The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (43 page)

Thus far, interpretations of his latest paper on the fa'afafine have been wildly contradictory but all equally overconfident. "New Gay Study Will Make Anti-Gay Activists Cry Uncle," one blog headline read. Another claimed, "Darwinian Fundamentalists Desperate to Rationalize Homosexuality," and cleared the way for a commenter to somehow bemoan Vasey's findings as "justification" for gay men "to sexually abuse their nephews."

 

"There's two mating right there," Lindsay Young called out.

They were right below her, ten yards away on a flat, vegetated ridge. It was late afternoon. One albatross lay on its stomach, wobbling with its wings pulled back—the way penguins slide over ice—while a second stood upright behind it, fat rippling down its telescoping neck, as it pumped its pelvis. "That looks pretty standard," Young said.

The birds carried on for a while. Then the male shivered and retracted. The female came to her feet and walked off. Young read the female's leg band with her binoculars. "You just hit the jackpot," she told me. The bird was part of a female-female pair. The male had another mate.

Young started scribbling notes, and we sat there rapidly rehashing the details. The sex didn't seem forced at all. In a rape, Young said—which, for all the talk of albatross monogamy, is not uncommon in the species—a male will pin a female's neck to the ground, or back her into a bush to tangle her up. (One study observed four different gangs of males forcing themselves on a single female, which lost an eye in the process.) But these two birds hardly seemed in a rush. Young made more notes. Then, with the male bird frozen right where he'd been left, the female slapped her rubbery feet on the ground, caught an updraft, and disappeared over the ocean.

The next morning Young still seemed to be assuring herself that her interpretation of what we'd seen was reasonable. "We didn't see how it started, but how it ended looked..."—she searched for a precise, nonanthropomorphic phrase. She couldn't really find one, and let out a self-effacing laugh. "Mutually beneficial?" she said. "I don't know!"

Dave Leonard, a friend of Young's, was tagging along. Leonard—tall, lanky, and tan, with a ponytail and a few days of scruff—is an ornithologist but works a deskjob now for a state wildlife agency and seemed to be enjoying a morning outside. He brandished a gigantic telephoto lens in all directions and had trouble recovering after realizing he'd forgotten to pack his binoculars. Leonard knows his birds, but he was here as a bird lover, not a bird researcher, and wasn't overly concerned with scientific detachment. When Young pointed out a male albatross whinnying at every female that passed overhead, Leonard shook his head and joked, "I feel your pain, dude."

Eventually Young spotted a female from one of the female-female pairs calling to a male about fifteen feet away. The female was standing right where the male and his partner usually build their nest. Her head was straight up in the air, and she clapped her beak animatedly. In Young's experience, it was rare for a bird to call so determinedly to another that's not her partner; this would definitely count as "solicitation," she said, if the two birds wound up copulating. "Pull up a rock," she told me and Leonard.

We sat on the ground expectantly for a while. Eventually the male albatross took a few steps toward the calling female. Then it stopped and looked around. It was comical, given the circumstances.

"'Will anyone see me if I cheat?'" Young said. "I'm not sure if he's taking her up on it or just going, 'Why are you in my spot?'" She was doing the bird's interior monologue, narrating for one blameless, anthropomorphic moment.

The male stopped again and tucked his beak into the feathers behind his neck. Then he turned around and retreated. The taut sexual anticipation—at least as felt by us three humans—seemed to let up. "Well, his partner should be very proud of the self-control," Young said. Then she said, "I know when to cut my losses," gathered up her backpack and clipboard full of hard-earned data, and trudged off to watch some other birds.

 

More than 4,000 miles across the Pacific, at a place called Taiaroa Head in southeastern New Zealand, two female Royal albatrosses (a related species) were building their nest. Later that winter those two birds would become one of only a few known female-female pairs to successfully fledge a chick at Taiaroa Head in more than sixty years of continuous observation of the colony. (Two years before, the same two birds had engaged in a threesome, presiding over a single nest with the help of one male—just another "alternative mating strategy" albatrosses sometimes engage in, it turns out.)

The tourism board of Dunedin, a gay-friendly region of New Zealand, held a publicity-grabbing contest to name the "lesbian albatross" couple's chick. For months, as the paired females incubated their egg, a press officer at Tourism Dunedin issued releases, and news organizations around the world, from England to India, ran with the story. The PR woman also tried to interest me in a story about a flightless kakapo bird in the region named Sirocco who'd recently made a memorable appearance on the BBC—"He actually started to shag the presenter, Mark Carwardine!" she wrote to me—and "has avid followers on Facebook and Twitter!"

A biologist working with the albatrosses at Taiaroa Head, Lyndon Perriman, seemed to bristle at the idea of naming any albatrosses—"They are wild birds," he wrote to me in an e-mail message. He noted that the female-female pair made for an inconvenient tourist attraction because their nest was not visible from any of the public viewing areas. It seemed fitting: people's ideas about the couple were riveting enough; it wasn't necessary to see the actual birds. The chick hatched on February 1. Tourism Dunedin named it Lola. The shortlist also included Rainbow, Lady Gagabatross, and Ellen.

FROM
Scientific American

I
N OUR EXPERIENCE,
nothing ever really ends. When we die, our bodies decay and the material in them returns to the earth and the air, allowing for the creation of new life. We live on in what comes after. But will that always be the case? Might there come a point sometime in the future when there is no "after"? Depressingly, modern physics suggests the answer is yes. Time itself could end. All activity would cease, and there would be no renewal or recovery. The end of time would be the end of endings.

This grisly prospect was an unanticipated prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which provides our modern understanding of gravity. Before that theory, most physicists and philosophers thought time was a universal drumbeat, a steady rhythm that the cosmos marches to, never varying, wavering, or stopping. Einstein showed that the universe is more like a big polyrhythmic jam session. Time can slow down, or stretch out, or let it rip. When we feel the force of gravity, we are feeling time's rhythmic improvisation; falling objects are drawn to places where time passes more slowly. Time not only affects what matter does but also responds to what matter is doing, like drummers and dancers firing one another up into a rhythmic frenzy. When things get out of hand, though, time can go up in smoke like an overexcited drummer who spontaneously combusts.

The moments when that happens are known as singularities. The term actually refers to any boundary of time, be it beginning or end. The best known is the big bang, the instant 13.7 billion years ago when our universe—and, with it, time—burst into existence and began expanding. If the universe ever stops expanding and starts contracting again, it will go into something like the big bang in reverse—the big crunch—and bring time crashing to a halt.

Time needn't perish everywhere. Relativity says it expires inside black holes while carrying on in the universe at large. Black holes have a well-deserved reputation for destructiveness, but they are even worse than you might think. If you fell into one, you would not only be torn to shreds, but your remains would eventually hit a singularity at the center of the hole, and your timeline would end. No new life would emerge from your ashes; your molecules would not get recycled. Like a character reaching the last page of a novel, you would not suffer mere death but existential apocalypse.

It took physicists decades to accept that relativity theory would predict something so unsettling as death without rebirth. To this day they aren't quite sure what to make of it. Singularities are arguably the leading reason that physicists seek to create a unified theory of physics, which would merge Einstein's brainchild with quantum mechanics to create a quantum theory of gravity. They do so partly in the hope that they might explain singularities away. But you need to be careful what you wish for. Time's end is hard to imagine, but time's not ending may be equally paradoxical.

Well before Albert Einstein came along, philosophers through the ages had debated whether time could be mortal. Immanuel Kant considered the issue to be an "antinomy"—something you could argue both ways, leaving you not knowing what to think.

My father-in-law found himself on one horn of this dilemma when he showed up at an airport one evening only to find that his flight had long since departed. The people at the check-in counter chided him, saying he should have known that the scheduled departure time of "twelve
A.M.
" meant the first thing in the morning. Yet my father-in-law's confusion was understandable. Officially there is no such time as "twelve
A.M.
" Midnight is neither ante meridiem nor post meridiem. It is both the end of one day and start of the next. In twenty-four-hour time notation, it is both 2400 and 0000.

Aristotle appealed to a similar principle when he argued that time can have neither beginning nor end. Every moment is both the end of an era and the start of something new; every event is both the outcome of something and the cause of something else. So how could time possibly end? What would prevent the last event in history from leading to another? Indeed, how would you even define the end of time when the very concept of "end" presupposes time? "It is not logically possible for time to have an end," asserts the University of Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne. But if time cannot end, then the universe must be infinitely long-lived, and all the riddles posed by the notion of infinity come rushing in. Philosophers have thought it absurd that infinity could be anything but a mathematical idealization.

The triumph of the big bang theory and the discovery of black holes seemed to settle the question. The universe is shot through with singularities and could suffer a distressing variety of temporal cataclysms; even if it evades the big crunch, it might get done in by the big rip, the big freeze, or the big brake. But then ask what singularities (big or otherwise) actually are, and the answer is no longer so clear. "The physics of singularities is up for grabs," says Lawrence Sklar of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, a leading philosopher of physics.

The very theory that begat these monsters suggests they cannot really exist. At the big bang singularity, for example, relativity theory says that the precursors of every single galaxy we see were squashed into a single mathematical point—not just a tiny pinprick but a true point of zero size. Likewise, in a black hole, every single particle of a hapless astronaut gets compacted into an infinitesimal point. In both cases, calculating the density means dividing by zero volume, yielding infinity. Other types of singularities do not involve infinite density but an infinite something else.

Although modern physicists do not feel quite the same aversion to infinity that Aristotle and Kant did, they still take it as a sign they have pushed a theory too far. For example, consider the standard theory of ray optics taught in middle school. It beautifully explains eyeglass prescriptions and funhouse mirrors. But it also predicts that a lens focuses light from a distant source to a single mathematical point, producing a spot of infinite intensity. In reality, light gets focused not to a point but to a bull's-eye pattern. Its intensity may be high but is always finite. Ray optics errs because light is not really a ray but a wave.

In a similar vein, nearly all physicists presume that cosmic singularities actually have a finite, if high, density. Relativity theory errs because it fails to capture some important aspect of gravity or matter that comes into play near singularities and keeps the density under control. "Most people would say that they signal that the theory is breaking down there," says physicist James B. Hartle of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

To figure out what goes on will take a more encompassing theory, a quantum theory of gravity. Physicists are still working on such a theory, but they figure that it will incorporate the central insight of quantum mechanics: that matter, like light, has wavelike properties. These properties should smear the putative singularity into a small wad, rather than a point, and thereby banish the divide-by-zero error. If so, time may not, in fact, end.

Physicists argue it both ways. Some think time does end. The trouble with this option is that the known laws of physics operate within time and describe how things move and evolve. Time's end points are off the reservation; they would have to be governed not just by a new law of physics but by a new type of law of physics, one that eschews temporal concepts such as motion and change in favor of timeless ones such as geometric elegance. In one proposal in 2007, Brett McInnes of the National University of Singapore drew on ideas from the leading candidate for a quantum theory of gravity—string theory. He suggested that the primordial wad of a universe had the shape of a torus; because of mathematical theorems concerning tori, it had to be perfectly uniform and smooth. At the big crunch or a black-hole singularity, however, the universe could have any shape whatsoever, and the same mathematical reasoning need not apply; the universe would in general be extremely raggedy. Such a geometric law of physics differs from the usual dynamical laws in a crucial sense: it is not symmetrical in time. The end wouldn't just be the beginning played backward.