Nothing Left to Change--Except Change Itself

A 48-year-old man who stole over-the-counter drugs faces life in prison under the three-strikes law. Critics protested that putting a person away for stealing aspirin was “foolish.” But the prosecutor countered that the man was probably a “career criminal. . . . He’s going to go out there and continue committing crimes.”

People, in other words, don’t change.

This is a curious argument--given that about the only thing that doesn’t change in this old universe is change itself. Indeed, the understanding that everything changes is one of the most profound insights of modern science.

Only a few centuries ago, people assumed--understandably enough--that the Earth stood still, the stars hung from the sky like sedentary street lights and species (including humans) appeared on Earth fully formed as faits accomplis.

Today, we know that the Earth not only spins us around at the dizzying rate of 17 miles per minute, it travels 580 million miles a year around the sun.

We know that the seemingly solid ground we walk on drifts about in slow motion, continents colliding like bumper cars. In the process, sea floors ascend to mountaintops and continents sink beneath the ocean.

So much for terra firma.

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we’ve seen newborn stars just turning on in celestial clouds--vast interstellar nurseries. We’ve seen spent stars gasp out their dying breaths in glowing rings of electrically charged gas, exploding like firecrackers, and disappearing into black holes.

Thanks to satellites like the Cosmic Background Microwave Explorer, we’ve seen traces of the birth of the universe itself. The 15-billion-year-old ashes still glow at a chilly 3 degrees above absolute zero (minus 460 F). We can look back, practically, to where it all began. But the point is, it did begin (the universe, that is.) And it’s been evolving ever since. Expanding, cooling, clumping into galaxies and clusters.

Even matter has a history. Subatomic particles come into being out of nothing, the pure energy of empty space. Matter changes form, morphing like Jim Carrey from one subatomic species to another. The stars are alchemists, turning hydrogen and helium into carbon and silicon, oxygen and gold.

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The very three dimensions of space we live in probably evolved from 10 or 12. In the very early universe, space expanded exponentially, inflating the universe like a helium balloon.

For the past 15 billion years or so, it’s been expanding at a far more stately pace. But some cosmologists think it’s now beginning to pick up speed again, getting ready to stretch the cosmos so thin that we won’t be able to see any galaxy except our own. (Not to worry. That’s not likely to happen for another 15 billion years or so.)

Time itself, most physicists think, had to begin sometime. The smoothly running flow from past to future that seems so much part of the given structure of the universe is not, alas, written into the laws of nature. Somehow, the arrow of time evolved.

And what of life? However it started, life as we know it today is unrecognizable from life when it breathed its first on this Earth. For one thing, the earliest life didn’t breathe oxygen. Oxygen was a poison exhaled by early organisms. Their deadly fumes extinguished much of the existing flora, giving rise to entirely new kinds of life--including us.

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The 20th century has taught us that genes jump around, that brains alter in response to experience, to hormones, to injury, illness and emotional trauma. Our brains even change as we grow. Recent studies revealed that the brains of adolescents are markedly different from those of adults. No wonder we don’t understand them.

But can an individual change? In science, especially, we expect talent and interest to emerge early. The Nobel laureate of today is the toddler who thought deep thoughts and set his home’s electric circuitry on fire.

Recently, however, I had dinner with an old friend--a celebrated physics teacher, Paul Hewitt, whose book “Conceptual Physics” has revolutionized the teaching of physics at both the high school and college level. I asked, innocently enough, when he got interested in physics.

You know the punch line: He didn’t tune in until age 25. At the time, he was a house painter with no college education.

Life is rich, strange and always unpredictable--like the universe and everything in it. But if there’s one thing it doesn’t stand still for, it’s stasis.