Earnest Thoughts

The CMB - Scholfield Huxley Edition

     I think there is something rather profound and beautiful about looking at the stars: you are literally looking back in time.  Thanks to the finite speed of light, it takes a measurable amount of time for light to travel from distant stars to our planet.  About 8 minutes from our star, the sun.  As you turn your eyes to further distances, you are investigating earlier times in our universe. Currently the furthest we can look, the edge of the observable universe, is called the Cosmic Microwave Background (The CMB).  A glow from what used to be a very hot Hydrogen plasma from our young universe stops us from being able to see any further.  This glow is from when our universe was about 380,000 years old.

"...looking at the stars: you are literally looking back in time."

     Perhaps the idea that we are looking in the past, and the fact that the universe is accelerating and that we cannot travel faster than the speed of light (because it would require infinite energy) and consequently cannot travel to these distant stars, motivates some physicist to think that "time is an illusion."  Who knows, maybe one day we’ll be able to upload our potentially quantum consciousness to a quantum computer and use  quantum wormholes to overcome ‘the illusion’ of time and hop around ‘the computer simulation’ that we are in.*  Sorry, I just devolved into a stream of consciousness/sci-fi.  But, even so, when we probe the edge of our collective understanding, scientific inquiry often ends up sounding like science fiction.  Many of these ideas will only become 'scientific fact' if they stand the test of time (i.e., a bunch of scientist arguing and trying to poke holes in it and making empirically objective tests for said ideas).

     Alright, back to CMB and how it tells us about the beginning of time.  Looking at the CMB is akin to looking at the universe with a heat camera and from these images we can measure both that the hot hydrogen plasma from the CMB (and hence the temperature of outer space) has cooled down to about 3K (-270C or -454F), and also observe that this surface is superbly smooth and isotropic (i.e. the same is all directions).  Then from this smoothness of the CMB surface temperature and its isotropic characteristic we have discovered that the entire freakin observable universe, before a period of rapid expansion called ‘inflation’, was smaller than the size of an atom. Now it should be said that, in true scientific fashion, our understanding of the early universe (and it’s size) has only just begun.  

"...from this smoothness of the CMB surface temperature and its isotropic characteristic we have discovered that the entire freakin observable universe, before a period of rapid expansion called ‘inflation’, was smaller than the size of an atom."

     But wait, if the CMB is from when our universe was nearly 400,000 years old, how exactly do we know anything from before this time period? Well, as our knowledge grows and our engineering is finely tuned to be more and more precise, we slowly make more and more rigorous claims about the nature of the early universe.  Through this improved sensitivity we can begin to carefully study the subtle asymmetries that do exist on this surface, and from those studies we can gain insight into the period before the CMB, the period of 'inflation'. Understanding this point in time of our universe should help reveal some interesting aspects of the  quantum nature of our early universe (because it was really small) and, in turn, help us shed some light on the connection between quantum mechanics and gravity.

     One of the experiments trying to study these asymmetries, or what the specialist call the polarization of light from the CMB – where quantum behavior will be encoded – is called BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization). You may have heard about this group when they published some data claiming to see signatures of gravity waves from this inflationary period, but it was later deemed that dust in our solar system contributed to the signal more than originally thought.  This observation might have been correct, but we cannot say it with strong scientific confidence because it was not a '5 sigma signal', so we’re not 99.9999% confident that it’s right and hence it is not a 'scientific fact'...yet (I really hate that phrase.).  As I understand it, by precisely modeling the subtle asymmetries in the temperature of the CMB we can gain insight into the period before the CMB, or inflationary cosmology.

"... was not a '5 sigma signal', so we’re not 99.9999% confident that it’s right and hence it is not a 'scientific fact'...yet"

     With that, I would like to leave you with the inspiration for this post: a slightly personalized version of a piece about Scholfield Huxley from the Spoon River Anthology. (Click here see the original). 

 

GOD! ask me not to record your wonders,

I admit the stars and the suns

And the countless worlds.

But I have measured their distances

And weighed them and discovered their substances.

I have devised wings for the air,

And keels for water,

And horses of iron for the earth.

I  have lengthened the vision you gave me and saw the beginning of time,

And the hearing you gave me a million times,

I have leaped over space with speech,

And taken fire for light out of the air.

I have built great cities and bored through the hills,

And bridged majestic waters.

I have written the Illiad and Hamlet;

And I have explored your mysteries,

And searched for you without ceasing,

And found you again after loosing you

In hours of weariness --

And I ask you:

How would you like to create a sun

And the next day have the worms

Slipping in and out between your fingers?

 

     Thanks to my Green Shirt Studio's course (and Sommer!) for helping me find this inspiration. Also, here is my dramatic reading of the poem. And thanks to BYOT for motivating the "just f**king do it" mentality and actually filming this dramatic reading!)

     Now, I just wanted to quickly add, as I was research/thinking about this entry, I realized a previous topic could be involved.  As it turns out, Rayleigh scattering - the same scattering that causes our sky to be blue - was at play during the inflation period of our universe and could potentially be a useful tool to analyze the slight asymmetries in the CMB temperature and consequently tell us more about the inflationary time period.   Although, an expert in this field field could better tell me the actual relevance of this form of light/matter interaction.

 

     This poem is full of science...so more personalizations to come.

* Italics indicate that these ideas are not scientifically rigorous. I don’t actually know how connected, scientifically speaking, they are -but found them to be fun sci-fi ideas.