The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe by Thomas Levenson

Author:Thomas Levenson [Levenson, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780812998986
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

The Higgs is no isolated example. Take, for example, the mysteries that remain in the account of what happened as our universe was born. So much has been discovered about that seemingly inaccessible time and process because the Big Bang—the explosive appearance of space and time, matter and energy, essentially out of nothing*2—left a snapshot of itself in a flash of light called the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. Discovered in 1964 as a seemingly uniform hiss of microwaves (the same year that the Higgs idea first emerged), the CMB offered the chance to do something new: to measure detailed properties of the very early universe by extrapolating backward from that microwave glow to the Big Bang process itself.

In the decades since, the interplay of cosmological theory and ever more refined observations has yielded a series of insights about that nascent universe, along with predictions about what kinds of features should be found in the CMB. For example: just by looking around us, it becomes obvious that the present-day universe is lumpy, with big piles of matter collected into stars and galaxies and clusters of galaxies—and giant, mostly empty spaces in between. What we see now implies that the CMB should clump too, that there should be places in the microwave picture of the universe that shine just a little brighter than other places: hot spots that map the slightly more matter-rich neighborhoods that could ultimately grow into galaxy clusters.

Early surveys of the microwave sky, though, showed a completely uniform, blank glow. If that were all there was, such a featureless early universe would seem to be incompatible with what we know is out there now—and that in turn would imply that what cosmologists thought they knew about the cosmological evolution was wrong.

That’s how matters stood for almost three decades until 1989, when a specialized telescope was launched into Earth orbit. By 1993, that instrument had captured enough photons to reveal exactly a broad pattern of light and dark—the first, out-of-focus glimpse of the original “seeds” of galaxy clusters. There was a prediction based on a clearly observed fact in the contemporary universe…and through enormous effort, it was shown to be true.

Since then, the CMB has been studied at greater and greater resolution to reveal an increasingly detailed picture of the events that turned the infant cosmos into one recognizably like our own. At the same time, theorists have made a series of predictions to be tested when and if observations of the CMB could be improved yet more. One idea first proposed in the 1980s suggests that during its first instants of existence, our universe underwent an episode called inflation, during which space itself expanded at a ferocious rate—the bang of the Big Bang itself, as one of its inventors, Alan Guth, describes it. For more than thirty years, observations have yielded results that are consistent with inflation, but despite that growing body of evidence, open questions remained.

That seemed set to change in 2014, as researchers closed in on

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