Universe’s Surprises Usually Surpass Our Imagination
You just never know what the universe is going to be up to next.
Why just this month, a big glob of matter sitting out in space bent light like a giant lens, bringing into focus a far-off baby galaxy just coming into being.
Not a month before that, the black hole at the center of our galaxy let out a loud belch of X-rays, the best evidence yet that such a monster was feeding voraciously--proof from the belly of the beast, as it were.
This is only the latest in a long string of surprises; it sure makes you wonder what else the universe has in store.
A paltry few hundred years ago, people believed there was nothing beyond what they could see with their eyes. You can imagine the astonishment that followed the invention of the first primitive microscope--the unnerving introduction to the teeming population of microbes that lives within (and on) our skin.
“Who would have dreamed,” writes Arthur C. Clarke, “that a tube connecting two lenses of glass would pierce the swarming depths of our being, force upon us incredible feats of sanitary engineering, master the plague, and create that giant upsurge out of unloosened human nature that we call the population explosion?”
Up until the start of this century, people thought that atoms were useful only as models because, of course, everyone knew that atoms could never be seen. Then Einstein showed that they not only could be seen , but had been seen , knocking about plant spores floating on water.
In short order, people learned not only to see atoms, but to look inside. Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus when he bombarded gold atoms with particles streaming from radioactive rocks. Most of the particles passed right through, but some--surprisingly--were scattered backward. Rutherford wrote: “It was quite the most incredible event that ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.”
People had also assumed, with good reason, that it was impossible to know the composition of stars, since it was hardly possible to go and collect a sample.
Then lines were found in starlight that told not only their makeup, but also their temperature, age and motion--a kind of quantum mechanical bar code that reveals everything but their price.
Long before Oprah, stars were spilling the intimate details of their lives to all who cared to listen.
In fact, it was by decoding starlight that astronomers discovered (surprise of surprises) that 90% or more of the matter in the universe is unseen and perhaps unseeable.
Many discoveries have been so surprising that people didn’t believe them, even when the evidence (like the jostling of plant spores) was right in front of their eyes.
When Marie Curie discovered radioactivity, she speculated that the phenomenon might be evidence that atoms were actually disintegrating. This was inconceivable at a time when atoms were considered the indestructible building blocks of nature. Atoms were forever. Her idea seemed so bizarre that she decided not to publish.
And what now seems an obvious fact--that the continents of Africa and South American fit together like puzzle pieces and were clearly once joined--was completely dismissed because no one believed that continents could move.
True, some discoveries are not so surprising. Recently, studies conducted with positron emission tomography (PET scans) revealed that the brains of teenagers are completely unlike those of adults. “Duh!” a parent (or teenager) might be tempted to say.
But the very fact that positrons, which are a form of antimatter, could be used for medical purposes is pretty darned surprising--not to mention the fact that there is such a thing as antimatter at all.
We don’t even know what it’s possible to know. Today, some scientists say we can’t know what lies beyond (or before) the Big Bang; others think they know how to look for evidence.
String theory has been dismissed as so much pretty mathematics since it can’t be experimentally tested.
Yet this month the University of Chicago is hosting a symposium on, yes, experimental tests of string theory.
In “The Unexpected Universe,” naturalist Loren Eisely tells of coming upon a spider in a forest, spinning the sticky spokes of the web that extend her senses out into the world. Just so, humans with their scientific senses have spun a web that reaches far beyond our ears and eyes. And like the spider, we lie “at the heart of it, listening.”
Yet Eisely is even more impressed at what the spider cannot perceive. “Spider thoughts in a spider universe--sensitive to raindrop and moth flutter, nothing beyond.... What is it we are a part of that we do not see ... ?”
Whatever it is, it’s sure to be unexpected.
