It’s the beginning of the world as we know it

And so the tiny speck gave birth in an explosion of light and heat. And so the universe was born. And through its long life it would grow ever outwards, producing galaxies and stars and planets and dogs and dog shite and humans, as it went on its universal way.

Suspend normal belief please. Imagine something as small as Maggie Thatcher’s sense of modesty. Now, imagine something even smaller, something as small as an atom. Good. Now imagine something smaller again, something as small as a proton, that thing which scoots around inside an atom. Still with me? Fair play to you. Well then, imagine something even smaller than that, something which would be only a fraction of a proton. That would be a very, very tiny thing, so small that if you magnified it a hundred times it would still resemble a speck of dust.

Think of the universe. It’s a very, very big place, isn’t it? Mother Earth is merely a proton-like speck is its utterly vast expanse. We’re talking about mega, giga size, here. Well, imagine that this whole monstrous universe, this incredibly big place — vastly bigger than even Maggie Thatcher’s ego — was once as small, as tiny, as that tiny thing you just tried to imagine, which is only a fraction of a proton.

Scientists believe — not all but the majority — that the universe was born out of such a tiny speck. Everything! It really is hard to fathom but scientists theorise that this tiny speck existed, that it was unimaginably dense and unimaginably hot. And that it got so dense and so hot that it finally exploded in what has become known as The Big Bang. This explosion, this amazingly, unbelievably intense explosion, blasted energy and matter outwards that would some fifteen billion years later make the birds and the bees and you and me. This explosion was so intense that it actually created time and space — as we know them — as it expanded outwards and outwards. It was some blast, The Big Bang was.

George Smoot has spent most of his career trying to prove that The Big Bang actually did occur. On 23 April 1992, he announced that he and his team of scientists had found ‘ripples in the fabric of space-time’ that were made in the first trillionth of a second of The Big Bang itself. The announcement would lead Stephen Hawking — mega-selling author of A Brief History Of Time — to state that Smoot had made, “The scientific discovery of the century, if not of all time.”

Wrinkles In Time is George Smoot’s recently published book. It is both a brief history of cosmology and the story of his quest — and the quest of hundreds of his colleagues — for cosmology’s Holy Grail, those ripples or wrinkles in time. It brought him to the freezing plains of Antarctica, to the top of mountains, and to the hot and sultry jungles of Brazil. His measuring instruments would take perilous trips on high-altitude balloons; would be attached to the roof of U-2 spy planes; and would finally get their own satellite to lift them off into space.

It would take him some seventeen years of incredible, relentless endeavour. Countless technical problems had to be overcome. Balloons would get lost, the Challenger would explode, and the Antarctic weather would test to the very limits both the instruments and the human spirit. Through it all, Smoot and his team persevered, constant in their desire to find that Holy Grail . . .

But what exactly did these wrinkles mean? And how could you know by looking at them what it was like way, way back when the universe was just a baby? “When you look at the sun,” he replied, “you see what has happened eight minutes ago… If you look at this light which comes from The Big Bang, it’s light that comes from fifteen billion years ago; it comes from a short period after The Big Bang. So, if you can make an image, the way you can make an image of the sun, you can make an image of what the universe looked like when it was only 300,000 years old.

“And so I set off on a quest to try and make a map of what the early universe did look like. These long set of experiments on the ground, on mountain tops, on airplanes and balloons, and finally in space, through tremendous effort, we finally got to the point where we could see parts in a million. And we saw an image which was uniform but in parts in a million had variations. And the interpretations most scientists could pick up at the time was that those were due to density variations.”

If the Big Bang had created a totally uniform explosion, then matter would be spread evenly everywhere. There would be no stars or moons or planets or us, just an even mist of matter. But things weren’t uniform in the early universe. There were ever-so-slight density variations. And if you follow Einstein’s theory of relativity, then if you have density variations, you also get what scientists describe as ripples or wrinkles in space and time.

“And if you look at what happens to the ripples, they are effectively unchanged over time,” George Smoot explains. “That means that the structures which we saw, which are hundreds of millions of light years across, had hardly changed from the beginning. These variations are only a few parts in a million and yet they make everything we think is interesting. They make the voids and the galaxies and the stars and eventually planets. To me, it was extraordinarily exciting. Not only had we seen how structure had developed, we actually had seen how space and time are created. We were actually probing the creation event.”

I asked him whether in one sense what he and his colleagues were doing, was like turning back — for the first time — the early pages of the history book of the universe. “Absolutely. And that’s a much more practical analogy. The analogy I was going to give you was… 300,000 years may seen like a long time, but in the age of a universe it’s very tiny. And if you think of the universe as being a middle-aged man today, that would correspond to a picture of that man five hours after conception. And the whole idea behind COBE — the satellite project we started — was to make a series of pictures after those five hours. And then we have another experiment, which we don’t have the results from yet, which looks at the light from the first stars and the first galaxies, and then maybe from later ones, and sees how things are changing over time. So what we’re doing is getting a series of snap-shots from the universe during its babyhood, so that we can really learn about the beginning.”

Although most of the scientific community were thrilled with the cute snapshots Smoot got of the baby universe, there were still a few stubborn scientific souls who refused to believe that The Big Bang had really started it all. These scientists belong to the ‘Steady State’ camp, and they basically believe that the universe was always there, that there was no beginning.

“The Steady State; it’s dead,” Smoot states frankly. “These guys really hate The Big Bang, you know, for personal and for other reasons. I think there’s two personal things. One, they’re so used to arguing against The Big Bang, they don’t want to admit it’s right. And also, if you have a Big Bang, then you have a moment of creation, and so that means you have to face the question of whether you have a creator or not. Whether there is a God. Whereas if you have the Steady State Theory, the universe is eternal and always there. You never have to worry about that issue. If you want to believe in God you can but if you don’t… You never have to face the question directly.”

One thing which emerges while reading Wrinkles In Time is the extraordinary imagination, tenacity and never-say-die spirit of Smoot and his colleagues. I asked him why did he have such an incredible hunger for discovery. “I don’t know. That question is really a deep question. It’s like… you want to know. When you’re born, you have a thirst for knowledge. And some of that’s survival, obviously. But some of it might be more. The Bible says it’s from eating the apple. (Laughs) Or maybe it’s being made in the image of God.”

Is being a scientist a bit like being a monk? “I think of it like being a monk or being an artist, where you sacrifice a lot for your work. You have a vision and a goal.” Did searching for the Holy Grail of cosmology mean that he had to remove himself from the daily currents of life? “Yes and no. If you are a theorist, that’s definitely true. But in order to really test and observe you still have to take these ideas, change them from their really complicated mathematical form and get to the real essence, and decide which ones are worth pursuing and which ones aren’t. And think about building instruments and doing observations which can test whether they are right or not. And nowadays it’s a team effort. So you have to be able to communicate that to your colleagues, not only scientists but also engineers and technicians. Because these things are such hard work and they require such creative talents, you can’t just say, I’ll pay you fifty bucks if you do this. You have to motivate the people to do a really good job. And so you can’t withdraw from the world if you’re really going to test it.”

But isn’t there a great cost to your personal life? Like being able to walk the dog, if you have a dog. Or being able to play with your children. “Absolutely,” he replied. “It depends on what sort of society you’re in and what sort of colleagues you have. But unfortunately, nowadays, it does take a lot of personal cost.

“But not only that. It doesn’t end when you make the discovery. What I found is that, I still want to do my research, but now I’m called on to do more things. And I want to bring science to the public, because I think it’s so important for people to understand this. Because society needs to be comfortable with science. Otherwise people will feel alienated. But on the other hand, science is so important in our daily lives, in terms of technology, in terms of policy decisions. People need to feel more comfortable with science so that their lives will have more meaning and richness.

“Also scientists are being called on to make decisions which would have been considered God’s domain before. I mean, there’s the question of, do we prolong life forever. Because at some point we’re going to be able to keep people alive indefinitely. And then there’s going to be the questions of genetics. You know when you’re going to have a child and you choose the sex. And maybe you’re going to alter a gene and make them a little smarter, or a little taller. But I think the big question is going to be the environmental impact. For me, I still think the universe is a wonderful place. But on the other hand, the earth is the only place in the universe that we know of that people can exist without machines. And we better take good care of it. It should be our home but it’s our cradle.”

Could it be true to say that human society has moved from a stage where it was self-sufficient and independent, to a point where we are becoming more and more dependent on machines for our survival? That in a way we have regressed into some sort of technological womb?

“Absolutely. In fact, that’s only natural. I mean, just think what it would be like without electricity. I mean, we’re already there. But that’s why it’s so important for people to be at home with science, so that they don’t see technology as unnatural and inhuman. We’re creating our own environments, and one of the things we better understand is what it takes to make a real environment. We’re doing it sort of blind and like children now. We don’t know what’s really important.”

Isn’t there a hidden danger in all this, that we can become slaves to technology? That the scientist can become a seeker of knowledge for knowledge’s sake? “That’s why science is so important and you can’t leave it in the scientist’s hands alone,” he replied. “That’s why the public need to know. That’s why I wrote the book. If you’re going to have a democracy and you’re going to have a wise choice, the public have to be informed and they have to be comfortable.”

We all know about the potential destructive power of a nuclear bomb. However, there are some who would say that science is moving towards a point — if not already at that point — where it is making a whole array of nuclear-bomb-potential discoveries. Discoveries like genetic-disease-bombs, artificial life/intelligence, which have the potential to wipe out an entire race or enslave/destroy the entire human race. I asked George Smoot about these doomsday-potential discoveries and how science should approach handling them.

“You should go ahead and discover it but when it comes to making use of it, it definitely should be a societal decision.”

Some would argue, however, that these doomsday areas should be walled off, that no research should be allowed. Smoot doesn’t believe that this sort of ‘head-in-the-sand’ approach would solve anything.

“Eventually people will discover it. And it’s a huge problem because you could imagine making discoveries that would put so much power in people’s hands that a terrorist could destroy a whole country. We have that problem now, that some knowledge is so powerful that it can disrupt a complex, modern society. You could say, it’s better not to know that, that there shouldn’t be any research allowed in that area. I think the problem is that in scientific research you never know when people are going to stumble across such knowledge by accident. So it’s better to know about it and have people informed about it and keep that technology from being used. Now I’m sure you could make up a hypothetical case where something was so horrible that it was better not to have let anybody discover it. But eventually someone will figure out how to do it. If it’s not a human it’ll be a computer.”

You could look at the development of the human species and conclude that we have some sort of ‘death wish’ written into us. We pollute the very air we need to breathe and the very water we need to drink. In many ways our history has been a process of the elimination of our senses and bodily functions from the cycle of life. It is as if we have constantly endeavoured to write up the redundancy papers for ourselves as a species. The story is supposed to end up happily ever after with endless leisure time. However, there is another possible ending, one where we are writing the story of our own extinction. I asked George Smoot whether he thought such a scenario could come about.

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “There’s no guarantees. Well, supposing we stopped all scientific research today. Are we likely to destroy the planet anyway? Probably. So, one of the things which has saved us from disaster… You know it was predicted that the growing population would soon outstrip the food supply. And yet because of science and technology, more people are better fed now than they ever were.”

But isn’t catastrophe happening in places like Africa already? We have the technology to feed them . . .

“Right. We don’t have the social wisdom to do it. But I don’t think you can lay all the blame at science’s feet. Science’s problem has been not having a moral follow-up and a societal follow-up.”

Morality and science don’t always mix too well. Much of scientific discovery — from the atomic bomb to the modern computer — has been funded by the military. I asked him if he thought it was not somewhat ironic that so much of science is driven by a military agenda.

“That’s human nature,” he replied. “People are willing to sacrifice more for war than for other things. It’s a two-edged sword. You can either develop the knowledge to be constructive or be destructive. Because that’s what Governments are able to collect money for and want to do. And that’s what they pay people to do. And some scientists are a bit misguided. Sometimes they do it because it’s a just war and sometimes they do it because they get paid to do it.”

When talking about cosmology — the universe, its origins, etc. — it’s difficult not to say a word or two about God as well. But who is, or what is God? Hasn’t God always represented for us the keeper of the knowledge we don’t yet have and the controller of the things we cannot yet control? In early times there was a God of the stormy seas and the autumn harvest. Then we built better ships, invented fertiliser and pesticide, and those Gods dutifully took a hike off into the hazy realms of mythology.

Not so long ago it was believed that the earth was at the centre of the universe; that everything revolved around our little planet. The cosmologists, priests and philosophers believed this had to be so because, after all, the homo sapien was God’s greatest invention. Therefore the homo sapien and the planet we lived on had to be at the centre of things.

So arrogant were we as a species, that we believed and wrote down as the truth, that we were made in the very image of the being which created everything. Now that’s what I call arrogance! Made in the very image of him. No. Him made in the image of us. God was and is man’s alter-ego. God is Superman, the all-powerful, all-seeing man. And what we have seen over history is a gradual transfer of God’s power to man, as man — the scientist — discovers more and more of the secrets of life and the universe. I put this theory to George Smoot; that God is in actual fact made in the image of man, or to be more exact, Superman. He laughed.

“You’re turning it around,” he then replied. “I think that’s probably right. It’s certainly an interesting hypothesis. And I think there’s a great deal about it . . . It’s very clear that people anthropomorphised God . . . I think there’s that other part you’re missing which is that man was in the Nature that he felt some comfort with, but he felt threatened by. And so he wanted to have the idea that there was this all-powerful protector. This all-knowing, all-powerful being that if you only did what this thing told you to, you would be safe. That’s what was so nice about the old mix of Greek and Christian theology and cosmology. That here we were at the centre of the universe and God was looking down on us. That’s very comforting.”

If today’s scientist is God made flesh, then we had better pay some respect to him/her, hadn’t we? But whether we see scientists as our new Gods or not, we cannot escape the fact that over the next fifty years it will be science which will be the major world shaker and shaper. George Smoot believes there is an important lesson to be learned by Ireland in all this.

“One of the things I would criticise Ireland for very strongly,” he states, “and many, many Governments too — there’s no science advisor at a cabinet level. In Ireland, science is so important for the future of the whole country. Ireland is wanting hi-tech jobs, and yet there’s no person to advise the Government on the scientific end of things. And yet you wouldn’t think of starting a modern company without a scientific background to it.”

(Wrinkles In Time, by George Smoot and Keay Davidson, is published by Little, Brown. Price: £18.99.)