Table Of ContentIN THE BEGINNING: AFTER COBE AND BEFORE THE
BIG BANG
JOHN GRIBBIN
© John and Mary Gribbin 1993
John and Mary Gribbin have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Design
and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as author of this work.
First Published in 1993 by Little, Brown and Company This edition published
in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Preface
Prologue - The End of the Beginning
Part One - The Birth of the Universe
Chapter One - Our Changing Universe
Chapter Two - COBE in Context
Part Two - What is Life?
Chapter Three - Life Itself
Chapter Four - Life on Earth
Chapter Five - The Living Planet
Part Three - What is the Universe?
Chapter Six - Across the Universe
Chapter Seven - The Goldilocks Effect
Part Four - Is the Universe Alive?
Chapter 8 - Is the Galaxy Alive?
Chapter Nine - The Living Universe
Further Reading
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Preface
Two of my main scientific interests have long been cosmology, the study of the
Universe at large, and evolution, the theory which explains our presence here on
Earth. During most of the twenty years or so that I have been writing books,
these seemed widely disparate interests, linked only by the fact that both are
subject to probing by human inquisitiveness, in the quest to find out as much as
possible about both ourselves and the Universe we inhabit. But while working
on my two most recent books, I became convinced that there is much more to the
story of life and the Universe than meets the eye. In The Matter Myth, Paul
Davies and I discussed the nature of complexity, and how simple physical laws,
operating on seemingly simple physical systems, can give rise to behaviour that
is more complex than the sum of its constituent parts. In In Search of the Edge of
Time (Unveiling the Edge of Time in the USA), I set out to tell the story of black
holes in the Universe, and ended up being led by recent developments in
cosmology to the idea that our Universe is just one among many. And then, in
the spring of 1992, came news that the COBE satellite had discovered fresh
evidence supporting the Big Bang theory, and the notion that the Universe was
born at a definite moment in time.
The discovery acted as a catalyst, helping me to put my fumbling thoughts
about life and the Universe in order. If the Universe itself was born, and will one
day die, and if it is just one Universe among many, and if things are in general
more complex than simple physical laws suggest, then the theory of evolution
might be much more relevant to the story of cosmology than I had previously
suspected. The Universe might, indeed, be alive — literally, not metaphorically
— in its own right.
This book, which can be seen as a sequel to both Matter Myth and Edge of
Time, is my attempt to explain the connection between evolution and cosmology,
and to point the way to a new understanding of the Universe, an understanding
being developed after COBE but which tells us what went on before the Big
Bang. The ideas I describe here represent the biggest shift in our understanding
of the Universe, and of our own place in the Universe, since the Big Bang theory
itself was first discussed more than half a century ago. It explains how and why
the Universe itself came into existence, and how and why we came into
existence. You cannot really ask for much more of any scientific idea; and it all
begins, as all good stories should, in the beginning — with COBE’s evidence for
the birth of the living Universe.
John Gribbin December 1992
Prologue - The End of the Beginning
Astronomers breathed a huge collective sigh of relief in the spring of 1992,
when the most important prediction they had ever made was proved correct at
the eleventh hour. The dramatic discovery of ripples in the structure of the
Universe dating back almost 15 thousand million years has set the seal on
twentieth-century science’s greatest achievement — the Big Bang theory which
explains the origin of the Universe and everything in it, including ourselves.
Slotting in this missing piece of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle confirms that the
Universe really was born out of a tiny, hot fireball all that time ago, and has been
expanding ever since. But this is not the end of the story of cosmic creation and
the evolution of the Universe. It is scarcely even the end of the beginning of that
story, for this discovery also points the way to a new understanding, not just of
the origin but (literally) of the evolution of the cosmos.
The story really dates back to the 1950s, when there were two rival theories to
explain the nature of the Universe. Astronomers knew that the Universe contains
many millions of galaxies, each one, like our own Milky Way, made up of
billions of stars. (In this book, ‘billion’ means a thousand million.) And they
knew that these galaxies are moving away from one another, as the empty space
between the galaxies expands. The simplest interpretation of this cosmic
expansion is that long ago the Universe must have been much smaller, because
there was less space between the galaxies. Take this notion to its limit, and you
have the idea of the Big Bang — that everything in the Universe emerged from a
point, known as a singularity, some 15 billion years ago.
But the rival theory, known as the Steady State hypothesis, said that the
Universe might have been expanding forever, without changing its overall
appearance. The chief proponent of this hypothesis was the British astronomer
Fred Hoyle (now Sir Fred). According to this idea, as the space between the
galaxies stretched, new galaxies were continuously being created, out of nothing
at all, to fill in the gaps. Of course, this would require the continual creation of
new matter, in the form of hydrogen atoms, in the empty space between galaxies
in order to provide the building material for the stars of new galaxies. Many
scientists were horrified at the prospect; but Hoyle and his colleagues argued that
this rather gentle form of continuous creation was no more abhorrent, in
principle, than the notion that all of the matter in the Universe had been created
in one instant, the Big Bang. Indeed, Hoyle himself coined the expression ‘Big
Bang’ as a term of derision for a theory that he once described as being about as
elegant as a party girl jumping out of a cake.
In the 1950s, which theory you preferred was largely a matter of personal
prejudice. Philosophically, is it more difficult to accept that matter is created
continually in the Universe in small dribbles, or that all of the matter in all the
stars and galaxies was created at a singular fixed moment in time?
The conflict between the two rival theories was resolved in the early 1960s by
a dramatic and unexpected discovery. Two American radio astronomers, Arno
Penzias and Robert Wilson, working with a radio antenna owned by the Bell
Laboratories, discovered a weak hiss of radio noise coming from all directions in
space. This radio noise, now dubbed the ‘cosmic background radiation’, was
quickly explained as the remnant of the fireball in which the Universe was born,
the echo of the Big Bang itself.
As the Universe has expanded for 15 billion years, the hot radiation in the
original fireball has expanded with it, and cooled as a result. (This is exactly
equivalent to the opposite heating effect that warms the air in a bicycle pump
when you pump up the tyres of a bicycle; when things are compressed they get
hot, when they expand they cool.) When astronomers measured the temperature
of this radiation, they found that it was just under -270°C. This is exactly the
temperature the radiation ought to have if the universal expansion has proceeded
since the Big Bang in line with Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
But there was a snag. In the 1970s and 1980s, astronomers became concerned
that the cosmic background radiation is too smooth and uniform. The radiation is
left over from the last phase of the Big Bang fireball, about 300,000 years after
the Big Bang singularity itself. If the radiation coming from all parts of the sky is
perfectly smooth, that means that the Universe was perfectly smooth just
300,000 years after the Big Bang. In a perfectly smooth Universe, as will
become clear as my story unfolds, there would be no stars or planets, and
therefore no people. And yet, we know that the Universe is full of galaxies,
galaxies are full of stars, and stars are orbited by planets. We live on one of those
planets. If the Universe were perfectly smooth, we would not exist.
Late in 1989, the COBE satellite (the acronym stands for Cosmic Background
Explorer) was launched to find out just how smooth the background radiation
really is. The Big Bang calculations said that the ripples in the background
radiation needed to explain the existence of galaxies — and of ourselves — must
be there, but that only receivers in space, above the interference of the Earth
itself and artificial radio noise, would be able to detect them.
At first the COBE measurements seemed to show a Universe too smooth to
allow galaxies to exist. But the theorists maintained that the ripples required to
confirm the Big Bang theory were so small that it would take two years of
painstaking observation by COBE for them to be picked out. They would
correspond to temperature fluctuations in the radiation from different parts of the
sky of only about 30 millionths of a degree.
The months that followed were a nail-biting time for those theorists. If COBE
still had not found any fluctuations by the middle of 1992, the whole Big Bang
theory might have had to be rejected. But in April 1992, right on cue, came the
news from NASA that ripples in the cosmic background radiation of exactly the
right size had indeed been detected. The discovery, announced at a meeting of
the American Physical Society in Washington, DC, was described by the NASA
team as ‘evidence for the birth of the Universe’.
The ripples in the background radiation confirm that 300,000 years after the
