Burke already knew that Penzias was measuring radio noise temperatures with the Bell Laboratory horn antenna, so he took the occasion of the telephone conversation to ask how the measurements were going. Penzias said that the measurements were going fine, but there was something about the results that he didn't understand. Burke suggested to Penzias that the physicists at Princeton might have some interesting ideas on what it was that his antenna was receiving.

Peebles speculated that there had to have been intense background radiation during the first few minutes of the big bang; otherwise, conditions would have been such that heavier elements beyond hydrogen and helium would have formed. Peebles's idea had been influenced by the senior physicist at Princeton, Robert H. Dicke, who thought some observable radiation should be left over from the early hot and dense stages of the big bang. He suggested it to a couple of colleagues, P. G. Roll and D. T. Wilkinson, who might want to search for this microwave background. This they did, constructing a small, low-noise antenna on the roof of the Palmer Physical Laboratory at Princeton.

In the meantime, Penzias and Wilson decided to publish their work, leaving any forthcoming interpretation of their findings to be developed by Dicke, Peebles, Roll, and Wilkinson. Penzias and Wilson made no mention in their paper about any cosmological connection but simply stated, Measurements of the effective zenith noise temperature…have yielded a value of about 3.5 degrees K higher than expected. They left it at that, not thinking that what they observed was to be a monumental discovery.

Unbeknown to the Dicke group, George Gamov, a Soviet-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist teaching at George Washington University, was also working on proving the CMBR's existence (cosmic microwave background radiation). An advocate of Lemaitre's primeval atom theory, Gamov and one of his graduate students, Ralph Alpher, were looking into the recombination period when the first elements were formed. Their results appeared in 1948 as the Alpher, Bethe, and Gamov paper published in Physical Review entitled The Origin of Chemical Elements. The paper explained that during the first several minutes after the big bang, primordial nucleosynthesis of hydrogen and helium composed most of the matter and predicted it at a ratio of 92 percent hydrogen and 8 percent helium. These elements occurred in the correct predicted proportions. Although their theory neglected to include a number of other processes, this paper came closer to a proof that the big bang actually happened. That paper essentially closed the door on the steady-state theory, which in no way could account for cosmic microwave background radiation while the big bang theory naturally predicted it.

For life to exist anywhere, a universe is needed. Until a better one comes along, we'll use the big bang theory as the explanation of how our universe was created. The big bang theory, based on the fact that the universe is expanding, successfully explains many of the observed features. It predicted the presence of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the earliest moments of the universe; it agrees with the lightest elements measured abundances. And with our present knowledge of galaxies and stars, we know that the universe continues to evolve. These observations give us high confidence in how the universe proceeded during the first fractions of a second, during the first few minutes, and during the time of its expansion and cooling.

After the universe changed from opaque to transparent, photons were released from captivity; uniformity gave way to density variations, and gravitational force compounded the density differences, bringing together atoms of hydrogen and helium into gaseous nebulae, initiating the formation of the first stars. Presto! We have a universe.

All this didn't have to come to pass; the universe could simply have stayed in a perfect state of thermal equilibrium, and matter would never exist. Or with an ideal universe, antimatter and matter could have been entirely symmetrical, with no excess of either particle type. But again, accidents happen.

*****

An Interesting Note

Hans Bethe did not really take part in the research in developing the paper. Gamov thought it would be fun to add Bethe's name to make a play on the first three letters of the Greek alphabet—alpha, beta, and gamma—which refer to the primary particles released after radioactive decay. Strangely, the editors and reviewers did not catch on to Gamov's joke until after it was published. Coincidentally, the paper was published on April 1, 1948.

Another Interesting Note

George Gamov and his wife made two attempts to defect from the Soviet Union. The first was a planned 250-mile kayak journey across the Black Sea to Turkey; the second was from the northwestern port of Murmansk to Norway. Both attempts failed due to bad weather. But in 1933, Gamov was granted permission to attend the Seventh Solvay Conference in Brussels. He insisted that his wife accompany him. Eventually, the Soviet authorities relented and granted both of them passports. Once there, with the help of Marie Curie and other physicists, Gamov and his wife never returned to Russia. (Stalin's loss.)

A Third Interesting Note

When knowledge of the big bang was eventually confirmed, Pope Pius XII welcomed the news. True science discovers God in an ever-increasing degree—as though God were waiting behind every door opened by science. The pope referred to it as the creation narrative of Genesis 1–3. In the beginning, God created heaven and Earth, and God said, ‘Let light be made.' And light was made. And what could be more appropriate than for a priest to discover the origin of the universe?

An Interesting Penultimate Note

Penzias and Wilson were not specifically searching for the cosmic microwave background radiation, and they did not know they had found it until other scientists confirmed it. Their paper was essentially about the unaccountable excess antenna temperature. Nevertheless, through their careful research, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978. Ironically, none of the scientists who confirmed the existence of the CMBR ever received the award. However, in 2019, Peebles won the Noble Prize for other cosmology discoveries, which included his prediction of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The Final Interesting Note

The cosmic microwave background radiation originates from a black body, which is a surface that absorbs all radiant energy falling on it. Radiation from a black body has a distribution in wavelength that follows what is known as the Planck law, which can be represented in a graph that compares brightness with wavelength. Such a curve corresponds to a given temperature. The temperature that Penzias and Wilson measured was 3.5 degrees, Kelvin. Ralph Alpher and Herman Robert Herman predicted a temperature of 5 degrees Kelvin in 1948, which was amazing, especially given that their estimate was based on newly derived atomic physics and extrapolated billions of years into the future. The actual temperature based on today's precise measurements is 2.725 degrees Kelvin.

Cities of Stars

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

—Albert Einstein

In the 1770s, French astronomer Charles Messier had a passion for discovering comets. To do so, he had to discern comets from other celestial objects that looked like they could be comets. To avoid confusing himself and others, he noted the locations of all the fuzzy, noncomet objects and compiled them in a list of over one hundred items. At that time, telescopes were not powerful enough to see any detail, so little did he know what they were. We know that what Messier was observing were nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies. But the names of his listed objects are still attributed to him by identifying these objects with his initial. For example, M1 is the Crab Nebula's astronomical name, M2 is a globular cluster, M31 is the Andromeda galaxy.

Edwin Hubble was never into comets, as far as I know. He was into galaxies. He was the first to identify the Andromeda Nebula as a galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years from us. Today, we know there are billions of galaxies. Perhaps the most amazing image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope is known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, where it was pointed toward a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, southwest of the Orion constellation. It was a dark region of the sky where there was a low density of bright stars in the near field. That allowed for better viewing of distant objects. In other words, the Hubble Space Telescope was looking at a really boring part of the universe.

The field of view was tiny, with an angular view 0.01 that of the moon. Imagine holding a penny up toward the sky at arm's length and looking at the eye of Lincoln. That's about the size of the field of view, one-twenty-six-millionth of the sky's total area. The resulting image was not just a single shot, but many shots taken over three months. Two sets of photos were taken between September 24, 2003, and January 16, 2004, totaling eight hundred exposures during four hundred Hubble revolutions. This technique of multiple exposures of a single point in space dramatically enhances resolution compared to a single exposure, which would have shown only blackness. The composite image of eight hundred exposures of that small space of the sky recorded a picture revealing ten thousand galaxies. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field looks back nearly thirteen billion years, back to the universe's outer edge, revealing the earliest galaxies formed four hundred to six hundred million years just after the big bang.

*****

Galaxies originate from the density differences that result in the clumping of gas and dust particles. These clouds of dust, or molecular clouds, are the result of gas ejected from dying stars. When enough particles come together, gravity sets in, bringing more material together. At some point, turbulence may set in, perhaps caused by a shock wave or supernova. As gravity continues to collapse the cloud inward, conservation of angular momentum increases the