October 21, 2011
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Astronomical Clock (from Matthew Kirkland).
Every month or so it seems like another eminent physicist publishes a new book claiming to go beyond or “before” the Big Bang. Roger Penrose, Brian Green and Stephan Hawking have all gotten into the game putting their stamp on the “Death of the Big Bang”.
Cosmology, it would seem, is at a precipice and we appear to be living at the twilight of Big Bang as a theory of the Universe’s origin. But would replacing time’s beginning at the Big Bang with something stranger like the infinite existence of a multiverse really matter very much for anyone else other than cosmologists? Reading popular books and magazine articles (my own included) one gets the sense that revolutions in cosmology naturally infer revolutions in human culture and even human experience. Is this really true? Does cosmology really alter the way any human being experiences the world on a day-to-day level? How can abstractions like relativistic Space-Time manifolds or String Theory landscapes ever effect anyone other than physicists in the Academy and the informed readers of magazines like this one? In others words, what would a true revolution in cosmology change?
The answer, in a word, is everything and everything begins with time.
When I started working on my new book “About Time. Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang” I thought I would simply be writing an account of current changes in cosmology. While it is true that cosmology in the age of Big Bang theory has become an exact science, that triumph refers to its astonishing account of what happened “after” time and the Universe’s origin. The scientific narrative of a universe expanding, of CMB photons decoupling and of matter cooling and congealing into galaxies over the last 13.7 billion years is, without a doubt, secure. It’s the bang in the Big Bang that has come up for grabs.
In light of new observations (i.e.Dark Energy) and new theoretical developments (i.e. the push for quantum gravity) a wild west of new cosmological ideas has emerged. My new book would, I thought, solely be an exploration of the development of ideas like the multi-verse or the new cyclic models of Steinhardt and Turok. But as I started my research into cosmology’s history the broader history of human time began to make its appearance in my questions. Looking back 100, 1000 or 10,000 years, it became clear to me that time in cosmology (be it of the scientific or mytho-religious variety) has always been tightly braided with the human experience of time.
To understand what I mean by the “human experience of time” you need do nothing more than answer the simple question “What time is it?” Your answer will likely take the form of something like 8:45 am, 10:32 am, or 3:07 pm. But what is the “3:07 pm” you read off your computer screen or cell-phone? Mechanical clocks did not appear until the fourteenth century, and they did not even have minute hands (an invention that would take approximately another three hundred years to appear). So did “3:07 pm” even exist one thousand years ago for peasants living in Dark Ages Europe, Song Dynasty China, or the central Persian Empire? Was there such a thing as “3:07 pm” in the long millennia before the vast majority of human beings had access to any form of timekeeping device? The answer is no. The best folks could say 1000 years ago when asked the time would have been “after lunch”.
But 3:07 is something you know very well. More importantly minutes are something you have been taught to experience be it in the boredom of clock-watching at the end of a class or the frustration of waiting for an overdue bus. The experience of time – as opposed to abstract notion of time in-and-of-itself – is something human beings have invented and re-invented many time across our history.
The invention of a specific version of cultural time (a specific “time-logic” may be a better way to describe it) has, however, gone hand in hand with inventions in cosmological thinking. Consider the case of the clock. Clocks first made their appearance around 1300 (no one is sure who invented the first one) and within 100 years they swept across Europe. The abstraction of rigidly measured, numbered hours was used by Europeans to completely rewire culture by metering work-times, determining market openings and setting the operation of courts. But more than changing the flow of daily life clocks also offered scientists and thinkers new ways of conceiving nature. By 1377 the clock as an idea was so powerful that philosopher Nicole Oresme could use it to frame a new cosmology in the image of a clockwork universe. Later, Isaac Newton’s science of mechanics was built on this abstract clockwork time, becoming the foundation for a new celestial physics and new real-world machines that set the industrial revolution in motion.
As historian Peter Galison has masterfully shown, the braiding of cosmic time and culture was just as important to evolution of that paragon of modern physical cosmology – the Theory of Relativity. In the late 1800s railroads and telegraph cables were binding far-flung localities together in a way that had never been experienced before. Simultaneity – a single shared now – became the dominant concern of culture. It was just at this moment that the young Albert Einstein took a job at the Swiss Patent Office.
Einstein’s day job kept him deep in the trenches of real world concerns with simultaneity as he evaluated one design for an electromechanical time-coordination device after another. Rather than “time-off” from physics (like a job at McDonalds) Einstein’s Patent Office work fed directly into private work weaving simultaneity into a theory of relativity that would change cosmology forever. Sixty years later the big bang — a theory built from Einstein’s relativity — was spectacularly confirmed. That confirmation would come through a microwave antenna designed for satellite telecommunications – a technology that soon rewired cultural time uniting the world into a single global present.
WMAP image of standard cosmology
What was true a century ago is just as true today. A culture’s dominant cosmology is always a public affair. But culture doesn’t change just because science does. Instead, there is what might be called an enigmatic entanglement between the two. Their mutual influence sloshes back and forth, each responding to each other as well as their own imperatives.
Technology – what we can do with the stuff of the world – is often the fulcrum on which the balance of influence swings. Technology has always been the middle ground — the shop floor — where new time and new time-logics are hammered out. Mechanical clocks, steam engines and silicon chips each provide culture with new ways to imagine its organization in time. These technologies also allow the Universe to be investigated in new ways or to be imagined through new metaphors. Cosmology has swung through conceptions of the Universe being like a clock, like a heat engine and like a computer. These swings have been in synch with culture using these machines to reset the contours of everyday life and time.
So now, in the era of the Multiverse, Eternal Inflation and Quantum Gravity does cosmology matter? Yes but its influence goes far deeper than just its effect on theological debates over the existence of God, Genesis or Intelligent Design. Every culture needs a cosmology to justify itself and set its own time against a broader background of “the ways thing are”. People don’t need to know the details of the Big Bang for this background to influence them anymore than a medieval peasant needed to know the details of a biblical cosmologies made of demons, angels, heaven and hell. Dominant cosmologies and their ontologies are always an aether people move through. They are a background that does not need to be explicitly questioned. In the same way the time-logics people learn through cultures, implicitly taught in school and work, may never be questioned.
We are accustomed to thinking of science operating in some kind of vacuum. A true theory could arise at any time and any place independent of the cultural perspectives of the people who find those theories. The truth is far richer and more interesting. Without a doubt the world pushes back in the remarkable dialogue we have with it through science. We learn more than we knew before. But understanding the braiding of cosmic and human time shows us that science really is a dialogue. We can’t be taken out of the picture. Perhaps someday we will find the true ultimate theory of the entire Universe – a perfect vision of the objective world. Or, perhaps, the Universe is like an infinitely faceted diamond. As we move through our own changes and our own learning we always get a different view. This perspective, I believe, is far closer to the historical truth of science’s wondrous beauty and power. The dialogue will always continue shaping us, the Universe (through our perspectives on it) and time in the process.
What could be more exciting.
About the Author: Adam Frank is professor of Astrophysics at the University of Rochester who studies stellar birth and death. He is also the co-founder of NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture Blog. You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His new book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang. Follow on Twitter @adamfrank4.
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A lot of hand waving in this article. Phrases like “the braiding of cosmic and human time” are a sign that you may not actually be making a tremendous amount of sense. In general, I would recommend keeping language as rigorous as possible. I think you would find an utter inability to express these ideas using tight, rigorous language–meaning that it’s just pseudo-science / mumbo jumbo.
Link to thisAll things considered and judged in a balanced way, a decent article.
An important point is: “Without a doubt the world pushes back in the remarkable dialogue we have with it through science.”
The “world” has been pushing back furiously at the LHC: no strings/branes, no “sparticles”, no “WIMPs”, no supersymmetry, no “extra-dimensions”, no porker Higgsy, no ADS/CFT duality, etc.
The “world” has said hundreds of times: “No WIMPs! The dark matter is not subatomic particles.”
The “world” has said: “no strings” for 44 years.
The crucial question is: Do theoretical types listen to the “world”?
Sadly, those most able to influence the directions of scientific advance seem to be totally tone-deaf to nature’s insistent message: “There is something fundamentally and seriously wrong with your basic assumptions. What is it about “No!” that you do not understand?”
Robert L. Oldershaw
Link to thishttp:/www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw
Discrete Fractal Cosmology
The complex and the more precisely our model of the universe and it’s origin becomes the more desperately some people cling to mythology for a more manageable and more human world.
Link to this@letxequalx It’s not the science that’s bothersome in this article. It’s the lack of science. I’m not sure whether you’re referring to Oldershaw’s post which is indeed a sign of denial. My response to Oldershaw is either dark matter exists or our theory of gravitation is completely wrong–I think the existence of dark matter is much more plausible.
However, Frank’s article is a cultural anthropology piece about the influence of cosmology on our cultural perception of time–but cosmology has had no impact on our cultural perception of time. However, technological advances in recording time more precisely have–and they may continue to do so.
But the idea that cosmology may change the average person’s perception seems a bit ludicrous given that there is no historical precedent for such a thing. Perhaps, when we begin traveling to other planets or traveling close to the speed of light, our cultural perception of time will change, but this would be because of technological advances not directly related to cosmology.
Link to this@daeda – You seem to espouse a pretty narrow view of science and its relation to culture. I doubt many folks who study the history of science would see things in such black and white terms. The give and take between science and culture goes far deeper than simply science handing culture new technologies. A good place to start to understand this relationship would be historian Peter Galison’s masterful work “Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time”.
As an astrophysicist I don’t find this kind of perspective does any disservice to science and its wonderful capacities. In fact, understanding how our humanity comes into play in the evolution of science makes those capacities all the more interesting.
Link to thisThank you for the response. Had I known you actually read the comments, I would have been more tactful.
I don’t believe this necessarily does a disservice to science. The conversation just seems incredibly speculative and poorly supported. You seem to say that revolutions in cosmology have affected our perception of time before and give some examples. However, to me, these examples don’t demonstrate anything of the kind. They demonstrate cases of advances in accuracy of time measurement affecting how we talk about time. That fact is not even remotely remarkable to me.
We now have and have had for some time the ability to measure various things on a microsecond level and below, but on a day to day basis, it has no effect on us, since we don’t have to deal with such small time measurements. Similarly, we know that time behaves differently for a sufficiently fast moving particle but it doesn’t affect us practically, because we don’t move fast enough relative to large things we normally encounter for it to matter.
When we do start moving very fast due to advances in technology, I’m sure this will impact our language and culture. But let’s be clear about what’s happening. It’s not cosmology affecting our perception of time in some imperceptible way. It’s just a technological advance that makes it practical to think about things in a different way.
I meant no disrespect with mycomment. Your research is undoubtedly pushing the field forward and improving our understanding of the universe. But in this particular article, you seem to be implying a weaving of cosmic time (which both covers billions of years and imperceptible fractions of second and even covers the warping of space time) and human time, but I would argue that this is so without precedent, that it’s hard to see how it would arise, and your examples that attempt to support the thesis seem to be supporting an entirely different and much more trivial thesis that better measurements of time seem to affect our perception of time, which is doubtless true but of little consequence.
(BTW, small typo you may want to fix: “How can abstractions like relativistic Space-Time manifolds or String Theory landscapes ever effect anyone other than physicists in the Academy and the informed readers of magazines like this one?” “Effect” should be “affect.”)
Link to thisGood stuff. But — how about correctly writing the names of Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene?
Link to thisA possible explanation of cosmologists publishing books and series of Videos about its science may be just that they are not so highly paid, and as there is a lot of people wanting info about how’s is built the universe, understanding the fabric of something gives you the feeling of mastering it in some way, that kind of publications do have a market. The image of the universe you’ve added to this article seems pointing a “Quantum instability” in the origin of Big Bang, and thus of our current universe, but if there was nothing before Big Bang, how a “quantum instability” may appear where there’s nothing to be either stable or unstable ?. One of my teachers of physics told us that nobody knows what the hell the force is. Any comment or reference about this would be greatly appreciated !
Link to this“The scientific narrative of a universe expanding, of CMB photons decoupling and of matter cooling and congealing into galaxies over the last 13.7 billion years is, without a doubt, secure.” I wouldn’t be so sure. Inflation, for instance, is still just a theory. I’m not a cosmologist, but I keep hearing about the “discovery” of dark energy and dark matter and these are both just theories, too. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Link to thisThe point about cosmology affecting society must be valid. Consider comoslogy hundreds of years ago. The earth was flat, then it was provably round. That caused a rather unpleasant (to some) shift in man’s place in the world.
But current cosmology does not have the same oomph. The reason is simple, most people do not spend the time or do not have the ability to properly understand the complex physics used to model our universe. Thus, though very interesting to many, it is more fantasy/fantastical notions than “reality”.
Furthermore, many notions being pushed these days are not theories but HYPOTHESES. The “Big Bang Theory” is a hypothesis. Multiple-dimensions is a hypothesis that routinely gets abused by writers, media, etc. The media that covers these ideas and otehrs doesn’t help at all. Just consider the ‘faster than light particles’ stuff. That research was poorly explained and poorly represented everywhere.
So, I personally find it hard to take any cosmological results serious. The observations are typically very good and interesting yet the postulated ramifications from (often) single/non-confirmed data are overblown on a regular basis (sometimes by the author, sometimes by others).
I read science fiction for fun, I read science for better understanding. I find these two get mixed way too often in cosmology.
Link to thisI think it is inevitable that an evolutionary, cyclic model driven by thermodynamic instability at the quantum level prior to cosmic expansion will become the dominant cosmological model. It is by far the best way to explain the so-called fine-tuning of cosmic parameters as well as the relative complexity of the early universe. It is only reasonable to assume that the same evolutionary patterns that are found throughout the hierarchy of systems within the universe would apply to the universe itself. The question then becomes is there a maximum level of complexity to which the universe (due to thermodynamic considerations) can evolve during the cyclic process? Also is there a repetition of a pattern of simplest to most complex cyclic incarnation? If so does that mean I will type this same question an infinite number of times? christina anne knight
Link to thisPerhaps the Big Bang was a miracle (but in this case it should be a “patch” of God, unable to produce a previous plan in the Nature), or rather something produced it, and this something should be a product of something else, which was even before the Big Bang.
Link to thisIf A affects B without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be indirect – that is must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events. But in all cases are the events which make other events coming out, even if for us human beings it will be impossible to know why, because the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle can be simultaneously known.
So, if one is not thinking that Big Bang was a miracle, a series of events produced the Big Bang. Of course one can do many conjectures, but Science is a enormous labyrinth with many blind paths, and to know that they are blind one must go to the end of them.
All Adam Frank is trying to do here is show us the connection between Science and the human species. It’s our awareness which makes this a necessary connection, even though it’s disputed by many comments here. Some comments indicate that Frank isn’t being scientific (enough), which is proof of his position – we learn and progress in our thinking and the better we understand the role of Science in the progressive development of thinking and behaving, the better off we are. Wanting more Science in someone’s argument may seem logical but it really expresses a lack of social development Science DOES dehumanize because some people use it as a bludgeon against “soft thinking.” People who fear social development and resist it – are not going to be adequate about their interactions and what they can do to others.
I know non-scientists who use, “it doesn’t matter, Science proves that humanity will go extinct someday” – and they’re really trying to justify their own immorality and moral obligations. The much broader view is the better one: Science just proves the importance of living in the now moment. It doesn’t matter that humans might go extinct: it matters what we do in THIS lifetime, whether measured in seasons or microseconds.The two greatest mass extinctions prove the “unnecessary” nature of species: but they also prove the importance of the continuance of lifeforms. It’s that which drives us consciously: we are the first species in 3 billion years capable of caring about that.
Link to thisBarking up the right tree?
Link to thisThe material universe is a disturbed field of pure energy seeking equilibrium, its entropy will have deconstructed the material universe when the equilibrium is regained. —– “The Dynamic Ether”
I may be too late in joining this discussion to have this read, but I did just finish the About Time book and this is the only discussion I could find.
Link to thisFor those that doubt the influence of cosmology on culture & vice versa, one need not look any further that the glaring example of how we refer to the beginning & end of the day. The phrases “sun rise” & “sun set” obviously harken back to a pre-Copernican view of the Universe. This vision of the universe informed our language and how we refer to the start & end of a day (cosmology influences culture). Despite the passage of 5 centuries of knowing that it is the Earth’s rotation and not the movement of the sun that determines the day/night cycle, we continue to use the same out-dated phrases (culture pushes back). Even though we all know the Earth rotates, I do think that language influences how perceive the world around us & I think use of phrases like these tend to manipulate us into thinking of ourselves as being the center of the Universe still.
Maybe culture has a lot of old baggage to shed & plenty of catching up to do before cosmology can move forward, and maybe this is a good point for cosmology to develop its tools for observation to determine which direction to take. I think it’s wise to not get too caught up in too many thought exercises and elaborate mathematics until we can verify them with some sort of tangible or observable proof. I think the words of a cultural icon of the late 20th century are most appropriate here;
“Keep your feet on the ground & keep reaching for the stars.” – Casey Kasem
Sneer if you must at my less-than-academic take on all of this, but it’s still good advice.