A Briefer History of Time (7 page)

But that is not the whole story. Our galaxy and other galaxies must also contain a large amount of "dark matter" that we cannot see directly but which we know must be there because of the influence of its gravitational attraction on the orbits of stars in the galaxies. Perhaps the best evidence of this comes from the stars on the outskirts of spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way. These stars orbit their galaxies much too fast to be held in orbit merely by the gravitational attraction of the observed galactic stars. In addition, most galaxies are found in clusters, and we can similarly infer the presence of yet more dark matter in between the galaxies in these clusters by its effect on the motion of the galaxies. In fact, the amount of dark matter greatly exceeds the amount of ordinary matter in the universe. When we add up all this dark matter, we still get only about one-tenth of the amount of matter required to halt the expansion. But there could also be other forms of dark matter, distributed almost uniformly throughout the universe, that we have not yet detected and which might raise the average density of the universe even more. For instance, there exists a type of elementary particle called the neutrino, which interacts very weakly with matter and is extremely hard to detect (one recent neutrino experiment employed an underground detector filled with fifty thousand tons of water). The neutrino used to be thought massless, and therefore to have no gravitational attraction, but experiments over the last few years indicate that the neutrino actually does have a very tiny mass that had previously gone undetected. If neutrinos have mass, they could be a form of dark matter. Still, even allowing for neutrino dark matter, there appears to be far less matter in the universe than would be needed to halt its expansion, and so until recently most physicists would have agreed that the second type of Friedmann model applies.

Then came some new observations. In the last few years, several teams of researchers have studied tiny ripples in the background microwave radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson. The size of those ripples can be used as an indicator of the large-scale geometry of the universe, and they appear to indicate that the universe is flat after all (as in the third Friedmann model)! Since there doesn’t seem to be enough matter and dark matter to account for this, physicists have postulated the existence of another as yet undetected substance to explain it—dark energy.

To further complicate things, other recent observations indicate that the rate of expansion of the universe is actually not slowing down but speeding up. None of the Friedmann models does this! And it is very strange, since the effect of the matter in space, whether high or low density, can only be to slow the expansion. Gravity is, after all, attractive. For the cosmic expansion to be accelerating is something like the blast from a bomb gaining power rather than dissipating after the explosion. What force could be responsible for pushing the cosmos apart ever faster? No one is sure yet, but it could be evidence that Einstein was right about the need for the cosmological constant (and its antigravity effects) after all.

With the rapid growth of new technologies and grand new satellite-borne telescopes, we are rapidly learning new and surprising things about the universe. We now have a good idea of its behavior at late-time : the universe will continue to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Time will go on forever, at least for those prudent enough not to fall into a black hole. But what about very early times? How did the universe begin, and what set it expanding?

8

THE BIG BANG, BLACK HOLES, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE UNIVERSE

IN FRIEDMANN’S FIRST MODEL of the universe, the fourth dimension, time—like space—is finite in extent. It is like a line with two ends, or boundaries. So time has an end, and it also has a beginning. In fact, all solutions to Einstein’s equations in which the universe has the amount of matter we observe share one very important feature: at some time in the past (about 13.7 billion years ago), the distance between neighboring galaxies must have been zero. In other words, the entire universe was squashed into a single point with zero size, like a sphere of radius zero. At that time, the density of the universe and the curvature of space-time would have been infinite. It is the time that we call the big bang.

All our theories of cosmology are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and nearly flat. That means that all our theories break down at the big bang: a space-time with infinite curvature can hardly be called nearly flat! Thus even if there were events before the big bang, we could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would have broken down at the big bang.

Correspondingly, if, as is the case, we know only what has happened since the big bang, we cannot determine what happened beforehand. As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences and so should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that the big bang was the beginning of time. This means that questions such as who set up the conditions for the big bang are not questions that science addresses.

Another infinity that arises if the universe has zero size is in temperature. At the big bang itself, the universe is thought to have been infinitely hot. As the universe expanded, the temperature of the radiation decreased. Since temperature is simply a measure of the average energy—or speed—of particles, this cooling of the universe would have a major effect on the matter in it. At very high temperatures, particles would be moving around so fast that they could escape any attraction toward each other resulting from nuclear or electromagnetic forces, but as they cooled off, we would expect particles that attract each other to start to clump together. Even the types of particles that exist in the universe depend on the temperature, and hence on the age, of the universe.

Aristotle did not believe that matter was made of particles. He believed that matter was continuous. That is, according to him, a piece of matter could be divided into smaller and smaller bits without any limit: there could never be a grain of matter that could not be divided further. A few Greeks, however, such as Democritus, held that matter was inherently grainy and that everything was made up of large numbers of various different kinds of atoms. (The word atom means "indivisible" in Greek.) We now know that this is true—at least in our environment, and in the present state of the universe. But the atoms of our universe did not always exist, they are not indivisible, and they represent only a small fraction of the types of particles in the universe.

Atoms are made of smaller particles: electrons, protons, and neutrons. The protons and neutrons themselves are made of yet smaller particles called quarks. In addition, corresponding to each of these subatomic particles there exists an antiparticle. Antiparticles have the same mass as their sibling particles but are opposite in their charge and other attributes. For instance, the antiparticle for an electron, called a positron, has a positive charge, the opposite of the charge of the electron. There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, when an antiparticle and particle meet, they annihilate each other. So if you meet your antiself, don’t shake hands—you would both vanish in a great flash of light!

Light energy comes in the form of another type of particle, a massless particle called a photon. The nearby nuclear furnace of the sun is the greatest source of photons for the earth. The sun is also a huge source of another kind of particle, the aforementioned neutrino (and antineutrino). But these extremely light particles hardly ever interact with matter, and hence they pass through us without effect, at a rate of billions each second. All told, physicists have discovered dozens of these elementary particles. Over time, as the universe has undergone a complex evolution, the makeup of this zoo of particles has also evolved. It is this evolution that has made it possible for planets such as the earth, and beings such as we, to exist.

One second after the big bang, the universe would have expanded enough to bring its temperature down to about ten billion degrees Celsius. This is about a thousand times the temperature at the center of the sun, but temperatures as high as this are reached in H-bomb explosions. At this time the universe would have contained mostly photons, electrons, and neutrinos, and their antiparticles, together with some protons and neutrons. These particles would have had so much energy that when they collided, they would have produced many different particle/antiparticle pairs. For instance, colliding photons might produce an electron and its antiparticle, the positron. Some of these newly produced particles would collide with an antiparticle sibling and be annihilated. Any time an electron meets up with a positron, both will be annihilated, but the reverse process is not so easy: in order for two massless particles such as photons to create a particle/antiparticle pair such as an electron and a positron, the colliding massless particles must have a certain minimum energy. That is because an electron and positron have mass, and this newly created mass must come from the energy of the colliding particles. As the universe continued to expand and the temperature to drop, collisions having enough energy to create electron/positron pairs would occur less often than the rate at which the pairs were being destroyed by annihilation. So eventually most of the electrons and positrons would have annihilated each other to produce more photons, leaving only relatively few electrons. The neutrinos and antineutrinos, on the other hand, interact with themselves and with other particles only very weakly, so they would not annihilate each other nearly as quickly. They should still be around today. If we could observe them, it would provide a good test of this picture of a very hot early stage of the universe, but unfortunately, after billions of years their energies would now be too low for us to observe them directly (though we might be able to detect them indirectly).

Photon/Electron/Positron Equilibrium

In the early universe, there was a balance between pairs of electrons and positrons colliding to create photons, and the reverse process As the temperature of the universe dropped, the balance was altered to favor photon creation. Eventually most electrons and positrons in the universe annihilated each other, leaving only the relatively few electrons present today

About one hundred seconds after the big bang, the temperature of the universe would have fallen to one billion degrees, the temperature inside the hottest stars. At this temperature, a force called the strong force would have played an important role. The strong force, which we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 11, is a short-range attractive force that can cause protons and neutrons to bind to each other, forming nuclei. At high enough temperatures, protons and neutrons have enough energy of motion (see Chapter 5) that they can emerge from their collisions still free and independent. But at one billion degrees, they would no longer have had sufficient energy to overcome the attraction of the strong force, and they would have started to combine to produce the nuclei of atoms of deuterium (heavy hydrogen), which contain one proton and one neutron. The deuterium nuclei would then have combined with more protons and neutrons to make helium nuclei, which contain two protons and two neutrons, and also small amounts of a couple of heavier elements, lithium and beryllium. One can calculate that in the hot big bang model, about a quarter of the protons and neutrons would have been converted into helium nuclei, along with a small amount of heavy hydrogen and other elements. The remaining neutrons would have decayed into protons, which are the nuclei of ordinary hydrogen atoms.

This picture of a hot early stage of the universe was first put forward by the scientist George Gamow (see page 61) in a famous paper written in 1948 with a student of his, Ralph Alpher. Gamow had quite a sense of humor—he persuaded the nuclear scientist Hans Bethe to add his name to the paper to make the list of authors Alpher, Bethe, Gamow, like the first three letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha, beta, gamma, and particularly appropriate for a paper on the beginning of the universe! In this paper they made the remarkable prediction that radiation (in the form of photons) from the very hot early stages of the universe should still be around today, but with its temperature reduced to only a few degrees above absolute zero. (Absolute zero, -273 degrees Celsius, is the temperature at which substances contain no heat energy, and is thus the lowest possible temperature.)

It was this microwave radiation that Penzias and Wilson found in 1965. At the time that Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow wrote their paper, not much was known about the nuclear reactions of protons and neutrons. Predictions made for the proportions of various elements in the early universe were therefore rather inaccurate, but these calculations have been repeated in the light of better knowledge and now agree very well with what we observe. It is, moreover, very difficult to explain in any other way why about one-quarter of the mass of the universe is in the form of helium.

But there are problems with this picture. In the hot big bang model there was not enough time in the early universe for heat to have flowed from one region to another. This means that the initial state of the universe would have to have had exactly the same temperature everywhere in order to account for the fact that the microwave background has the same temperature in every direction we look. Moreover, the initial rate of expansion would have had to be chosen very precisely for the rate of expansion still to be so close to the critical rate needed to avoid collapse. It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us. In an attempt to find a model of the universe in which many different initial configurations could have evolved to something like the present universe, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alan Guth, suggested that the early universe might have gone through a period of very rapid expansion. This expansion is said to be inflationary, meaning that the universe at one time expanded at an increasing rate. According to Guth, the radius of the universe increased by a million million million million million—1 with thirty zeros after it—times in only a tiny fraction of a second. Any irregularities in the universe would have been smoothed out by this expansion, just as the wrinkles in a balloon are smoothed away when you blow it up. In this way, inflation explains how the present smooth and uniform state of the universe could have evolved from many different nonuniform initial states. So we are therefore fairly confident that we have the right picture, at least going back to about one-billion-trillion-trillionth of a second after the big bang.

After all this initial turmoil, within only a few hours of the big bang, the production of helium and some other elements such as lithium would have stopped. And after that, for the next million years or so, the universe would have just continued expanding, without anything much happening. Eventually, once the temperature had dropped to a few thousand degrees and electrons and nuclei no longer had enough energy of motion to overcome the electromagnetic attraction between them, they would have started combining to form atoms. The universe as a whole would have continued expanding and cooling, but in regions that were slightly denser than average, this expansion would have been slowed down by the extra gravitational attraction.

This attraction would eventually stop expansion in some regions and cause them to start to collapse. As they were collapsing, the gravitational pull of matter outside these regions might start them rotating slightly. As the collapsing region got smaller, it would spin faster—just as skaters spinning on ice spin faster as they draw in their arms. Eventually, when the region got small enough, it would be spinning fast enough to balance the attraction of gravity, and in this way disklike rotating galaxies were born. Other regions that did not happen to pick up a rotation would become oval objects called elliptical galaxies. In these, the region would stop collapsing because individual parts of the galaxy w ould be orbiting stably around its center, but the galaxy would have no overall rotation.

As time went on, the hydrogen and helium gas in the galaxies would break up into smaller clouds that would collapse under their own gravity. As these contracted and the atoms within them collided with one another, the temperature of the gas would increase, until eventually it became hot enough to start nuclear fusion reactions. These would convert the hydrogen into more helium. The heat released in this reaction, which is like a controlled hydrogen bomb explosion, is what makes a star shine. This additional heat also increases the pressure of the gas until it is sufficient to balance the gravitational attraction, and the gas stops contracting. In this manner, these clouds coalesce into stars like our sun, burning hydrogen into helium and radiating the resulting energy as heat and light. It is a bit like a balloon—there is a balance between the pressure of the air inside, which is trying to make the balloon expand, and the tension in the rubber, which is trying to make the balloon smaller.