Virtual Philosophy

INSTRUCTIONS: After reading the the timeline about the history of our universe and the essay about the multiverse sit back and watch the immersive Spheres VR. When finished write down your own autobiographical reaction to what you have experienced, responding to the following three questions: 1) How do you feel knowing how immensely large the universe is? 2) What do you find most intriguing about the cosmos at large? 3) What questions would you like to see answered about our life here on terra firma (e.g., Is there life on other planets?). In addition, answer the following query: why is understanding physics and astronomy important for doing philosophy? Be sure to do some further research to best answer this question. Post your responses on your website and share with your classmates.

Universe Timeline | Nova Online | Alpha to Omega

The Big Bang

0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang

The universe began with a vast explosion that generated space and time, and created all the matter and energy in the universe. Exactly what triggered this sudden expansion remains a mystery. Astronomers believe it involved a runaway process called "inflation," in which a peculiar type of energy that existed in the vacuum of space was suddenly mobilized. The inflationary expansion ended only when this energy was transformed into more familiar forms of matter and energy.

Ultimate High-Energy Lab

1 second after the big bang

After inflation ended in the first tiny fraction of a second, the universe continued to expand but not nearly so quickly. As the universe cooled, the most basic forces in nature emerged: first gravity, then the strong force, which holds nuclei of atoms together, followed by the weak and electromagnetic forces. In its first second of existence, the universe was made up of fundamental particles, including quarks, electrons, photons, and neutrinos. Protons and neutrons then began to form.

Basic Elements Form

3 minutes after the big bang

In the next few minutes, the universe as we know it took shape. Already incomprehensibly large, its protons and neutrons came together to form the nuclei of simple elements. That the universe remains largely made up of these elements—hydrogen and helium—is considered strong evidence of the validity of the big bang model.

From Hot to Cold

500,000 years after the big bang

For the next 300,000 to 500,000 years or so, the universe remained an enormous cloud of hot expanding gas. When this gas had cooled to a critical threshold, electrons were able to combine with hydrogen and helium nuclei. Photons no longer scattered, but rushed outward. We can still see the photons emitted from this period, but time and distance have shifted them into microwave wavelengths. Today, this cosmic microwave background radiation gives astronomers a window onto the early universe.

Birth of Stars and Galaxies

1,000,000,000 years after the big bang

As time moved forward, the pull of gravity exerted its influence on the early universe. It amplified slight irregularities in the density of the primordial gas. Even as the universe as a whole continued to expand, pockets of gas became more and more dense. Stars ignited within these pockets. Groups of stars then became the earliest galaxies. Modern telescopes can detect these primordial galaxies as they appeared when the universe was only one billion years old, just 7 percent of its present age.

The Era of Quasars

3,000,000,000 years after the big bang

From one billion to three billion years after the big bang many smaller galaxies merged into larger ones, forming an array of shapes resembling spirals and spheres (known as elliptical galaxies). Often the merger was so violent that stars and gas collapsed into a common center, becoming so dense they formed gigantic black holes. The gas flowing into these black holes became hot enough to glow brightly before it disappeared. The light of these "quasars" can be seen across the depths of the universe.

Supernova 9933

6,000,000,000 years after the big bang

Within galaxies, as stars were being born, others died...often in enormous cataclysmic explosions. These explosions, called supernovae, are important to the evolution of galaxies because they distribute all the common elements such as oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and iron into interstellar space. Explosions of especially massive stars also create and distribute heavier elements such as gold, silver, lead, and uranium. The supernova pictured here is of a smaller type, used by astronomers to determine distance. This one appears to us now as it looked when the universe was about five billion years old.

Birth of the Sun

5,000,000,000 years before the present

The sun formed within a cloud of gas in a spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. A vast disk of gas and debris that swirled around this new star coalesced into planets, moons, and asteroids.

The image on the left, from the Hubble Space Telescope, shows a star in the throes of birth. Powerful jets of radiation roar out of its poles, lighting up the surrounding environment.

Galaxies Collide

3,000,000,000 years in the future

Astronomers estimate that in about three billion years, our Milky Way galaxy will be swallowed up by one of its nearest neighbors, a large galaxy named Andromeda that lies 2.2 million light-years away. Depending on their pathways, these two galaxies will either merge into a single gigantic galaxy or rip each other apart, sending millions of stars like our sun hurling into space. One such titanic collision involving four galaxies, 300 million light-years away, is pictured at left.

Galaxies Disappear

100,000,000,000 years in the future

If recent observations of cosmic acceleration are correct, then the "vacuum energy" that is emerging in the universe will continue to overtake the pull of gravity from matter. This means that, in the future, gravitationally bound clusters of galaxies will survive but galaxies in general will fly ever more rapidly apart. Eventually our nearest unbound neighbors will be so far away that they will no longer be seen, even with big telescopes. But this will be so far in the future that our sun will have long since burned out and our Earth died with it.

Stellar Era Ends

1,000,000,000,000 years in the future

During this era, which will last from 100 billion years to one trillion years after the big bang (and is the era we are currently in), most of the energy generated by the universe will be in the form of stars burning hydrogen and other elements in their cores. This long period will give way to an even longer, lingering death for our universe.

The Degenerate Era

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000 years in the future

This era extends to ten trillion trillion trillion years after the big bang. Most of the mass that we can currently see in the universe will be contained in stars that have blown up and collapsed into black holes and neutron stars. Or it will be locked up in brown dwarfs and planets that never triggered nuclear fusion, or in stars that withered into white dwarfs. With stars no longer actively burning, energy in this era is generated through proton decay and particle annihilation.

The Black Hole Era

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000 years in the future

This era extends to ten thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years after the big bang. After the epoch of proton decay, the only star-like objects remaining are black holes of widely varying masses. Their energy is steadily evaporating.

The Dark Era

>10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000 years in the future

At this late stage, protons will have decayed and black holes will have almost completely evaporated. Only the byproducts of these processes remain: mostly neutrinos, electrons, positrons, and photons of enormous wavelengths. For all intents and purposes, the universe as we know it will have come to an end.

SOURCE: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/universe/historywave.html

IS THE UNIVERSE REALLY MADE OUT OF TINY RUBBER BANDS? A Kid's Exploration of String Theory

Hi, my name is Shaun. However, my parents’ pet name for me is Plato. I have always wondered about the origin of matter. Once I took an old golf ball and broke it apart. I was surprised to see that there were tightly woven rubber bands inside.

This got me to thinking about what made up rubber bands. So I went to my father and mother and they suggested that I look into the subject of physics, but more specifically into the subject of quantum mechanics, which is the study of how very small things behave.

Richard Feynman, a very famous scientist who worked on developing the first atom bomb, was once asked if he could try to explain all of physics in one simple sentence. His reply was pretty funny, but quite profound: “Things are made of littler things that jiggle.”

“So if this was true,” I thought to myself, “then I could unlock the secret of matter by breaking things down to their smaller parts and seeing how they moved around.”

When I took apart a rubber band I found out they were made of even smaller lines of rubber. But when I went and pulled those apart all I got were little pieces.

I couldn’t go any farther with my bare hands so I got my microscope out and when I got the piece positioned just right I could see that it was made of smaller thread like material.

“What is that stuff?” I pondered.

My microscope was pretty limited so I couldn’t break the rubber down much farther. I was stuck in a sort cul du sac, similar to the street I live on which has a dead end to it.

What to do?

I then realized I had to learn from the great physicists in the past who have explored this subject in depth.

This is when I learned about the early Greek philosopher, Democritus, who suggested that all things are made up of little tiny balls which he called atoms which he thought were uncuttable. This turned out later to be wrong since atoms can be broken apart, but the word atoms became a popular way of talking about really tiny things.

In the 19th and 20th century, physicists realized that atoms were comprised of mostly empty space. But in their core was a seed like thing called a nucleus which houses smaller bits of matter called protons and neutrons. And darting around that nucleus seed was a superfast particle called an electron.

I found it intriguing that the number of protons and electrons in an atom are recognized as different chemical elements such as hydrogen (the simplest atom with only one proton and one electron) and uranium (an atom with 92 protons and 92 electrons). These different atomic numbers explain why some things are solid and dense, such as gold, and other things are airy and flighty such as when you put helium in a balloon.

Everything we see around us is just the mixing of different types of atoms.

Yet, this got me to look further into the heart of atoms. What is inside protons and neutrons? What is light?

Scientists such as Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, and Werner Heisenberg developed a new way of understanding physics which became popularly known as quantum mechanics. Just as an auto mechanic tries to understand what is wrong with your car by opening up the hood and looking closely at the car’s engine, the quantum mechanic looks under the hood of the atom to see how the tiny bits of matter are working together.

Physicists were shocked to realize that matter at very small scales behaves in completely unexpected ways. Indeed the more they tried to figure out the exact location and speed of an electron, they noticed that their very act of trying to measure both interfered with the electron. Thus, scientists couldn’t know both precisely.

Imagine that you are rolling a pair of dice outside in the dark and you couldn’t see what numbers you rolled.

However, when you put your flashlight on the dice, the light itself changed the roll of the dice so that you couldn’t know what your original throw was.

Your very act of shining light on the dice literally altered your throw. This is very similar to what happens when physicists try to figure out what electrons are really doing only to realize that their very act of observing changed what they observed.

This understanding caused a revolution in physics and started them on a new course where chance and probability played an important part in studying the secrets of nature.

They realized that there were four fundamental forces in the universe: 1. Electromagnetism (which is where we get light and electricity and our food from); 2. Strong nuclear force (this keeps protons and neutrons bonded together for the most part); 3). Weak nuclear force (which explains why there is radioactive decay within atoms). 4. Gravity (which is the universal attractive force which explains why the earth orbits the sun and why I cannot jump very high when I play basketball).

But scientists wondered if all four of these forces were the result of one very tiny super process. They called this quest a G.U.T, which stands for Grand Unified Theory or a T.O.E., a Theory of Everything. This made me laugh thinking that the hidden mystery of the universe was in a TOE or a GUT.

Scientists realized that to find out the hidden parts of atoms they had to investigate even smaller bits. In order to do this they had to force protons to break apart so they could see what they contained. So scientists built big colliders where they had protons zipping around near the speed of light in large circular tracks until they hit each other and broke apart.

This reminded me of when I would occasionally take a shell or a rock at the beach and try to open it apart and see what is inside of it. The secret of the universe is in the tiniest bits of matter. In the 1980s a new theory was developed called String theory which essentially claims that everything in the universe is made out of very small loops of matter, much, much smaller than anything we can see in atoms. These strings vibrate in various ways and thus cause various forms of matter to be created.

All the elementary particles that make up our universe are like musical notes which are caused by infinitesimally small loops of guitar like string (sometimes open and sometimes closed). Strike a different vibration of one of these strings and a different physical property emerges.

These strings, however, are so small that nobody can see them, not even with the world’s most powerful microscope.

This is why scientists built a Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland which is pretty deep underground so they could smash protons against each other and try to recreate the initial conditions shortly after the Big Bang. The Big Bang is when our universe started 13.7 billion years ago.

Everything back then was collapsed into a tiny little seed, including all the stars and the planets. This single point was much smaller than a penny but it was amazingly heavy with all that packed in energy and matter. So when it exploded it was called a “Big Bang.”

In this way scientists realized that if they could understand the very small they could also unlock the secrets of the very large, since at the beginning of time everything came from the tiniest of seeds.

One of the most interesting aspects of string theory is that there may be many more dimensions than we presently see. We know of four dimensions: length, width, depth, and time. But string theory says there may be 11 dimensions which are curled up so small that we cannot access them.

I couldn’t visualize this at all, but Brian Greene, the famous Professor of Physics at Columbia University, in a film series gave a good illustration of it. He pointed to a lawn and said that if you were an ant the blades of grass would seem like trees, but if you were up in an airplane looking down at that same lawn it would flat and dimensionless.

One of the coolest ideas being suggested by science is that the universe we live in may be only one of trillions of other universes. They have called this the multiverse.

Apparently, all of these universes may result from slight changes in the vibrations of extraordinarily tiny strings of energy/matter, just as a few chord changes can produce a new song. The problem with string theory is that it hasn’t yet been proven by science. However, scientists have proposed a number of experiments, including some connected to the Large Hadron Collider, which will be able to demonstrate whether string theory is true or not. Because string theory is open to being tested it is not simply philosophy or wishful thinking.

I never realized that a simple golf ball when broken down could be so complex when it is viewed from smaller and smaller scales.

My dad suggested that a quote from the poet Tennyson actually summarizes my project perfectly, “if we could but understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is.”

I found it amusing when I thought of how my golf ball was made of smaller rubber bands which when squished up appeared solid. This got me to thinking about string theory in a different way: maybe the universe, like my golf ball, is really just made of tiny rubber bands that we cannot see! Or, maybe I am also a unique strand of strings.

NOTES

I had a lot of fun doing this project. I learned the most from watching Brian Greene's two NOVA specials (which are several hours each), The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos. I also recommend reading Quantum Physics by John Gribbin. If you want to have a short introduction to the subject of String Theory, I recommend Professor Greene's recent T.E.D. talk “Is Our Universe the Only Universe?”

SOURCE: https://www.integralworld.net/diem-lane10.html