THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
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Founded January 1970
Julian Date: 2459298.18
2020-2021: C
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Exploratorium XXXI: A Manufactured Universe?
Today, we decided to drive a Sherman tank over a half-inch thick layer of splintering lake ice and discuss the notion of creation. Honestly, most people tend to avoid this topic, because very few people tend to regard it lightly. One cannot broach the issue of creation without inciting ire on one side and offending religious sensibilities on the other. We'll preface this article with a sincere assurance that we intend no offense whatsoever. Then again, neither did Victor Frankenstein.
What or who created the Universe? This most fundamental of all metaphysical inquiries remains unanswered. Even cosmology, the branch of science dealing with formation and development of the Universe, cannot provide much insight into the creation event, itself. Indeed, cosmology has produced the Big Bang Model, in which the cosmos took form out of an infinitesimal kernel about 13.8 billion years ago. However, the Big Bang model breaks down at the very first moment of creation. The conditions that prevailed before 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000001 sec after the creation event is unknown. Some theorists even suggest that it will remain forever unknowable. Cosmologists will have to be content with studying the cosmos as it appeared after this first mysterious moment, known as "Planck time,."
"The Cosmic Web" An artistic depiction of the observable Universe. Each point within the illuminated filaments are galaxy clusters. Our own Milky Way Galaxy is reduced to a flicker within this structure. How did this magnificent Universe come to be? Some cosmologists wonder if the entire cosmos might have been manufactured by beings similar to us. Perhaps the Universe took form in a super collider in another Universe or, perhaps, as a high school student's lab assignment.
Our inability to explain creation has not dissuaded scientists, theologians, and philosophers from offering possible explanations. Lately, some scientists are seriously discussing the possibility that the cosmic creator might be neither a god nor a natural process. Instead, it could have been, well, a scientist in another Universe. While we can well understand how the prospect of God as a scientist could be rather appealing to scientists, they do cite some scientific evidence to support this idea. The most compelling evidence is the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Such super colliders could have the potential to create teeny black holes: "teeny," in this sense meaning atomic sized or smaller. Black holes are regions in space-time where the gravity is too powerful to permit anything to escape, apart from Hawking radiation, which, being a quantum mechanical effect, we can cheerfully ignore at present.
Black holes could serve as passageways to other Universe, through hypothetical conduits called "Einstein-Rosen" bridges. Physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen determined that black hole could produce such bridges to other Universes. Of course, they would likely prove highly unstable. However, a black hole could also, in theory, spawn another Universe: a space-time system wholly independent of that in which it was originally produced. A strong objection to this theory would seem to involve energy. We're aware of the "no free lunch" adage. One cannot just conjure energy out of nothingness. Even the energy you expended to go to the coffee machine this morning originated in the Big Bang. Energy doesn't vanish. It merely changes form. It would seem, therefore, absurd that a teeny black hole could create a Universe abounding in energy. That objection is quite valid, but only in our Universe, which contains a set amount of energy* Gravity has "negative" energy so, ironically, no extra energy is needed to create an offshoot Universe. Even a small black hole, such as one that a super collider could create, would be capable of forming a Universe.
The Large Hadron Collider. Could a highly complex collider in another Universe have generated our own Universe? Such devices could conceivably create black holes that might form an off-shoot Universe that is both immensely large and abundant in energy. Image LHC, Geneva
This offshoot Universe could undergo a birth and then a rapid inflationary event, as many cosmologists believed occurred in our own Universe. In this scenario, the creator would exert no control over their creation. The cosmos would form and promptly snap off from our own Universe. Think of birth without any subsequent rearing. On the other hand, perhaps a Universe creator might have developed the ability to alter the conditions of this manufactured Universe. For instance, by setting the relative strengths of the fundamental forces. These forces are gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. All physical phenomena are manifestations of these forces. These forces are not equally strong, nor do they act over the same range. For instance, gravity and electromagnetism are infinite in range, while the nuclear forces act only over an atomic diameter. Also, electromagnetism is immensely stronger than gravity** and the strong nuclear force is more powerful than electromagnetism.
Cosmologists are often troubled by how profoundly these fundamental forces vary in magnitude and influence. Were these forces to have differed even slightly in comparative strengths, the cosmos would be dramatically different. If gravity had been a bit weaker, galaxies and stars would not have congealed out of the primordial matter rising out of the radiant energy that pervaded the infant Universe. If gravity had been slightly stronger, the Universe would have imploded back in itself rapidly after formation. In both cases, life wouldn't have formed in the cosmos. As another example, if electromagnetism were stronger than the strong nuclear force, fusion would be impossible. Thermonuclear fusion reactions occur because positively charged atomic nuclei fuse together when they draw close enough together. At this point, the strong nuclear force binds them together. They fuse through a series of reactions to form another element and in the process some of the initial matter is transmuted into energy. Electrostatic repulsion keeps lie charges separate when they are outside the strong nuclear force range. If electromagnetism were stronger than the nuclear force, nuclei would never be able to fuse together. Without fusion, we'd have no active stars.
Our Universe seems precisely set for life's development. We don't know if it was deliberately set or, as some insist, we just happen to inhabit a Universe that generates life. There might be myriad Universes in which these forces differ. Or, there might be entirely different forces within these universes. We just happen to be in a life bearing Universe. Presumably, any Universe creator would know how to adjust the settings to give rise to life in their own private Universe.
Of course, the notion that our Universe could have been created in a super collider, or, as part of a high school laboratory experiment or, as some suggest, really is a Matrix-like simulation, disturbs our minds without improving them. It is a hypothesis: a possibility that cannot be investigated, at least not with the equipment we have at our disposal. Even if we did establish that our entire Universe has been manufactured, that leaves open the question of how the first Universe came to be.
Surprisingly, we didn't solve the matter in today's article. That we so ardent desire to know how the Universe came about is miraculous, in and of itself. Science cannot tell us why the Universe exists or, to be honest, how it truly came to exist. We do know we're here, as a negligibly small fraction of an unfathomably enormous Universe we've only started to comprehend. As they say, existence is the greatest enigma of them all.
* Nuclear reactions do generate energy from matter. Realize, though, that matter is crystallized energy. Nuclear reactions do not violate thermodynamical laws by transmuting material into energy. Instead, they extract some of the innate energy within matter.
**It seems difficult to believe that gravity is a lot weaker than electromagnetism. However, look at your refrigerator. See the magnets? The electromagnetic force generated by a single magnet is easily overwhelming the gravitational pull of an entire planet.
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