The Cosmic Landscape Read Online Free PDF Page A

Internet worms, it’s easy to imagine similar principles applying to completely inanimate objects. Once the magic was removed from the origin of living creatures, the way lay open to a purely scientific explanation of creation.
    Darwin and Wallace set a standard not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as well. The laws that govern the birth and evolution of the universe must be the same laws that govern the falling of stones, the chemistry and nuclear physics of the elements and the physics of elementary particles. They freed us from the supernatural by showing that complex and even intelligent life could arise from chance, competition, and natural causes. Cosmologists would have to do as well: the basis for cosmology would have to be impersonal rules that are the same throughout the universe and whose origin has nothing to do with our own existence. The only god permitted to cosmologists would be Richard Dawkins’s “blind watchmaker.” 2
    The modern cosmological paradigm is not very old. When I was a young graduate student at Cornell University, in the early 1960s, the Big Bang theory of the universe was still in hot competition with another serious contender. The Steady State theory was, in a sense, the logical opposite of the Big Bang. If the Big Bang said that the universe began at some time, the Steady State said that it had always existed. The Steady State theory was the brainchild of three of the world’s most famous cosmologists—Fred Hoyle, Herman Bondi, and Thomas Gold—who thought that the explosive creation of the universe a mere ten billion years ago was too unlikely a possibility. Gold was a professor at Cornell and had his office a few doors down from mine. At the time he was tirelessly preaching the virtue of an infinitely old (and also infinitely big) universe. I barely knew him well enough to say good morning to him, but one day, very uncharacteristically, he sat down to coffee with a few graduate students, and I was able to ask him something that had been bothering me: “If the universe is eternally unchanging, how is it that the galaxies are all receding away from one another? Doesn’t it mean that in the past they were more closely packed?” Gold’s explanation was simple: “The galaxies are indeed moving apart, but as they separate, new matter is created to fill the space between them.” It was a clever answer, but it made no mathematical sense. Within a year or two, the Steady State universe had given way to the Big Bang and was soon forgotten. The victorious Big Bang paradigm asserted that the expanding universe was only about ten billion years old and about ten billion light-years big. 3 But one thing that both theories shared was a belief that the universe is homogeneous, which means that it is everywhere the same: governed by the same universal Laws of Physics throughout. Moreover, those Laws of Physics are the same ones that we discover in terrestrial laboratories.
    It’s been very exciting, over the last forty years, to watch experimental cosmology mature from a crude, qualitative art to a very precise, quantitative science. But it is only recently that the basic framework of George Gamow’s Big Bang theory has started to yield to a more powerful idea. As the new century dawns, we are finding ourselves at a watershed that is likely to permanently change our understanding of the universe. Something is happening that is much more than the discovery of new facts or new equations. Our entire outlook and framework for thinking, the whole epistemology of physics and cosmology, are undergoing upheaval. The narrow twentieth-century paradigm of a single universe about ten billion years old and ten billion light-years across with a unique set of physical laws is giving way to something much bigger and pregnant with new possibilities. Gradually cosmologists and physicists like myself are coming to see our ten billion light-years as an infinitesimal pocket of a stupendous
megaverse.
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