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10 | Beginnings
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❍ 10 BEGINNINGS Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows. He only knows, or perhaps He does not know! —Rig Veda X recently rediscovered the principle of dialectics, as encapsulated in a short dialogue between me and my son Andrew: Andrew (age seven): “Dad, can anything move faster than the speed of light?” MG: “No.” Andrew: “What about the speed of darkness?” Leave it to children to remind us of the many ways to perceive reality! There is little doubt that when we attempt to order the world around us, thinking in terms of opposites is very useful. Daynight , female-male, dead-alive, left-right, rich-poor, polarities are everywhere. It may very well be that our brain itself is the product of this polarized reality, well adapted to the world within which it functions ; we order the world around us in terms of opposites because our brain, being the optimized product of interactions with this external reality, is “wired” to function this way. This is a pedestrian view of our brain as the product of evolution dictated by natural selection. But then, an unpleasant question arises. If our brain, and thus the way we think, is the product of the environment within I which it functions, can we ever construct an unbiased picture of the world? Can we transcend the inherent limitation of being the product of selective interactions with the environment in order to achieve some sort of all-encompassing view of reality? Or are we stuck within predetermined frames of thought? Disturbing, isn’t it, to think that we are fairly limited in the ways we can grasp reality. Whenever thoughts like these start to disturb my peace of mind, I go for a hike in the mountains or listen to music, preferably Mahler. Beauty external to us and beauty created by (some of) us. It is not long before my fears of being forever condemned to having a limited perception of the world are dispelled by the beauty of the scenery, or by the music that makes my brain pulsate anew with energy . I realize that even though horizons may exist, they are receding horizons, never to be reached. In a land of receding boundaries an eager traveler will always discover new wonders. This is my metaphor for human creativity. And so it is that armed with our finite brain we wonder about the infinite, and about questions that transcend the bipolar reality in which we live. Of all questions that we can ask about nature, none is more fundamental than the origin of the Universe, what I called “The Question” in Chapter 1.* With the development of physical cosmology during the first three decades of this century, that is, with the promotion of cosmology to a physical science, it became possible , for the first time in the history of humankind, to address questions of origins in a quantitative way. As we will see, the laws of physics coupled to a sound observational program can actually be used to reconstruct the main features of the history of the Universe with remarkable accuracy. Of course, this reconstruction is far from being completed (can it ever?), leaving some very important questions unanswered. Two of the open “origins” questions that are particularly interesting to me are the origin of matter, that is, where did the matter we and everything else are made of come from, and the origin of the Universe as a whole. Although these are two “origins” questions, they are quite different. While we can try to answer the question of *If you read Chapter 1 a long time ago, a quick refresher may be quite useful at this point. BEGINNINGS 281 [54.225.1.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:27 GMT) the origin of all matter using well-established (well, almost wellestablished ) ideas in physics, the question of the origin of the Universe as a whole is much more complicated. Even though it is possible to use general relativity and quantum mechanics to build mathematical models that exhibit a self-consistent picture of a possible beginning, models are simply not enough to understand the question of the origin of the Universe. Since all these models assume the laws of physics to be valid as a tool to forge a possible beginning, they cannot possibly explain where the laws of physics themselves came from. If we simply say that the laws of physics were created with the Universe, we fall into an...