Coming of Age in the Milky Way (53 page)

Two of their hypotheses—one called vacuum genesis, the other quantum genesis—seemed best to hint at what the near future might promise for human knowledge of the origin of the universe.

First, vacuum genesis. The central problem of cosmogony is to explain how something came from nothing. By “something” we mean the totality of matter and energy, space and time—the universe that we inhabit. The question of what is meant by “nothing,” however, is more subtle. In classical science, “nothing” was a vacuum, the empty space that intervenes between particles of matter. But this conception always posed problems, as witness the long inquiry into whether space was filled with an aether, and in any event it did not long survive the coming of quantum physics.

The quantum vacuum is never really empty, but instead roils with “virtual” particles. Virtual particles may be thought of as representing the possibility, delineated by the Heisenberg indeterminacy
principle, that a “real” particle will arrive at a given time and place: Like the pop-up silhouettes on a police firing range, they represent not only what is but what
might
be. As quantum physics sees it, every “real” particle is surrounded by a corona of virtual particles and antiparticles that bubble up out of the vacuum, interact with one another, and then vanish, having lived on borrowed, Heisenberg time. (“Created and annihilated, created and annihilated—what a waste of time,” mused Richard Feynman.)
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A free proton, say, is not alone in its travels, but is surrounded by a corona of virtual protons, the existence of which influences its behavior in ways that are not only observable but are, indeed, fundamental to the interactions of the proton as we know it. One example of the reality of virtual particles resides in the fact that the stars shine: To revisit the Coulomb barrier one last time, it is the structure of the virtual particle clouds surrounding protons that makes it possible for protons at the centers of stars to tunnel through one another’s electrical fields often enough for nuclear fusion to be maintained.

The quantum vacuum, then, is a seething ocean, out of which virtual particles are constantly emerging and into which they constantly subside. And this is not merely an abstraction but a practical reality; as the American physicist Charles Misner notes:

The rules governing the brief existence of the virtual particles are set by the uncertainty principle and by the law of conservation of matter and energy. They state that the probable frequency with which virtual particles of a given mass can be produced, and the amount of time each can cavort before falling back into nonexistence, is determined by the energy potential of the vacuum. In a low-energy environment, massive particles like the W and Z bosons cannot borrow enough energy to exist in any quantity for any discernible interval: That is why we do not normally encounter these bosons in nature today, and why it was necessary to spend millions of dollars souping up the CERN accelerator until it could
inject enough energy into the vacuum to make a few Ws appear and survive long enough to trigger Carlo Rubbia’s detector. In the early universe, however, there would have been adequate ambient energy in the vacuum for the W and Z bosons to pop up all the time; this is the historical basis for the assertion of the electroweak theory that these bosons gamboled about in great numbers when the universe was young, managing the affairs of the unified electroweak force.

What has this to do with the origin of the universe? Perhaps little or nothing. Or perhaps, according to the vacuum genesis hypothesis, everything.

The protocols governing virtual particle production are tantalizingly open-ended, in that they place no absolute upper limit on the masses or lifetimes of the particles that can be created out of the vacuum. The known laws of science permit us to deduce the energy potential of the vacuum by observing the rate of particle production, but they set no ceiling on the energy that a given vacuum might contain. A vacuum that had looked quite unprepossessing might suddenly give birth to a particle as massive as a planet: Such an event is highly unlikely, but it is not impossible. Genesis, of course, can be quite unlikely—it need have happened but once—and it is through this keyhole that the vacuum genesis hypothesis entered the halls of science. Its thesis is that the entire universe originated as a single, extraordinarily massive virtual particle, one that sprang unbidden from a vacuum billions of years ago.

The first physicist to think of vacuum genesis was Edward Tryon. A modest messenger for so startling a hypothesis, Tryon had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell and had won his Ph.D. under Weinberg at Berkeley, but he was only an assistant professor at Columbia University, and his countenance did not seem destined to adorn any scientific Mount Rushmore. One afternoon during the fall 1969 academic semester, assistant professor Tryon was in the audience at a seminar being conducted by the luminary English cosmologist Dennis Sciama. As happens to everyone at times, Tryon drifted off into a reverie at one point during the talk. His thoughts wandered to the boiling quantum vacuum and the virtual particles that appear out of it. Suddenly he was seized by an idea, and was startled to hear himself interrupting Sciama’s talk. “Maybe,” he blurted out, “the
universe
is a vacuum fluctuation.”

Tryon’s colleagues laughed. They thought it was a joke. “It just cracked them up,” Tryon recalled more than a decade later, still looking pained at the memory. “I was deeply embarrassed…. I never told them I’d not been joking.”
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Humbled, Tryon put the idea out of his mind, but it came back to him in full force three years later, one evening while he was sitting quietly at home. “I had a revelation,” he recalled, blushing. “I visualized the universe erupting out of nothing as a quantum fluctuation and I realized that it was possible and that it explained the critical density of the universe. I understood all those things in an instant, and a chill ran through my body.”
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At the magnetic north of Tryon’s speculation stood the realization that the overall energy content of the universe might well be zero. True, when one adds up the energy released by the big bang and by starlight, plus the frozen energy that we call matter that is bound up in the stars and planets, the total is an enormous positive sum. But there is also gravitation, which, since it is purely attractive, belongs on the minus side of the ledger. (Gravity was Tryon’s specialty.) Interestingly, the gravitational potential of the earth or of any other object turns out to be approximately equal to its total energy content as calculated via
E
= mc
²
. If this were true for the universe as a whole, then the universe would have
no
net positive energy, and could have emerged from a vacuum without violating the law of conservation of energy.

But is it true that the universe has zero net energy? The answer, Tryon realized, could be found in the rate at which cosmic expansion might be slowing down. The universe is continuing to expand, owing to impetus generated by the big bang. The rate of expansion, however, was thought to be decreasing with time, owing to the mutual gravitational attraction exerted by the galaxies upon one another. Such a rate of slowing could reveal the overall mass density of the universe, a quantity the cosmologists symbolize by the Greek letter omega. If omega was equal to or less than 1, the mass density would be insufficient to stop expansion, and the universe would go on expanding forever. Geometrically, such a universe is described as “open,” meaning that the overall curvature of space is hyperbolic. If omega was more than 1, the expansion would be destined eventually to stop, after which the universe presumably would collapse into another fireball. If omega was exactly 1, then expansion would continue forever, forever slowing but never quite coming to a halt.

Tryon’s speculation required that omega be equal to or less than 1. Strangely, omega appears be exactly (or almost exactly) equal to 1. Indeed, the reason that observational cosmologists like Sandage and Tammann had been unable to determine conclusively whether the universe is open or closed was precisely because it is balanced at or close to an omega of value unity. Cosmic space, in other words, is neither dramatically open nor dramatically closed, but is perfectly—or almost perfectly—flat.

That it should be so is nothing short of astonishing. The gross features of the present-day universe are highly dependent upon tiny variations in the early universe—just as, say, a variation of millimeters in the angle at which a bat strikes a baseball can produce variations of hundreds of feet in where the ball lands in the outfield. In the standard big bang model, for the universe to be flat today it must have been incredibly flat at the beginning: At one second ABT, the cosmic matter density would have to have fallen within one trillionth of 1 percent of the critical value. At 10
⁻³⁵
second the permitted deviation would have been even smaller—less than one part in 10
⁴⁹
. If this happened by pure chance, it was very lucky indeed; the odds against it are vanishingly small.

One could of course make the equations come out right by inserting the required matter density as an “initial condition,” but this amounted to invoking the guiding hand of God, which in science is rather like playing tennis without a net.
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Alternately, one could “explain” the flatness of the universe by identifying it as a prerequisite of human existence. This argument, called the anthropic principle, went as follows: Were the cosmic matter density only slightly higher, the universe would have stopped expanding and have collapsed before enough time had elapsed for stars and planets and life to form; were it only slightly lower, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to have congealed from the rapidly thinning primordial gas. Therefore, the argument goes, the fact that we are here constrains certain cosmological parameters, among them the value of omega. The anthropic principle “explains” the miracle of the flat universe if we
imagine the creation of many universes, only a fraction of which chance to have the values requisite for life to appear in them. But the explanation cannot be tested unless the creation of other universes can be established, something that may well be impossible by definition. In that sense, the anthropic principle is a dead-end street. The English physicist Stephen Hawking, whose work is said to have contributed to the formulation of the principle, nonetheless called it “a counsel of despair.”
⁷

But where there is enigma there is also the promise of discovery: A paradox may signal an inadequacy in the way we are looking at a question, thereby suggesting a new and more fruitful way of approaching it. This, I think, is what Bohr meant when he exclaimed, “How wonderful that we have met with paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”
⁸
And it was in this spirit that the flatness conundrum was resolved, by the invention of a new cosmological hypothesis, the inflationary universe.

The inflation hypothesis was first proposed by a young American physicist named Alan Guth. He learned of the flatness problem one November afternoon in 1978 at Cornell, in a talk by Robert Dicke, a resourceful Princeton relativist whose thoughts on the cosmic background radiation recalled those of Gamow. Trained as a physicist, Guth at the time knew little of cosmology, and, with the fierce conservatism of the young, dismissed ideas about the early evolution of the universe as “too speculative.” Dicke’s point about the oddity of omega equaling 1 struck Guth as “amazing,” he recalled, but at the time he had no idea what to do about it.

The physics community, however, was at the time commencing its mating dance with cosmology, and Guth soon found himself working on the question of how magnetic monopoles might have been produced in the early universe. Guth found monopoles intriguing: First conceived in Dirac’s austere imagination in 1931, they were purported to be massive particles with a unipolar magnetic charge. The grand unified theories indicated that they would have been created out of knots in space-time, by the same symmetry-breaking event that split the electroweak and strong nuclear forces asunder. Anachronistically, each magnetic monopole would harbor trapped W and Z bosons, as well as a tiny region at its core where the unified, electronuclear force still functioned.

The problem that engaged the attention of Guth, and of his Cornell colleague Henry Tye, was that the grand unified theories
predicted the production of far too many magnetic monopoles—roughly one hundred times more monopoles than there are atoms. Given that most of the matter in the universe is invisible—the “dark matter” question—cosmologists generally welcomed the suggestior that massive subatomic particles might make up the deficit, but this was an embarrassment of riches. Searches for monopoles had turned up null results: One event had been recorded, on Valentine’s Day, 1982, on a device built by Bias Cabrera in a basement laboratory at Stanford, but Cabrera’s result had never been repeated, at Stanford or anywhere else. This plus several other lines of inquiry suggested that the cosmic monopole population was either negligible or zero. The disagreement between theory, which predicted many monopoles, and observation, which permitted few, could be resolved, Guth and Tye found, if the fabric of space-time had been smoother than expected at the time of the grand unified phase transition. Smoother space-time meant fewer space-time knots, resulting in fewer monopoles. It also meant an omega equal or close to 1.

On the evening of December 6, 1979, Guth wrote the words
EVOLUTION OF THE UNIVERSE
atop a blank page that he then went on to fill with calculations. His hypothesis was that the universe initially had expanded much faster than at the linear rate it evinces today—that, as Guth would later put it, there had been an “inflationary epoch,” during which the universe expanded exponentially. This meant that space was flatter and smoother by the time of the grand unified phase transition, and that far fewer monopoles therefore were produced. Here, too, was the solution to the flatness problem Dicke had outlined: Since the universe would have been much larger at the end of an inflationary period than was envisioned in the old, linear-expansion model, space would be much flatter—just as, say, an acre of the surface of the earth is flatter than is an acre of a spherical asteroid only ten miles in diameter.