In the extreme lower left-hand corner is a very old Tahitian, sitting with his head clutched in an attitude of despair. Opposite him, on the lower right side, is a baby lying peacefully on the grass. There are also dogs and kittens, and to the left of the central figure, an enigmatic votive figure, turquoise-hued, like an upright Buddha. The landscape is of a paradise—trees, mountains and a placid tropical ocean.
This painting, perhaps Gauguin’s most mystical, is a chronicle of the human life cycle. Despite the benign, mild climate of this South Pacific Eden, or perhaps because of it, Gauguin was brought nearer to the ultimate truths of existence than he had ever been before. In the upper left-hand corner of the painting he wrote its title: D’ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons nous? (“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”) If ever an artist grappled with cosmology, the origins of the universe and, ultimately, ourselves, it was Gauguin with this work. Here on the shores of the South Pacific, among the simple lives of the Tahitians, he sought to pose the mystery of existence.
THE RING OF ETERNITY
A little over thirty years after Gauguin painted his masterpiece in Tahiti, the astronomer Edwin Hubble became director of an observatory that housed the largest telescope on earth—the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. It sat atop a mountain that was part of the same massif that spawned the bristlecone pines to the north. Like Gauguin, Hubble wondered where we came from, though for Hubble that question was linked to the larger question of where the universe came from. So, every night, he looked at the stars. But not just any stars. He preferred very, very distant collections of stars, which at the time were referred to as nebulae—we now call them galaxies. And Hubble knew he was looking not only farther than any human had before, he was also looking back in time.
Two years into his work at San Diego’s Palomar Observatory, Hubble found himself confronting an enigma. There was a problem with some of the data, something didn’t make any sense. It had to do with the way the galaxies were moving. It was wrong. Years earlier, astronomers had learned how to measure exactly how far away these inconceivably distant objects were. They had also discovered a way to determine which way a star was moving relative to the earth. It had to do with subtle variations in the speed of light: if a star was moving towards the earth, its spectrum “shifted” towards the colour blue; if it was moving away from the earth, its spectrum shifted towards red. The thing that perplexed Hubble was that the farther away a galaxy was from the earth, the more its light seemed to shift towards the red, which meant that all distant galaxies, no matter where he looked in the night sky, were accelerating away from earth. Hubble was more than mystified. If what he was seeing was true, then the planet earth, in a bizarre reversal of Copernicus’s discovery, was the repulsive centre of the whole universe. How could that be? Maybe there was something wrong with the optics of the giant telescope. Maybe his math wasn’t right.
Hubble pondered this mystery for months until, in a flash of insight, he recalled a theory he had read in an article two years earlier. Written by a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaître, the article proposed that our universe started some billions of years ago with the explosion of a primeval atom. Hubble had an epiphany. He realized that here, in Lemaître’s hypothesis, was a perfect solution to what seemed to be a contradiction. There was nothing wrong with his math or his observations. The universe was expanding, and it was doing so evenly and prodigiously. Earth wasn’t at the centre of the expanding universe; it only seemed to be because every point in the universe was moving away from every other point, like raisins in rising bread dough. And if the universe was expanding outwards in this way, it must have at some point been much, much smaller. Running the universe backwards in time, Hubble understood that there was only one, inescapable conclusion: the universe had begun in a tremendous explosion, a “Big Bang,” as the Russian physicist George Gamow later called it in 1948.
Thirty-five years after Hubble’s discovery, in 1964, Bell Laboratories contracted two communication specialists named Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson to try to improve microwave telecommunications signals by reducing background static. It seemed, at first, like a simple task. They were able to screen out almost every type of external noise they heard—radio noise, static electricity and even solar-flare static. But there was one type of noise that they just couldn’t seem to get rid of. They tried everything to eradicate it, even cleaning the bird droppings off their antennae, yet the noise persisted. Anywhere or any time they pointed the antennae into the sky, the results were the same. In desperation, they called an astrophysicist at Princeton, who conjectured that maybe they were picking up background radiation from the universe itself.
With that idea in mind, Penzias and Wilson went back to their antennae and began to evaluate the consistency of the noise in all directions. It was identical everywhere, and it was clearly from a source beyond our own galaxy. After further analysis they realized, with mounting excitement, that they were eavesdropping on the birth of the universe itself. What was causing the background static was the primordial radiation left over from the Big Bang, like the sound of a bell that was still ringing, faintly, 13.7 billion years after being struck loudly at the very beginning of time. The irksome “noise” they had stumbled upon won them the Nobel Prize.
THE BIRTH OF TIME
After looking at the evidence that Hubble and Penzias and Wilson presented, physicists concurred that time commenced at the beginning of the universe. They also concluded that there couldn’t have been a “time before” the Big Bang. It turned out that the relationship between matter, energy and time in our universe is intimate—time came into being alongside the other dimensions. Here you might ask, “How could the universe have arisen from nothing? How could there not be a time before time?” These aren’t naive questions. For hundreds of years, philosophers have struggled with them. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant decided that the birth of the universe must be a paradox, for how could anything arise out of nothingness? Nothingness, he said, couldn’t create “a condition of being, in preference to that of non-being.” In short, Kant came up against the modern reality—the universe is impossible and finite. St. Augustine also thought about the beginning of the universe, though he was closer to the modern scientific view. Linking time to its inception, he wrote, “The world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.”
A helpful way to wrap your mind around what didn’t come before the universe—the non-time before time began—is to think of it as identical to the period before you were born. At one point you didn’t exist; then you did. The universe is like that, only without a parent. The nothingness that birthed our universe is so absolute that even death, the annihilation of a living being for all eternity, would be as life compared to it. This is what lies at the beginning and (as we will see) the end of the universe.
Okay, you might say, given the inconceivable absence of anything before the first moment of time, wouldn’t there still have to be a first moment, a start to all of this? Science says no; the universe came out of less than nothing and had no first moment. Ask yourself if there is a final, smallest number that is just slightly, infinitesimally larger than zero. Try to find some number where you can stop and say, “There, that’s the last number before zero.” It can’t be done. You can always keep halving a smaller number out of the previous until you meet infinity (or eternity, however you wish to look at it). Just as there is no final number, there is no first moment.
How, then, did moments themselves begin? And how did something come from nothing? This is where quantum physics comes to the rescue. At the level of quantum phenomena, which is a very strange and counterintuitive world, particles like electrons can pop into existence within the pure vacuum of interstellar space billions of miles from any stars. They literally appear out of nowhere, and it is this magic propensity that provides a clue as to how our universe began. Out of less than nothing, within less than nothing, where there was no time,
no space, no matter, no “was,” an infinitesimal blip switched on and the unimaginable occurred—a universe exploded into being simultaneously with the only element that could keep it expanding: time.
Yet according to physicists, even the presence of time itself was a bit of a fluke. They’ve modelled many other possible universes that could have arisen from a big bang—parallel universes where physics are slightly altered—and have found that some of them might even have formed without time. So we’re lucky. As Paul Davies wrote in About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, “For reasons we know not, the quantum state of our universe, fortunately, is one of those very special states that permits time to emerge from this primordial jumble, as the universe evolves’ away from the Big Bang, in a fuzzy and ill-defined way. And that is good news, because life in a universe without any sort of time would be difficult.”
Now, 13.7 billion years after it began, time continues unabated. The present may be a vanishing threshold forever sliding into the future, but it has the entire history of the universe behind it, substantiating it. The past is the absent miracle that shores up the present. We are constituted by our history. Without the products of the past, without everything that history and prehistory has built—the mountains, the stars, the planets, the oceans and ourselves—the present would exist only as an abstraction within a vacuum, an airless, colourless trace moving like a solitary tsunami through an empty ocean of time. And we, without memory and past, would be vacant ghosts.
With the present being an impossibly small, possibly immeasurable fraction of time, time is almost 100 percent history. Time is almost entirely what was. But here’s the kicker: what was doesn’t really exist, except in our memories and the solid objects it has produced. And even they, in the end, will succumb to deep time, as the universe continues its evolution. Ultimately, when the fabric of the universe begins to unravel, when the atomic bonds that hold solid matter together break down after trillions of years, when even diamonds begin to dissolve (turning first into smooth spheres and then disappearing entirely), the emptiness of the past will become destiny.
THINGS YOU CAN’T TAKE BACK
The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow’s past.
—Mary Webb
September is almost over. Summer ended officially six days ago, on the twenty-second, and last night there was a frost warning. I put plastic over my basil plants and the big palm to protect them, though this morning there was no frost on the grass. Still, the banana leaves are looking a bit spotty, and while the flowers on my mandevilla are going strong, the leaves look a little lacklustre. It’s a poignant season for someone who loves summer as much as I do. The celebration’s over, the guests are leaving. This week alone I’ve seen two noisy V’s of southbound geese. When I was mowing the grass a couple of days ago, I found a wine cork from my dinner party, part of the dwindling evidence of that marvellous night with my friends. The stopper from a time capsule whose opening is now in the past.
In one sense the past is very close to us. It is the perpetually open back door of “now.” The present, in some entangled and complex way, is wrapped around the immediate past, and yet, at the same time, the past is always missing from it. The past just isn’t there. Elusive, intangible, always pacing the present, it’s one step behind; as soon as we turn to grasp it, it’s gone, so that something that happened a second ago might as well have happened a hundred years ago for all that we can do about it. It is equally insubstantial, equally lost. This was a truth that was brought home to me, in a small but irritating way, last Friday afternoon when I locked my keys in the car.
It was rush hour and I had parked illegally in order to use a bank machine. The traffic was so heavy that I was trapped in my car at first and had to wait for a gap between cars before stepping out. As soon as I shut the door behind me, I realized that I’d left the keys in the ignition with the engine running. My mistake, a brief slip, was already part of the past. I couldn’t take it back. Waiting for the towing company to come and break into the car, I thought of other moments where the instant division between present and past is equally irrevocable—transitory moments where the merciless past bares its teeth and holds on like a bull terrier.
I came up with the Waterford goblet knocked by an errant elbow from a counter above a marble floor; the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote lingering in the air after sliding off the top of a high mesa; the policeman’s flashing light in your rear-view mirror; and the last glimpse of your house keys as they tumble down a sewer grate during a downpour. Driving home after the tow-truck operator rescued me, I thought of the past as the stone-faced customs agent who impounds your lip gloss or your butane lighter at the airport—you cannot argue with the past. There is no bartering, no deal-making. The past is absolutely bureaucratic.
Tonight, in my study, I can feel again the adamantine implacability of the past as I felt it this afternoon. The past is like a ubiquitous central vacuum that punctuates the entire universe with a micro-fabric of temporal black holes—a three-dimensional quantum sieve of suck. It’s like a big drain, a funnel. Everything that falls into it is immediately carried away. You can say “now,” and then you can say “now” again, but both “nows” are immediately in the past.
When I pay close attention to the rushing divide between the present and the past, if I concentrate on that precise boundary where the universe and everything in it pour over the edge of “now” into the abyss of history, I imagine that I can sense it. The past is all around me, separated from me by an instant—the waft of a butterfly’s wing, a slip of gauze. But it’s my sense of hearing that somehow captures the present slipping into the past. When I listen closely enough, every sound—a ticking clock, the rustling of papers—seems to emit a faint, almost undetectable resonance as it slips into the immensity of the past. It’s a sound beyond normal hearing, more like a studio sound effect than anything natural, and I’m far from sure that I hear it at all.
Perhaps this low-level, almost indistinguishable echo is like the “Hawking radiation” that leaks out of black holes. Not everything falls into black holes. At the edge of a black hole there is a barely detectable fizz of quantum particles that, because they are so light—almost massless—escapes its monstrous gravity. This outward escape of quantum particles is called Hawking radiation, after Stephen Hawking, who discovered it. It has great consequences for the future of the universe because it means that, after billions of years, black holes will simply evaporate, drained to nothing by the infinitesimal, but steady, loss of mass. This is a great contradiction of a law of physics called the Conservation of Information. According to that principle, all information contained in the universe has to be conserved, retained, even if transformed. The information in a piece of wood is contained in the molecular lattice of its cellulose. If the wood burns, the cellulose is converted into light, heat and carbon; nothing is lost. But if all the information that gets sucked into a black hole merely evaporates over time, then black holes represent a monstrous type of ultimate, cosmic death: the death of matter (and all the information contained in matter) itself. A past where even the past is annihilated.
Chapter Eleven
TIME TRAVEL
I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant.
—H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
A little over two blocks south of my house, there is a low escarpment, about five or six storeys tall, that snakes several miles through the city. In aerial photographs the cliff looks almost like a river as it meanders from east to west across the grid of city blocks. One of the first and oldest streets in Toronto, Davenport Road, runs along its base. Houses on the north side of the street are angled into the bank so that their back doors exit on the third floor. According to historical records, Davenport Road follows the path of an old trail used by natives for thousands of years
. Before that the trail could only have been used by fish, because 11,200 years ago, at the end of the Wisconsinian glaciation, it was under water.
The escarpment is the old shoreline of an extinct glacial lake, Lake Iroquois, that was twice the size of present-day Lake Ontario. Were a catastrophic flood to resurrect Lake Iroquois, my house would be safe, but most of the city, at least the part south of the old shoreline, would be submerged. Only a few of the taller office towers in the financial district would poke through. If my house could be transported eleven thousand years back in time, then on windy nights I would be able to hear waves crashing on the shore as they did when the glaciers had begun their last retreat.
My morning jogs have been glorious this week. The October leaves, like solar prisms, seem to be replaying all the sunny afternoons they soaked up during the summer. Every kind specializes in a different part of the summer spectrum—maples flame red and orange, the ash trees glow with deep, moody yellows, while the sumac thickets distill the fluorescent pink of a hundred sunsets. My jogging path takes me through a park perched on the edge of the Davenport escarpment. On clear, still days, I can see across Lake Ontario to the United States. For several mornings recently, when I’ve looked southwest, I’ve been able to see the mist from Niagara Falls, seventy kilometres away. It’s a faint puff of what looks like smoke or steam, tethered to the horizon like an unmoving cloud.
The Niagara River tumbles over a limestone escarpment much higher than the earthen one that runs along the southern edge of my neighbourhood. At ninety metres tall and hundreds of kilometres long, it’s one of the major landforms of the region. It extends in a great arc from Green Bay, Wisconsin, through upper Michigan into central Ontario, then down the Bruce Peninsula and through Niagara, finally petering out in upstate New York. As my father once did, I’ve learned to see landscapes in geological time-lapse, and the Niagara Escarpment has an extraordinary, almost cataclysmic, geological pedigree.
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