by Adam Frank
UNIVERSES IN THE MAKING: COSMOLOGY AND COSMIC TRUTHS
It stands twenty-five metres high and weighs seven thousand tonnes.6 Three thousand kilometres of cable run into and out of its octagonal bulk.7 The cables provide electric power and carry petabytes of data from its stacked panels of silicon wafers into banks of computers.8 They call it Atlas. It is the primary detector for the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator that represents the future of particle physics. Running through the centre of the Atlas detector is an evacuated metal tube that stretches off into the distance of the underground facility. Following the tube through its tunnel housing takes a visitor on a twenty-seven-kilometre (seventeen-mile) circuit.9 Superconducting magnets filled with supercooled helium girdle the metal tube as it runs through the tunnel. Inside the tube protons are driven to speeds just a sliver below that of light. A beam of protons circulates in one direction on one side of the tube. Another beam, kept safely apart in the other side of the tube, circulates along the track in the other direction. In the middle of Atlas’ great maw the opposing streams of matter are magnetically shunted towards each other. When the particles collide they shatter, sending a spray of debris in all directions. In the detector, traces of the collision are caught and measured. Data will stream into the computers to create a record of those brief instants when humans managed, ever so briefly and on ever so small a scale, to re-create conditions that have existed only once before in this universe’s earliest history.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) took twenty years and more than $9 billion to build. Located outside of Geneva, Switzerland, it is an international facility operated by twenty countries through the efforts of thousands of scientists and technicians. It is the largest physics experiment ever created. The hopes of the entire field of fundamental physics ride with those circulating proton beams. From the first indirect evidence for string theory to direct detections of dark matter, physicists hope that the LHC will be the engine that finally takes them beyond the standard model. But in its sheer size, cost and organization the LHC represents something else as well. It is the culmination of a new way of doing science that emerged with, and from, the culture we have so recently constructed.
Physics and cosmological science were just as profoundly transformed by the new efficiency culture as was daily life. The years after World War II, in particular, saw the development of “Big Science”, massive industrial-scale efforts dedicated to answering big questions. Particle physics led the way in the development of Big Science, building ever-larger particle accelerators of astronomical cost that required the staff of a fair-sized factory. Without these efforts, the standard model—with its leptons, quarks and force bosons—could never have been achieved. The space programme is another potent example of Big Science. The infrastructure required to design, build and launch a space-based research telescope of even modest ambitions extends across continents. The management of so much human effort, technical detail and funding contributed to, and relied upon, the rapidly changing capacities of material engagement and all the cultural behaviours that went along with it.
The hyperlinked Internet emerged, in part, as a research tool for particle physicists. The first Web browser emerged from a computational astrophysics lab. Just as these technologies exploded into the larger culture, rewiring the landscape of human behaviour, they were also reshaping scientific culture and possibilities. What would have taken scientists months just a few decades earlier now took seconds and could be repeated millions of times. The automated data collection used to produce cosmic maps of galaxies distributed across billions of light-years is just one example of the computer-facilitated efficiency that modern cosmology now relies on. The collaborations between hundreds of scientists, engineers and technicians making the WMAP satellite with its high-resolution view of the cosmic microwave background is another. The cosmological conclusions WMAP offered to thousands of scientists, who were linked together by electronic networks, would not have been possible without the same kinds of material engagement that powered Facebook, Wikipedia and Amazon.
It was against the background of these efforts that the bang in the Big Bang was challenged. Theorists followed their own imperatives in cosmology building as they contributed, and responded, to the large-scale interrogations of the world via experiments. Their efforts, expressed in the language of mathematical physics and theoretical models, now offer radical new narratives of the universe and time. The question is, what will happen next?
Wilson and Penzias’ 1964 detection of the cosmic microwave background was an accident. That is what makes their story, and the story of Big Bang science, so compelling. They tripped over evidence for the true history of cosmic evolution as though they’d stumbled across the Rosetta Stone on a walk through the woods. There is a lesson for us in that discovery. The cosmic microwave background spoke so loudly for the Big Bang model that any dissent was immediately quashed. The evidence was that complete. Even a person staring at static on an ordinary TV screen could pick up a few CMB photons in the flickering chaos. In that sense, the material engagement of everyday life, in the form of television technologies, allowed everyone to “see” the Big Bang. Will the new alternative cosmologies find evidence as convincing?
String theory has provided deep mathematical insights into a diversity of fields. It may ultimately prove to be the foundation for an entirely new physics that will find its own confirmation in experiment. That would be a thrilling development. Experimental confirmation of unseen dimensions would radically expand the meaning of our concept of “cosmos”. But string theory may also prove to be nothing more than mathematics, an intellectually rich but physically disembodied collection of interconnected ideas. The multiverse is also a thrilling possibility. If evidence of other universes were to manifest in our experiments and observations, it would throw open the doors of humanity’s cosmological imagination and begin a new chapter in the human effort to place ourselves against the true cosmic background. But we may never find evidence for even one other universe in our maps of galaxies, the cosmic microwave background or anywhere else. Like the aether of a century ago, the multiverse may prove to be nothing more than scientists’ deeply held wish.
In light of these questions, many scientists today criticize cosmology’s reliance on currently unobservable entities, such as the extra dimensions in string theory or the multiple universes used in eternal inflation. String theory, in particular, has now existed in various forms for more than thirty years and has yet to produce any tangible connections with observation or experiment. Its proponents argue that we must wait and that it makes sense to do so given the extent of the theory’s reach. But how long will the scientific community and the culture that supports it be willing to wait?
More important, what form will the evidence for a new and radical definition of universe take? The detection of the CMB announced a total victory for Big Bang models. Will the evidence for esoteric cosmological entities such as a multiverse be so clear as to muffle dissent the way the CMB did? Or will evidence for something like string cosmology lie so far in the realm of ninth-order effects in a perturbation spectrum that interpretations will differ for decades? What if no direct, compelling evidence arrives for hidden dimensions or other universes? Will cosmologists continue to infer their existence because adding those features to a theory is the only way to explain what is observed, such as the appearance of fine-tuning?
Finally, should the definition of science itself, and its fundamental goals, change in response to new theories and their confrontation with new data? The recognition that string theory can’t uniquely predict our universe but instead provides an almost infinite landscape of possible universes was a disappointment for many. For others, including Leonard Susskind, it pointed towards a different approach, an anthropic approach, to cosmological science. How should science change as it stretches to embrace the oldest and deepest questions of existence and reality? Should it change at all?
These questions will o
bviously hinge on material engagement in the form of new technologies for physical experimentation and astronomical observation. Hyperprecise, space-based gravity wave detectors, may be launched within a few decades, and they represent one direction for new material engagement. Gravity wave detectors might provide evidence for alternative cosmologies. But it is not yet clear if the planned gravity wave detectors will be sensitive enough to see the signals predicted by the new cosmologies. Thus questions of alternatives to the Big Bang will also rest on the culture that supports science.
Strong and convincing evidence for string theory, brane cosmology and multiverse models may come in the next few decades. But if it does not come, then the entire approach now pursued so actively may fall by the wayside. If the predictions of the new cosmologies remain beyond the reach of experiments, then the efforts to pursue those cosmologies will wither. Like the aether of a century ago, thousands of scientific papers may become nothing more than historical relics of theoretical dead ends. Neither science nor culture will wait forever. Cosmos building will march on, especially when culture faces its own changes. In that case, the truly radical approaches to redefining cosmic time might begin to find support, encouragement and funding.
The principal point is that, as we have seen, culture always needs a cosmology to support its own institutional facts, its own organizing principles. From that perspective, it is not surprising that a culture that constructs its time in submillisecond clock cycles would find its image in a cosmology that focuses on events occurring 10–33 of a second after creation. We live in a scientific, technologically driven culture, and we look to science to provide our cosmological framework and orientation. A myth that ceases to be useful ceases to exist, said Karen Armstrong, speaking of human culture in millennia past. The same can be said of scientific narratives of the universe. Even today, human culture needs its dominant cosmology, and if culture changes, it appears that cosmos building will too. What we have learned about the time after the Big Bang is solid. The story of the universe expanding, of subatomic particles fusing into light nuclei, of cosmic microwave background photons being released to traverse space forever and of galaxies condensing out of a sea of hydrogen represents the best of what modern science has achieved. But the context into which we set that story is now become fluid. It is the bang at the beginning, the very meaning of beginning, that is up for grabs.
Seeing the braided evolution of cosmic time and human time points us to the deepest question of all: what is the nature of truth in cosmological science? How much of the cosmos do we have objective access to?
MASKS OF THE UNIVERSE
In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal put the finishing touches on a new manuscript and sent it off to an academic journal. The manuscript wasn’t a description of a new experimental method or a new theoretical calculation, and the journal wasn’t a scientific publication. Instead, Sokal sent his new work to Social Text, a journal focused on “postmodern culture studies”, and his entire article was nonsense, a hoax.
The journal was dedicating an issue to the so-called science wars that erupted in the 1980s and 1990s when some scholars in the humanities began arguing that science was “socially constructed”. In their view, there was no inherent truth to be found in scientific practice. Instead, the results of science were a kind of agreed-upon fiction, a game with made-up rules like those of bridge or chess. The language of social constructivist arguments drew heavily from postmodern studies of literature and could be highly obtuse and arcane. Sokal’s article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, appeared to favour the social constructivist argument claiming that quantum gravity was a cultural invention that depended solely and explicitly on linguistic conventions. This was not, of course, what Alan Sokal believed. Instead, he wanted to see if the journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”.10 The journal did publish the article and, once Sokal revealed his hoax, was humiliated. The firestorm of controversy that followed has yet to fully die down.
Social construction of science, the idea that science does not reveal aspects of the world’s own structure, is surely a mistake. The world clearly pushes back even in the context of highly abstract, technologically dependent interrogations such as the study of the cosmic microwave background. But when dealing with science’s encounter with all-embracing issues such as the five questions at the heart of cosmology, the polar extreme of social constructivism, what philosophers call naive realism, is just as much a mistake.
For centuries, philosophers and scientists have argued over realism and its opposite, anti-realism. As philosopher Samir Okasha put it,
Realists hold that the aim of science is to provide a true description of the world. This may sound like a fairly innocuous doctrine. For surely no-one thinks science is aiming to produce a false description of the world. But that is not what anti-realists think. Rather, anti-realists hold that the aim of science is to provide a true description of a certain part of the world—the “observable” part. As far as the “unobservable” part of the world goes, it makes no odds whether what science says is true or not, according to anti-realists.11
Like all isms, these positions come with many, many variants. Naive realism is the idea that science gives us a perfect and complete description of reality, fully objective and fully independent. While naive realism makes sense in day-to-day life, it is a real problem in confronting the universe as a whole. The reasons for this are fairly obvious, and they are the ones Andy Albrecht cites in his exploration of the clock ambiguity: We remain locked within the system, the universe, we hope to describe. We have one and only one example of the universe we want to study, so its investigation is very different from exploring, say, the heat conduction of a metal bar in a lab. Most important, given the inherent possibilities of infinities in both space and time we cannot even be sure that our definition of “universe”, the system we want to study, is correct as we begin the project.
The universe is not a bar of iron, a germinating seed, an atom in a magnetic trap or even a planet orbiting a distant star. It’s the totality of existence, and because of this, we only “get” what we observe; we must build from that as best we can. And it is exactly with that recognition that richer and more interesting perspectives on interactions with culture come to the fore.
The argument traced across this book, the argument about the inseparable braiding of cosmic time and social time, could be interpreted in two very different ways. The first is not very interesting: technology changes and allows scientists greater capacities to study the world, and cosmology responds to that technology with new data and new models. This is the kind of easy, triumphalist narrative we get in secondary school. It’s the “march of science” pablum that makes for easy reading and easier thinking. The second interpretation of cosmic and social time paints a richer picture. Material engagement shapes both the cultural and cosmological imagination. It creates horizons of possibility. The data of cosmology are the raw material. They are how the world pushes back in our interrogations. But the stories we imagine—the stories we can imagine—must always be framed by the cultural imaginations material engagement made possible.
Material engagement flowing both upwards and downwards creates the possibility of new imaginative landscapes for human culture, including science, to inhabit. The invention of those landscapes through culture building opens up a set of new possibilities for cosmology building that both enable and constrain the imagination. This shifting imaginative landscape focuses our cosmology-building efforts in new directions, creating new responses to questions that have been with us since the time of myth. Scientists, like everyone else, are born in the midst of culture’s institutional facts. Our personal storehouses of metaphor, analogy and creative vision are shaped by the specific world we grow up within. From this cultural background come clockwork universes and Mixmaster universes as cosm
ologists seek to build their imaginative responses to the data that material engagement provides them. Thus, culture and cosmology flow back and forth through a paired process of invention, interrogation and response.
In 1948, the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell looked at the panoply of world religions and myth systems and declared each to be a “mask of God”. In 1985, cosmologist Edward Harrison looked at the history of cosmology and declared its shifting ideas to be “masks of the universe”. Making a distinction between the one physical Universe and the many culturally imagined universes—between an ultimate reality and the realities we build through investigation and interpretation—Harrison wrote,
Where there is a society of human beings, however primitive, there we find a universe; and where there is a universe, of whatever kind, there we find a society. Both go together, the one does not exist without the other. A universe unifies a society, enabling its members to communicate and share their thoughts and experiences. . . . Each determines what is perceived and what constitutes valid knowledge, and the members of a society believe what they perceive and perceive what they believe.12
His last point is the most radical: Each society perceives what it believes. Thus each culturally imposed framework acts as a filter constraining our conception of the universe while it enables our explorations.
Does this perspective rob science of its remarkable and inspiring power? Not at all. The Universe is there and it pushes back. The discovery of the scientific process, its methodologies and its all-important ethic of honesty in investigation (so critical to science) was a pivotal step in our evolution. When the practice of science became formalized beginning in the 1500s, it brought enormous new powers and energy to material engagement, greatly expanding our vision and capacities. Science has changed our ability to see the world’s internal structure. But the recognition that we only see the universes and not the universe entire should move us past simple narratives of what science is and what it does. The recognition that cosmos and culture are so infinitely entwined can and should change our vision of both. What we need is a richer understanding of our proper relation to the Universe as a whole and the universes we create.
