Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves (30 page)

That’s why meteor stories have, to date, tended to be whimsical (or, in the case of the 2013 Siberian event, scary and laceration-producing) rather than tragic.

Meteor landings, such as the dozens that occurred in a Ugandan village in 1992, are sometimes preceded by widely observed celestial fireworks. My favorite meteor story involved just such a scenario in the northeastern United States on November 30, 1981.

An alarmed woman phoned our observatory (the Overlook Observatory, which I have owned and operated since 1982) that night to report a fiery ball slashing across the heavens, lighting up the countryside. Some people assume that observatories are UFO-reporting stations, and we get regular inquiries concerning lights in the sky. But like most celestial phenomena, this had an easy explanation, and I told the woman that the sparking object was probably just a meteor: nothing unusual. I couldn’t know, however, that things were anything but routine a mere hundred miles to our east.

Observers in central Connecticut were noticing the same brilliant light in the sky, but to them it was motionless. There’s only one way it could appear stationary: it was coming straight toward them!

The grapefruit-size meteor not only survived its passage through the atmosphere, it crashed through the roof of a house in Wethersfield, Connecticut, where Robert and Wanda Donohue were watching the TV show M*A*S*H* in the next room. They later told me that it was the loudest sound they’d ever heard. Rushing into a room that was now filled with dust, where furniture had been overturned, they found a hole in the ceiling.

Connecticut has no Meteor Police, and after the Donohues called 911 some firemen came to their house along with the town’s uniformed officers. It was a fireman who found the six-pound meteor under the dining room table, where it had settled after a couple of high-speed bounces that left behind scuff marks on the carpet and ceiling.

They almost weren’t surprised. Eleven years earlier, in April of 1971, the last time a meteorite had hit a house anywhere in the United States, the impact point was Wethersfield, Connecticut. The same town. In one of the strangest coincidences of our time, a house barely more than a mile from the Donohues’ had been struck.

The only plausible explanation for the same town being hit consecutively is that Wethersfield is a suburb of Hartford, the headquarters for many insurance companies. This is where statisticians and actuaries live. They’re the ones who know how impossible this is.

(In case you’re curious, the answer is yes: the Donohues’ insurance completely covered them for the meteorite damage. They deserved it. A couple of years later, Bob and Wanda generously donated the cosmic house wrecker to a museum in New Haven.)

With all these ongoing impacts, should we worry, really? Maybe a little. That famous Tunguska event occurred over a part of Asia at a time when the world’s population was just a third of what it is today. If it happened now, over a city, we could have twenty million fatalities.

Significant meteoroids keep coming in, like the six-foot-wide exploding air burster that rattled windows in Nevada on April 22, 2012, and of course the 2013 Siberian spectacle. Gemologists and adventurers quickly converged on both places like Black Friday shoppers and started finding meteorites—most of which bored precise holes into the snow—in Northern California the next week and in and around the Russian town of Chelyabinsk the very next day. But experts now estimate that a truly damaging meteorite impact hits our world only every few hundred years. Then and now, the most likely ground zero is somewhere over the ocean.

The asteroid Apophis will come extremely close to us on April 13, 2029, at a speed of nineteen miles a second. It will barely miss us then, passing between the ground and our television satellites 22,300 miles up! If its orbit is altered in a precise but unlikely way by that near miss, it could hit us the next time it comes by, on April 13, 2036, with an impact explosion equivalent of five hundred hydrogen bombs. However, the chance of that collision with Earth is currently pegged by NASA experts at only one in a quarter million, which matches the odds of your teenager grabbing the vacuum and spontaneously cleaning the entire house.

Far beyond our solar system, truly off-the-charts velocities—like those of galaxies slamming into each other at a few percent of the speed of light—will never affect us. The cosmos is crammed with rapid motion for the mind’s musings only, an insurance headache for alien civilizations alone.

The fastest you and I—and everything else on our forgiving planet—travel through space? Aristarchus nailed the twin spin-plus-orbit motions 2,300 years ago. Combined with Eratosthenes’s spot-on determination of our planet’s size a century later, the small minority of humans who eschewed geocentrism knew before Christ was born that Earth spins.

When the four eighteenth-and nineteenth-century transits of Venus across the solar disk let astronomers pin down the sun’s true distance from us, we could then finally calculate our exact orbital speed: 66,600 miles per hour, or 18.5 miles per second. We’ll never feel it, because everything around us is moving, too, plus there’s no palpable acceleration or motion change.

Only one other major earthly speed needed to be added. The all-time biggie. This was uncovered by Harlow Shapley a century ago. As we circle the sun, that star itself whooshes around the galaxy’s own center, taking us along for the ride. Our world thus partakes of our galaxy’s spin at a whopping 140 miles a second. That’s the very fastest terrestrial speed that makes any sense, because beyond the galaxy there’s no fixed reference point. We say the Andromeda galaxy is approaching us at seventy miles a second. But we could just as easily regard it as motionless and say that we are moving toward it at that speed. Or we could split the difference and say each travels at thirty-five miles per second. All we know is that the gap between us is shrinking. Because we lack any stationary reference grid for extragalactic motion, our ability to include calculations of speed in our movement story stops at the property lines of the Milky Way. Beyond that, spaces between galaxy clusters increase, but no one can pin down who, exactly, is moving.

Old textbooks say that the sun and Earth move together through space at just thirteen miles a second. That’s because, not too long ago, we were only aware of our motion relative to the stars surrounding us. Imagine a group of floating leaves rushing down a river’s rapids. One leaf has a bit of a slow, sideways drift relative to the others. That’s what those old books talked about. Like adjacent horses on a carousel, the stars in the night sky—which on average are just 150 light-years away—partake of the same motion we do. So they don’t seem to move much, relative to us. Observing them, we seem to be slowly drifting at thirteen miles per second toward the star Vega (some authorities peg it as the constellation Hercules in that same part of the sky). However, we know now that we, Hercules, and Vega all simultaneously rush crazily forward at 140 miles a second in the direction of the star Deneb, which we’ll never reach, because it’s moving ahead at the same rate.

Although this ultimate sensible motion of our world unfolds ten times faster than our best rockets, it’s still just one-thousandth the speed of light.

When Light’s Velocity Just Won’t Get You There

I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count

myself a king of infinite space,

were it not that I have bad dreams.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET (CA. 1600)

There’s fast, and then there’s infinite.

Plenty of things are fast. All the atoms around us vibrate trillions of times a second. Photons in fiber-optic cables completely circle the earth in a literal eyeblink. Distant galaxies whoosh 150,000 miles farther away each second.

Infinitely fast is a different ball of wax. It would mean that something leaving the farthest galaxy just as you reach this point of the sentence is now already in Kansas. We always thought such superluminal speeds were impossible. We were wrong.

Infinity’s exploration requires a quick peek into the intriguing realm that surrounds light speed, which seemed like the absolute limit when many of us went to school.

In 1905, Einstein explained a wild observation made two decades earlier by Hendrik Lorentz and George FitzGerald. They had realized that light travels at a constant speed and understood how profoundly remarkable this is.1

It means photons from the landing lights of an approaching jet strike you at light’s unwavering rate of 186,282.4 miles per second, as if the plane weren’t moving at all. Right from the get-go, light starts out as unique and nonintuitive.

Moreover, Einstein showed that objects that have weight can never quite reach light’s speed. In a hypothetical ultrapowerful rocket, as you accelerate your mass increases. You magically get heavier and heavier. At just below the speed of light, even an object that started out lighter than a feather would outweigh the entire universe. The energy needed to accelerate it the final tiny amount would be infinite. Hence you could never achieve that speed.

After Einstein set forth his two relativity theories in 1905 and 1915, light’s sovereignty in a vacuum was no longer seriously challenged. Yet bizarre escape clauses started to show up during the ascension of quantum mechanics in the 1920s.

This is a Wonderland realm where objects don’t quite exist until they’re observed. There are two main competing theories attempting to make logical sense of this. The first is the “many worlds” explanation for quantum phenomena. This maintains that each option in life creates a separate universe that then carries on. The moment an alternative possible action exists for anything—even if you observe a falling leaf landing here but not an inch away—the cosmos divides into separate realities to accommodate both outcomes.

If you measure an electron, you’ve deliberately or unintentionally forced it to appear in a particular place with particular properties, such as an upward spin versus a downward spin. Or, to be more accurate, you have suddenly joined the universe where it exists in the state you observe it to be. But different yous also exist, inhabiting separate universes, where they each observe the electron in all the other places or states that were then possible.

By this reasoning, some other version of you really did take the prettiest cheerleader to the prom. Unfortunately, one analogue of yourself was a jerk that night (remember, if it could happen, it did happen), and she never spoke to that version of you again.

Most theorists and science professionals do not buy into all these simultaneous realities. Instead, the majority prefers the Copenhagen interpretation. This does away with multiple realities but says that the universe is filled with particles and bits of light that have no definite existence, location, or motion until they are observed. Only then does their wave function collapse, and only then do they materialize in a statistically determined place and continue to exist there happily from that moment on.

Einstein didn’t like any of this. In 1935, he and two colleagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, wrote a now-famous paper in which they essentially bad-mouthed quantum theory as fundamentally incomplete and thus seriously flawed and addressed an aspect of quantum theory that was bizarre even by quantum standards. They pondered what happens to particles created together, or “entangled.” According to quantum thinking, the pair of particles then shares a wave function, and each object knows what the other is doing. If one is observed, forcing it to leave its blurry, probabilistic wave-function state and collapse into an electron with an “up”-pointing spin, its twin—no matter where in the universe it happens to be—knows what its doppelgänger did, which causes its own wave function to collapse. It instantly becomes a particle with complementary properties, in this case a “down” spin.

The easy way to create such entangled pairs is to shoot a laser into beta barium borate or certain other crystals. Suddenly two photons emerge, each with half the energy (twice the wavelength) of the original, so there is no net energy gain or loss. These two then head off at the speed of light, possibly for billions of years, to lead seemingly independent lives. The same process holds true for entangled solid objects such as electrons and even whole atoms and clumps of material.

But let one member of the duo collapse into a particular state, and its twin knows this is happening and instantly does the same.

Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen argued that such apparent parallel behavior must be attributable to local effects, a contamination of the experiment, rather than some sort of “spooky action at a distance,” as they called that aspect of quantum theory. Their paper was so celebrated that such synchronized quantum antics borrowed the physicists’ initials and became known as EPR correlations. And the line “spooky action at a distance” became the standard pejorative way of describing such an outrageous and silly belief—a put-down of true instantaneous behavior. It was repeated in dismissive fashion in physics classrooms for decades.

But recent experiments show that Einstein was wrong. In 1997, Geneva researcher Nicolas Gisin created pairs of entangled photons and sent them flying apart along optical fibers. When one encountered the researcher’s mirrors and was forced to go one way or another, its entangled twin, seven miles away, always instantaneously acted in unison and took the opposite, complementary option when encountering its own mirror.

Instantaneous is the key word. The reaction of the twin was not delayed by the amount of time light could have traversed those seven miles to convey the news. It happened at least ten thousand times faster, which was the experiment’s testing limit. Quantum mechanics tells us that the echoed behavior should indeed be perfectly simultaneous. Indeed, quantum theory predicts that an entangled particle knows what its twin is doing and instantly mimics its actions, even if the pair lives in separate galaxies billions of light-years apart.

This is so bizarre, with implications so enormous, it drove some physicists to a frantic search for loopholes. Some argued that Gisin’s testing apparatus had a bias and preferentially was detecting only those particles that exhibited the complementary properties expected of twins. Then in 2001, National Institute of Standards and Technology researcher David Wineland eliminated these criticisms.