Uncertain Certainties About the Cosmos
Launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope continues to send astonishing photos of deep space back to Earth. Hubble images, such as those found in the May 2020 issue of National Geographic Magazine, are stunning. Peering deeply into the darkness of space, Hubble has found thousands of unknown galaxies, a surprising number of black holes, and witnessed the birth and death of far-off stars. This information and volumes of other data transmitted home for over thirty years have aided scientists in answering fundamental questions about the universe. Thanks to Hubble, we now know more about the origins, age, components, and evolution of our host than ever before. Hubble will continue to help us find our way around the cosmos for a long time to come.
Hubble will soon have a companion in exploring the frontiers of space. In March 2021, the new and incredibly powerful Webb Space Telescope, which is two and one-half times larger in diameter than the current record-holding Hubble, will be launched almost a million miles into space to orbit the sun. From this platform, scientists will peer even farther into the deepest realms of our universe. What is revealed by the two telescopes working in unison may again alter our certainties about the cosmos.
Four hundred years ago one of the first telescopes was instrumental in shifting our view of the cosmos. Galileo Galilei, an Italian astronomer, crafted one powerful enough to see the heavens and pointed it skyward. His revelations shifted Earth from its lofty center of all creation to a minor position in a small solar system tucked among the stars. Galileo confirmed that Earth circles the sun instead of the sun circling Earth. This cosmic shift in existential certainty was brought before the Inquisition as a grave threat to Catholic doctrine, the authority at the time. After surviving his trial by ceding ground, Galileo lived out his life in a villa in the hills above Florence knowing that he had cracked the cosmic egg, even if it were heresy to say so. There was no turning back.
Again, the cosmic egg is showing cracks. For several decades, with Hubble’s help, scientists have been altering their certainties about the cosmos as they probe deeper and deeper into the origins of the universe. Once thought to have always existed, they found that it originated in a big bang, and instead of being constant, it is expanding – the universe is larger than ever imagined. The origins of the Big Bang are not far from view with Hubble. They will be even closer with the Webb telescope, and there are many questions to answer.
Basic questions about the origins of the Big Bang are captured by Wendell Berry, a renowned American poet, in a short poem from his collection Leavings:
On the Theory of the Big Bang As the Origin of the Universe
What banged?
Before banging,
How did it get there?
When it got there, Where was it?
Are there answers to Berry’s existential questions? Yes – while some are scientific, others are metaphysical.
Before the Big Bang, it seems that the whole of the universe was nowhere. The facts about pre-Big Bang are unknown. Scientists have yet to explore this realm, although Webb will bring them closer to the beginning of time than ever before. For now, that realm belongs to metaphysics, as it has for ages, where at least one ancient source, Tao Te Ching, speaks of it as the formless and perfect mother of the universe that is serene, empty, solitary, unchanging, eternal, and infinite. Herein lies the womb from which existence issues. It is a gestational field in which all thought is conceived; an eternal field of infinite emptiness that is intelligent and aware. There are no boundaries, no center, no dimensions, no substance, and no spacetime. It is eternal, infinite emptiness that is nowhere.
Metaphysics explains mysteries whose questions have yet to be answered by science. Metaphysics is a precursor of possibilities that may or may not be found to be true scientifically. Metaphysics goes beyond knowledge to what is yet to be known using words to say what cannot be said. Metaphysically, until science can observe the instant before the Big Bang, words such as emptiness and nowhere help to describe where the universe was before it banged.
Although the womb that gestated the universe is a metaphysical construct, the birth of the universe has the uncertain certainty of scientific knowledge. Currently, scientists theorize that some fourteen billion years ago our cosmos blew out of an emptiness that is nowhere to become existence as we know it. The content of a hundred billion galaxies burst from a singularity smaller than an electron to become the ever-expanding storm of debris that we call home. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of these billions of galaxies, each with its hundred billion stars. The planet we inhabit is but a nanoscopic speck whirling in the utter vastness of this cosmic storm.
Our earthly home is a minute particle of debris spinning on a physical field called space. This field curves and bends under Earth’s weight, giving the planet an orbit around its star, the sun. The fusion of its travels with the field in which it lies forms spacetime, in which we sense our existence as bodies ticking along in unison with a myriad of objects on our wee planet inside the explosion that is the expanding universe.
From tiny quarks to giant stars, universal debris consists of matter, which forms from quanta, or discrete packets of energy. Physicists think that these packets are the smallest forms of energy and constitute quantum fields. It is from quantum fields that such subatomic particles as quarks, photons, muons, and neutrinos manifest like mushrooms popping up on the forest floor. Okay, maybe not quite like that, but you get the idea that the field grows the particles. The particles do not create the field.
Particles appear when they interact. Without interactions, they are non-existent. They are aroused when needed, otherwise they are nowhere until called upon in the creation of matter. Some physicists liken quantum fields to roiling oceans of dynamic space filled with random fluctuations of particles appearing and disappearing. The world we experience is a swarm of fluctuations far outside our senses to detect, so we see our bodies and the objects around them as solid when in fact matter is mostly continuous fluctuations of energy popping in and out of existence. We call these fluctuations rocks, trees, you, me, planets, stars, etc. Objects manifest through quantum interactions which are in flux, so their forms are in flux. This fluctuation is the play between particles leaping from one interaction to another. Particles do not exist unless they are interacting.
What might this mean? It could mean that the universe is a fluctuation going in and out of existence so rapidly that we cannot detect it. So far, this is a construct awaiting evidence, but its possibility could crack the egg of reality. Our certainties have been scrambled before. In the past few decades, with Hubble’s help, we have been introduced to:
the entirety of existence exploding from a dot that was nowhere,
subatomic particles popping in and out of existence to form objects in space,
space itself being an object (a field of energy that holds all objects like they were rolling on a raised, out-stretched blanket), and
fields of energy made up of discrete packets that act as particles when observed and waves when left alone.
Physicists have been chipping away at the shell of our certainty that the universe is a constant reality. Like Galileo revealing that Earth is not the center of creation, science is uncovering a universe that is not what it appears to be. Matter is not solid. Space is an object. Time is relative if it exists at all. And there may be multiple universes. The egg of reality is cracking under pressure from expanding knowledge. A greater understanding of our fundamental existence is hatching.
Physics and metaphysics are the parents of the constructs used to explain existence. Science provides a steady stream of factual answers to ontological and existential questions, while metaphysics fills in the gaps until facts catch up to the questions. Metaphysical answers are often mythological stories of godly realms of creation based more on philosophy and faith than on science. It isn’t that one set of answers is right and the other wrong. They both derive certainty as they see it. Scientific knowledge comes from observation and measurement while metaphysical truth arises from inner reflection and knowing. Science has given us Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics. Metaphysics has given us the foundations of being, as reflected in the Kabbalah, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Tao, Greek philosophy, Existentialism, and many other philosophies and faiths. Answers from both disciplines bring us closer to our ontological truth. In a few years we may know even more as Hubble’s new partner, Webb, peeks behind the cosmic curtain at the beginning of time. The fundamentals that are revealed may once again alter the reality of our existence as we know it.